Overwatch 2 inspires MeinMMO demon Cortyn – but at the same time the game is really bad, because a lot of things are just annoying and sneaky.
It’s been a good three weeks since Overwatch 2 was released and we’re now in the first recurring event of Blizzard’s hero shooter, the “Halloween Terror”. And what has been stated again and again in recent weeks still applies in principle:
Overwatch 2 is really fun.
That’s probably partly because it’s a game that everyone in my circle of friends enjoys, but partly because the gameplay is just plain good.
That was it in Overwatch 1, little has changed. One of Overwatch’s great strengths is that you can be the team’s hero or heroine from time to time. When, as Mei, you block Reinhardt’s ultimate with an ice wall, when Cassidy takes the Pharah out of the sky with her hail of rockets, or when, as Kiriko, you time the one-second invincibility so that the whole team survives the explosion of D.Va’s mech.
Overwatch allows such and other moments again and again.
Lots of laughs when the Roadhog gets pushed down himself trying to pull someone down the well. Eyes are rolled vigorously when the one random on the team, who of course plays Genji, hops around somewhere in the middle of nowhere and spams “I need healing!”.
The tight matches, in which you still panicked in the “overtime” trying to push the payload just one centimeter further than the opposing team, the cool team attacks when the agreement succeeds and the merciless failure when you miss your mission again .
It’s all fun and got even better with the latest Halloween Wrath of the Bride mode. Because this is a first taste of PvE mode and, at least a few times, it’s a lot of fun. It’s a cool, entertaining story trip in a typical spooky tale as it might take place in the Overwatch universe.
But as cool as I think the Wrath of the Bride mode is, in the end it’s nothing more than a promotional event for the skins in the shop.
“Blizzard did a good job of showing all the skins here and even giving them a bit of a story.”
That was a friend’s first reaction after successfully beating the new Junkenstein mode. He’s right. It’s hard to see the new game mode in a different light. It’s a big promotional sign for the shop and the skins there. Because the cool skins are “tested” in Halloween mode and the voicelines and small dialogues make you feel a little more connected to these characters. That’s clever – and at the same time so transparently evil.
But honestly? I really like the Kiriko skin as a witch. If it cost 10 euros, I would have bought it. I probably would have seriously thought about 15 euros, I think it’s that good. Instead, it costs 2,600 premium currency, which is the equivalent of exactly 26 euros and is part of a “reduced” bundle, with all sorts of nonsense that I don’t want at all.
It is particularly curious that this bundle with its price reduction is completely imaginary. Because the individual objects from the bundle cannot be bought individually. Of course it’s easy to write that you would save 29% here.
Incidentally, this practice of allegedly selling “reduced” bundles whose individual parts were never for sale would be legally prohibited in many countries. However, Blizzard cleverly circumvents this with the premium currency. This is because the bundle is not offered for direct purchase for real money, but for fantasy currency, for which such rules do not apply – because you actually only bought the Overwatch coins and not the bundle.
And I can’t take seriously the fact that we got the “Reaper” skin for free as compensation for the messed-up launch of the game. Because I’m pretty sure we would have gotten the skin anyway, just as a twitch drop.
Otherwise I can hardly explain why you get an “exclusive” skin for Winston as a Twitch reward, which has been in the game for 2 years.
It just seems like they quickly swapped out the reward and later marketed it as a “Sorry” skin.
It is precisely in this area between “Overwatch 2 is so much fun” and “Overwatch 2 is so shabby” that Blizzard’s hero shooter is currently moving. To be honest, I don’t think there will be any monetization action in the next few months as as many Kiriko witches as I saw yesterday seem to agree with the developers. Apparently many others are willing to leave a lot of money in the shop of a game where you could just earn all these things yourself a few weeks ago.
Or how do you see it all?