I had made the decision to go into video game development when this game was being hyped. I was studying for the college entrance exam knowing Overwatch would release just slightly before I would be done with that. I don't think I have anticipated anything as strongly as this game. I reserved the collectors edition, I tried playing TF2 to quench the crave for the game (which failed miserably). And when it came out, it delivered. It was exactly as they had painted it, it was better actually, because I don't think I had the imagination necessary. It was such a strong experience to me that there are a bunch of songs I listened to around the time the game came out, and to this day 8 years later, if I listen to any of them I am completely transported.

I loved Zenyatta, Tracer and Hanzo, and enjoyed a little bit of D.VA, Widowmaker, Lucio and Junkrat. Later I would become an Ana main healing miles away, throwing support grenades defensively and offensively with a precision I took pride in, and wiping around in a fraction of a second to sleep the Genji that just pulled out the ult.

I watched everything from the Overwatch League at some points, other times at least the semifinals and finals. I myself played in competitive mode sometimes, but just looking for a specific approach to the game. In competitive it made sense to try your best to win being surrounded by others doing the same, but it felt like you had to perform for others, or even conform to what they thought was the best hero to play and how. So other times I played casual to be able to play in some ways that were frowned upon on competitive. But at some point they established the mystery hero mode as a fixed one, and by the gods I burned through that mode. I loved it, the feeling of being on equal grounds with the randomness, the challenge of being good with absolutely every hero, the lack of salt directed towards the members of your own team. It wasn't perfect, it gave an advantage to the defending team when the mode was zone capture like Hanamura, because they didn't have their ult counter reset as often. But that was far from a deal breaker for me, I just had that fact in mind when playing, and that let me enjoy it even when the odds were against me.

And the story was not heavily pushed forwards, but every short, every comic, and every bit of worldbuilding was a huge event for me. Many times I just played because I wanted to be in the world of Overwatch. I felt I was part of a great piece of art, and Jeff Kaplan came with his YouTube videos to update us about how nicely everything was going, and how much cooler it was going to keep getting. Him and the team that developed the game truly showed they loved it.

I loved this game with my whole being, all the universe it was set in, the community around it, the (early) safety of the team chat, the polish of the mechanics, the art, the unique gameplay.

Then, people started leaving, Blizzard started to squeeze, scandals, forcing the game to the point of breaking, bad management of the lootboxes, more developers of the game leaving. The game wouldn't stop sinking more and more. At first I decided to stop playing for a short while every time they made changes. Then, even with the effort to avoid hot spots, good moments to play stopped existing. Overwatch 2 was going to be the revival, good moderation, fixing the frustrating points, nice new art, revival of the competitive sphere, and more. I played 3 matches when it came out, I never played again and never will. They brought it back to life but it came back wrong.