An immensely, immensely cynical attempt at putting Overwatch back into the hype cycle by calling an arbitrary patch Overwatch 2 has at last concluded with the only remaining selling point — the long-promised PvE content — being cancelled. There is now significantly less of a reason for this to even be called a sequel, and it was already a tenuous prospect from the outset.

Overwatch was a game that started out middling and got progressively worse over the years. Overwatch 2 picks up from the lowest point Overwatch ever fell to and drives itself deeper into the ground than previously thought possible. The enforcement of stale metas, content droughts, heavier microtransactions, season passes, a community as welcoming as an acid bath, the fact that this is developed and produced by one of the most blatantly evil companies in video games; all of these have been exceedingly well-documented and complained about for years up until this point. Even then, staring down every single flaw that this game had, there were still players holding out for the hope that they'd get to have a single player/co-op campaign as the advertisements had promised.

It won't be coming.

Years of allegedly active development have resulted in nothing but thin air. Contrary to Blizzard's most famous bit of vaporware, Starcraft Ghost, you could actually buy this one before it got a number stapled to the end of the title. Anyone who picked this up in the hopes of getting what was promised later down the line will not be getting the product that they were told they'd get. You could say that these people were foolish for buying the mere promise of something to come later, and I would agree. I can also, however, clown the fuck out of Blizzard for fumbling what by all rights should have been one of the biggest IPs in gaming today and creating something whose legacy is going to be little more than the endless Blender porn animations of its cast.

Buckle down for the retrospectives and video essays that are going to start flooding in about this to try to explain why Overwatch failed as hard as it did. I imagine you're going to start seeing a lot of takes from a lot of people all speculating on what the exact, singular reason was, be it Blizzard's floundering reputation, or the death of the pro scene, or the moneymen deciding that more and more corners needed to be cut.

Allow me to share my theory, though: every story of "why you stopped playing Overwatch" is always the same, and it's never because someone decided they'd had enough fun and hung it up while their opinion was still high. This game is seemingly designed to make people flame out. Someone on your team fucks up hard enough, or you fuck up hard enough, or an enemy player pulls out some unbalanced trick that'll be patched in a week, and you rage and you quit and you never pick it up again. Overwatch is a game with no unity between players, with no community, because Blizzard has devolved into a company which tailors all of its experiences towards glory-seeking leaderboard watchers and nobody else. It's never enough to succeed, to win; you have to dominate, to be the absolute best, to be the first in the world to ever do it.

Look at the way that World of Warcraft has warped itself over the years from being an open and free journey into rote and optimized mechanical rotations, with bosses and dungeons literally designed under the assumption that you'll be playing with plug-ins that tell you exactly where to stand and what button to press at a given time. Overwatch followed a similar trajectory as its life went on, though perhaps made even worse by the fact that they were made compulsory; can't have too many tanks on one team, that's not allowed. Can't have more than one person playing a specific character, that's busted. Can't have a team without tanks or healers, so you're forced to play one if nobody else will. It's one of the worst and most obvious implementations of a forced meta I've ever seen in a game, and it's all in service of a competitive scene that no longer exists for pub players who think they're going to be scouted anyway.

If you're playing with friends and want to try an off-meta strategy, you are literally forbidden by the game's mechanics from drifting too far away from an intended vision of what your team comp ought to look like. God help you if you're in a public lobby and you decide to pick anything other than the highest winrate, highest complexity, most glorious and flashy characters that are available to you. You will be flamed into either submission or a shouting match if anyone on your team becomes suspicious that you aren't playing optimally. Everything has to be optimal. It's all about optimization. And why shouldn't that be what the players expect? It's the idea that Blizzard forces on them. Of course they're going to be toxic shitheads who cry and shout and scream when they perceive the game not being played perfectly.

They learned it by watching you.