Overwatch

I've been focusing on the same whipping boy for the past few months on this blog, the big U- who's name I shall not quoteth throughout this diatribe- such to the extent that I've forgotten the other names who deserve my villainization just as much. In that vein, allow me to bring to the fore Overwatch 2- the fall of Blizzard; although, I suppose every Blizzard product has been the fall of Blizzard in some way shape or form, hasn't it? To even coin the term 'fall', would imply that the Blizzard of today is in any way similar to the Blizzard of the old world- which of course it simply isn't. Those old developers have been weeded out of the company bit by bit and those that remain are the inexpensive and inexperienced interns stumbling over their own feet in pursuit of some vapid concept coined 'Blizzard quality'.

Overwatch has been like a 'before and after' picture condemning excessive drug abuse, showcasing a Blizzard team that were once powerful enough to steal the spotlight of the entire industry for a brief time alongside a pathetic shadow of their former self which cannot help but repeatedly disappoint everyone they come across. To this day I find it near impossible to reconcile the fact that Overwatch 2 launched with promises that the team knew were scrapped and wouldn't announce their cancellation until years had already passed. Here I was waiting for the complete single player campaign to drop in order to get back into the game, only to learn that I had been essentially shafted by a team who figured their online efforts were so taxing they couldn't possible meet the bars of quality they set for themselves.

The team's claim that the parameters of their vision have changed is like a government trying to recontextualise the devastation following a hurricane as a 'reimagining of their public infrastructure.' How else can you feasibly go from a high quality single player narrative campaign that highlighted individual heroes with RPG skill trees undergoing story-led missions and end up with badly balanced co-op raids feasibly stretched across an ill-fitting range of PVP designed and focused characters, topped off by bare basic narrative voice overs in lieu of real storytelling, and not be supremely embarrassed in yourselves? God, I wouldn't ever show my face again in the industry if my game underwent a glow down that pathetic for a franchise has well-defined as Overwatch.

To this day this franchise has no storyline beyond that which we're briefly told in the intro cutscene, despite years of well designed and performed characters with entire wealth's worth of backstories which could be used to fuel a truly engaging narrative if only the team could successfully pull it's head out of it's arse. Instead they want to screw around slowly 'trial and erroring' themselves into gradually recreating the exact same game Overwatch 1 was, before pulling everything apart again and building it up once more. How the hell can you just totally rip apart the healing system that the entire franchise has had since inception and call that a decent use of development time? Seriously, I'm dying to know!

But of course, that is all old news- the newest of the new is the current 'missions structure' that Overwatch decided to pimp it's former narrative aspirations through, premium chunks of paid content that seems to have been disparaged by every Overwatch player on the planet for their lack of replayability and general play-worth, has been cancelled. Or so the team seem to think behind the scenes, because of course Overwatch devs are terrible at communication both inside and out of their community- Don't worry though. When the decision is actually made the Overwatch team will be sure to inform us around about circa 2026- probably after farming pre-orders of the next bunch of missions with a handy 'no refunds' clause attached to the disclaimer.

The ambiguity comes from the fact that there was actually a large team at Overwatch dedicated to making these missions, apparently somewhere near 400 people were sitting down trying to fit a square block through a round peg and failing embarrassingly through the attempt. 'Were' being the operative in this conversation because these fellows are no more. They have shifted off this employed coil after the recent rounds of layoffs that apparently got everyone working on the co-op missions, mid-development. So either literally no one in management realised that and the department is going to stay unknowingly dormant for the next three years, or this was a particularly guerrilla way to insist they aren't going to need the team anymore for a task they aren't interested in being completed anymore.

So yes, this seems to be yet another aborted vector of the game that is Overwatch 2- a product who's only substantive changes has been removing one player from the line-up, recently totally restructuring healing and... there has to be another one right... oh- I guess the monetisation system! Yeah, Overwatch 2 is a bit of an embarrassment of a multi-year project that has floundered in nearly everyway to innovate upon the first game. It's lost the cultural impact the franchise launched with, fumbled every opportunity through which they could have launched a second wind and seems to be scratching it's head wondering how to get the Multiplayer working. (Which means rewiring the game, apparently. Cause why not, it's not like anything else you try is going to make it to market!)

I actually used to believe in Overwatch. I thought it could be a positive and fun force for moving in a solid direction in game design. Normalising multimedia storytelling, developing iconic and distinctly strong characters, presenting a cast of diverse nationalities in a way that makes sense and isn't pandering- there is so much that Overwatch could have been: but for some reason no one seems willing enough to put in the effort, resources or love to bring it about. Maybe it's a corporate thing, with the man in the high castle stomping out the flames of potential before they can be sparked, or maybe we are suffering from an unfocused team who can't decide whether they're brave enough to try and innovate or still too skittish to trust in the framework they've been refining for about 8 years now. Either way, the Overwatch vine is wilting- and they have no one to blame but those within the office walls.