Overwatch 2 is now Steam's "worst game of all time"

Don't worry, another year or two and they'll be selling us Overwatch Classic™ for $15 a month.

Which one? The game was rebalanced so many times it was basically several different games. If they put in a 2-2-2 mode with the weaker open-queue tanks, I'd call that close-enough to Overwatch 1. Of course, that still would mean the new expensive monetization model. Like there's one skin in the free tier of the current battle-pass, and it's for Torb.

SAME. OW1 was one of my favorite games. Still mad about it.

Let's be real, Overwatch 2 was an update patch that they tried to sell as a sequel.

With no context, completely in isolation, yeah Overwatch 2 isn't the worst. But for a lot of players, it's not just about what Overwatch 2 is, but also about what it did and what it means. That factors into players' feelings about the game.

the worst "triple a" game for sure

It depends on what metrics do you use. In general, lowest-rated stuff on sites are not the worst by objective terms, but because of propaganda or other stuff that pisses off people.

How old are we talking about? For me peak Blizzard was Diablo 2 / StarCraft 1 & 2 / WarCraft 3. Of course D1 & WC2 also remember fondly.

Companies NEVER care about their customers. They care about profit.

Sometimes, it is profitable to be considerate of the consumers, but when customers are willing to give a company money despite their bad practices, they will always prioritize profit.

You poor soul, do you think they give one single fuck?

Blizzard is tone deaf, all they look at is the moneyflow

They only come to steam because of desperation

Nah, the next CoD is most definitely coming to Steam. Blizzard had to know that these reviews were coming from the discourse online alone. Plus, pretty sure that it's Microsoft's decision to do so now anyways and there's no way their going to limit their potential profits by locking out a platform like that just over some bad reviews.

Problem is OW1 was a fairly ethical implementation of approach #2, but greed got the best of them.

Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don't really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.

But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don't miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.

Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to 'outraged' unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don't know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.

I think what's more important is a real shift towards your 'type 3' games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it's had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was 'dead'. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money's worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be 'dead'?

Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I'd love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that's what will actually make a difference, it's what's actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.

I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We've basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.

There are still type 3 games eg. The Witcher, Baldurs Gate 3, etc.

There's an article about this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/08/12/the-main-lesson-frombaldurs-gate-3-should-be-people-hate-microtransactions/

Baldur's Gate 3

Define “harass”. LoL and Fortnite don’t “harass” you into giving recurring payments. You can make f2p-friendly games, especially on pc, if you want. Blizzard just doesn’t want.

Honestly forcing competitive in tf2 was the worst thing to happen to it.

I used to play Q2 competitively, so I'm a little opinionated:

Not all games are eSports-ready, nor do they need to be.

Why: eSports need to be fair. Everyone has to start at the same place, and the majority, if not all of the performance has to come from player skill.

E.g: Imagine modern football where certain players running on the field could just randomly teleport or fly, but most can't.

Class-based (hero arena, etc) shooters are inherently unequal in the same way, because that's the point of classes (e.g: Heavy having more HP than Scout, Spy being able to cloak and so on).

If you're about to make the argument that "TF2/OW/LOL/WTFBBQ" requires plenty of skill despite the abilities/imbalance: save it.

There's an enormous gulf between what the audience and casual players + enthusiasts perceive as being inside of an eSport and what's actually going on mechanically on the top-level.

Players optimize and engineer the fun out of a game.

eSports players/pros engineer the game out of the game.