Imagine transforming from one of the most beloved and pop-culturally relevant video games of all time into the laughing-stock punching bag of the gaming community. And imagine turning into said easy-target laughing stock in only four to five years. It took Sonic fifteen years and a legendarily bad game to even be considered a low-hanging fruit, but all Overwatch needed was a singular, progressively-shittier game and an absolutely terrible company to dig its own grave. The way our entire culture turned against Overwatch over the course of half a decade... man, I've never seen anything like it.

I'm not gonna say that the evils of capitalism, corporate corruption, and the horrors of male-dominated and abusive work spaces destroyed Overwatch and Blizzard as a whole, but... nah, I'm fucking with you, it absolutely did. Of course it did. Overwatch made so much money and made so much of a cultural splash that there was nowhere to go but down. The only surprising - but not too surprising - part was just how blatantly Blizzard embraced their descent into hell. Their massive layoffs, the leaked spreadsheets demonstrating wage & salary disparities between employees, their notoriously toxic workspace, that Hearthstone Hong-Kong incident, Bobby Kotick and the numerous sycophants protecting his caustic ass, everything about their rapey tendencies and the power hierarchy they held over their female employees, a hierarchy that led to the inevitable but devastating sexual-harassment lawsuit... it's like Blizzard saw the abyss ahead of time and decided to say "fuck it" with a big, flashy dolphin dive straight into the fiery pools of hell.

Overwatch was huge, man. It's easy to forget nowadays, but everyone was playing Overwatch in its heyday. It appealed to everyone: kids, teens, and - crucially - college students and adults that appreciated the diversity and edge that Overwatch's multifaceted roster brought to the table. Was it ever a balanced or competitively-viable game? Fuck no. But that's what separated Overwatch from its biggest, oft-compared contemporary (League of Legends): it was casually enjoyable. Anyone could pick up Overwatch and find at least one character that personally spoke to them - the characters were unique and distinctive and eye-catching but not too complex or different from one another that actually playing the game required years' worth of study and practice. Overwatch was the perfect game to pick up and play for a couple hours, and the impact left behind by its' iconic, flashy, Street Fighter-esque cast of characters was incredible.

I mean, shit, do you know how much Overwatch porn there is?? It's absurd how much fucking porn it got in such a short amount of time. The impact Overwatch left on the gaming community was only secondary to the impact it left on the Pornhub community. (And I mean... Dva, Mei, and Mercy are pretty god damn cute!)

And yet, after that incredible tidal wave that Overwatch had been riding for a solid year or two... rot began to set in. And it set in quickly. A baffling amount of poor decisions began to plague Overwatch and destroy it from the inside out like an unseen cancer. The introduction of Roll Queue, a universally-despised mode that became the default way to play OW for some garish and confusing reason, a decision that made the game both boring and impossible to play given the absolutely rancid wait times between matches. A devastating lack of new content, maps, or modes, and a content schedule so slow it might as well not even exist. Progressively lamer and uninspired new additions to the cast with abilities that turned an already flimsy game into an unbalanced disaster where you either pick the character that wins, or you don't and you suck. The inevitable rise of toxicity, throwers, and smurf accounts that began to dominate lobbies. The often strange and unwelcome amount of nerfs and buffs they would give to characters seemingly at random, or that one time when they made Symmetra a completely different fucking character.

Overwatch had an atrocious sense of flow and balance. Blizzard had an uncanny 'talent' for adding things no one wanted and taking away things that everyone liked. They mismanaged everything so poorly that it almost feels like they were doing it on purpose. You remember that scene from Spider-Verse where Miles intentionally got every question wrong on his multiple-choice quiz? How his professor pointed out that if Miles had just answered randomly, he would've at least gotten some of the questions right through the law of averages, and thus, he must have known all the correct answers and intentionally bombed the test? Sometimes I feel like that's what Blizzard did with Overwatch. I feel like it takes skill, practice, and intent to make something as profoundly empty as Overwatch became. They had to know exactly what was making Overwatch a laughing stock, and yet they deliberately chose not to address these issues and actively made the game worse in a flagrant attempt to say 'fuck you' to all the haterz. "You don't like our game? Well, fuck you, now you can't even play it anymore. Now if you don't want us to ruin your precious little game any further, then sit down, shut up, and buy our merch, you fucking lemming."

Unless they actually are that incompetent. In which case LOL LMAO RIP BOZO

Now that all the dust has settled, Overwatch is probably the perfect go-to example of Lightning In A Bottle. Overwatch had It. It had that Special Something that made it a cultural phenomenon practically overnight. In its halcyon days, Overwatch was a fast-paced, teamwork-focused extravaganza with a colorful & cartoonish yet sleek & sexy cast of characters and a unique, action game-derived approach to shooters that prioritized abilities and unique mobility options over gun and equipment specs. It was accessible, it was playful, it was a welcome break from the overwhelming dominance of Call of Duty and the CoD-derived contemporaries of the time, and the focus on teamwork and variety brought its' player base together in a way that overly-competitive games like League or DOTA simply did not. For two years, Overwatch had It. You were either playing Overwatch, or you were missing out.

And yet, unsurprisingly, they lost It. A disastrous blend of growing toxicity, mismanagement, obnoxious & inconsistent patching, annoying new characters that lacked the broad, cartoony appeal of their predecessors, a piss-poor content schedule, legendarily awful balancing that turned the game into a wheel-spinning, drain-circling snoozefest, and some of the most blatantly corrupt, ignorant, and evil business practices ever uncovered from a big-name video game company that refuses to change or adapt or work to redeem themselves... all of these things were just jagged nails in Overwatch's coffin, a disappointing but unsurprising mix of elements that inevitably doomed Overwatch to the slow and vaguely-depressing death it was forced to succumb to.

And you know what the saddest yet goofiest thing about all of this actually is? Blizzard thought that Overwatch was still Hip enough to make an iterative fucking sequel out of it.

Yeah, you'll notice I haven't said anything about Overwatch 2 until now. That's because there is nothing to fucking say about Overwatch 2 other than "holy SHIT that launch day was fucking AWFUL lmaoooooo". It's the same goddamn game as before, the personification of "a toofpick changes everythang". There is nothing to say about the actual content of the game itself, because everything I could say about OW2 could be said when talking about OW1. In spite of the fact that Overwatch has been dying for four years, in spite of the fact that its' former fans have been very vocal and precise about everything that didn't work about Overwatch 1... somehow, someway, Blizzard managed to listen to absolutely none of it and published the exact same game yet again. In its current state, there is absolutely nothing unique about it compared to its dead-as-hell predecessor in spite of the fact that Blizzard had four years' worth of notes and critiques to work with. (See? That's what I'm saying, they have to be fucking with us on purpose. They just have to be making a concrete effort to not do anything at all. No one's this lazy and apathetic by accident.)

The literal only thing I have to say about OW2 on its own is, wow, what the fuck were they thinking when they tried to encrypt their character models? Did they really think that would stop anyone from making Overwatch porn? And even if their encryption hypothetically succeeded at doing this, Blizzard, what the fuck are you thinking? SFM Porn is the only reason people even give a fuck about Overwatch anymore. I know they've been trying their damnedest to murder this game's relevance, but, c'mon, removing the porn? That's how you know everyone at Blizzard's a fuckin idiot.

An interesting, and yet utterly inscrutable experience. I think this game would benefit from being a little less obtuse. I don't mean in terms of story, I think the way it presents its story is interesting, however I spent the whole experience feeling like I never really knew what I was doing. Where in another game I'd be able to utilize new hints and important knowledge to find the answer, here it felt more like coincidence. This Time selecting a characters face led me to something knew, vs the many times before I'd selected the same character and been led in circles. I get the impression the game had some sort of secret triggers behind the scenes determining when and how to reveal new or important scenes, but as a player I never really got it. It was endless loops of "this scene AGAIN?" mixed in with enough overall intrigue to keep me going to the end, and truthfully I likely will continue to dig around for other secrets.