Why Overwatch 2 is a great idea and how it can help the balance of our current OW

While a meme, the idea of Overwatch 2 coming out is one of the best decisions blizzard could make.  It’s an untapped intellectual property that has brought together a lot of players who aren’t necessarily interested in FPS gaming. It’s precisely because of this vast array of players that it would be dumb to not put out more content in the OW universe.  A great deal of OW players would be considered casual.  They don’t care about the balance of the game or if cool new ability is viable at low and high ranks.  Its more about having fun and working together with friends.  Fans have been asking for a single player version to get more details about the OW universe and learn about their favorite heroes.  So, what do we know about OW2 so far?

Most of the guesses about the game is that it’ll primarily be PvE which is following the current trend of PvE games and the return of couch co-op.  This would also address a lot of the complaints that OW has today, which is the high degree of toxicity and blaming other teammates.  While PvE doesn’t get rid of teammates it does more easily align players towards an objective, as long as you progress towards that objective there's not much room to complain.  Unlike ladder where there is tremendous pressure to do things the “proper” or “meta” way.  It’s the idea that picks are a decision and if you pick the wrong hero then you are deciding to lose that have caused this.  This leads me into my next assumption about OW2.  If it is story driven, which it most likely will be, then you would be moving through a story as a character meaning one will be assigned to you at the start of the mission.  It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have Roadhog being picked during a mission about the formation of the Overwatch team.  This also removes the complaints about who plays what.

I would like to make one more call out about OW2 and that is that there will be more mechanics that punish or attempt to remove toxicity.  OW has been run into the ground because of it and OW2 will take great strides to limit it.  I’d expect less communication from the developers about counters and how the game is designed.  This has been the biggest source of toxicity in OW is that the devs said how the game should be played when it was released, they didn’t expect the community not to listen to them.

While everyone can have their guesses, no one truly knows until blizzcon and more information is released but how does this relate to OW in its current state?

Players are overly attached to specific heroes.  Not the role of the hero, not what the hero does but the model and lore of the hero.  The biggest example is Mercy.  On the forums you can see a myriad of players asking for reworks and changes.  Some of them change the hero so drastically that its not even the same hero anymore.  It’s odd to think that if you swapped Junkrat’s and Mercy’s model, these players would follow the model while those that are worried about game play would follow the skill set, yet that’s how a lot of players in Overwatch feel right now.

These players are mostly what we would consider part of the casual group.  A new game that specifically targets lore, missions and PvE would be perfect for these players.  Meaning it gets them out of OW multiplayer and into a new game. While a bit of a scummy business model, selling single player and multiplayer separate is great because you can balance them separately unlike other games that tried to balance PvE and PvP at the same time. This gets the causal players out of the multiplayer game so blizzard can make the proper adjustments to heroes without upsetting these dedicated and delicate players. 

The other way to interpret OW2 is that its not another game but a massive update.  Now, I don’t believe a company can balance a game when they are afraid of their player base but jeff kaplan publicly said they were too afraid to nerf dive heroes so they created Brigette.  We also see a theme of changes when they changed the speed of Junkrat’s projectile. Blizzard specifically called out that the arc did not change, same with Doomfist's punch and how it effects his speed.  They seem to be too afraid to invalidate time put into a hero which makes sense to a point but if something must change then blizzard has to change it.  If a hero has to be relearned then so be it.  They can’t buff their way out of this situation like they’ve tried before which is why there's only one way to not upset a specific group of players - A massive update that upsets everyone under the guise of OW2.