The death and rebirth of Overwatch

On the 3rd of October this year, Overwatch was scheduled to change forever, where Blizzard Entertainment planned to shut down the games servers. Why this is only a change and not a complete shutdown, is because Overwatch 2 had its launch day the day after, leaving Overwatch well alive.

What was Overwatch 1?

Overwatch is a popular multiplayer shooter game that was originally released in 2016, where you could play gamemodes that usually consisted of two teams of real players who went up against one another. At the end of the games lifespan, you could play as 35 different heroes from the main classes tank, damage, and support. Heroes are playable characters with unique characteristics such as their weapon, health, and abilities, and each one also having a special attack that could range from healing everyone nearby to a very powerful attack.

How does Overwatch 2 compare to Overwatch 1?

Much similar to its predecessor, Overwatch 2 mainly consists of shooting gamemodes with two teams built of players. The absolute biggest change between these, is that Overwatch 2 is free-to-play, making it accessible to everyone who wants to give it a shot. Battle passes, new heroes, changed team size, better balanced, faster pace, and other general changes to the gameplay are some of the notable changes from the old game.

What about those who paid for the original game, now that they can't play it?

While Overwatch 1 costed money and the new game doesn't, there is still reason to why your purchase is justified. To start, we must remember that you have had up to 7 years of fun experiences playing the first game. That your money was needed to grow and develop the game series is not a question. With the release of Overwatch 2, players from before the 23rd of June 2022 have also been promised a "Overwatch 2 Founder's pack" for free for their previous support. They mentioned that the community means everything to them, and that they appreciate and respect old-time players, which is why they are offering this gift along with the relaunch.

Why the Overwatch 2 launch was a bug-filled roller-coaster

When Overwatch 2 was meant to be open to the public, all hell broke loose. Servers having to be shut down for maintenance, players losing connection to the servers, and users not being able to load in or run the game are a few of many examples that the game has been full of since its launch. To this day there are still a number of unresolved bugs, most of which can be found via their Twitter page BlizzardCS. Simply put, they underestimated the number of problems that would come with the release of the game, and did not spend enough resources looking into these issues before launch day. While filled with bugs, the game is mostly playable by now.

What the future brings to the Overwatch series

With a total rehaul of the game, there is a lot of things that will change. Nothing is certain, but with new interest coming to the game, there may be many changes of community and its participation, eSports along with all teams and players, and experiences overall. Hopefully, everything will change for the better and leave players satisfied while having the game remain popular and relevant for long. No matter what, this is a huge change for a huge game, and we hope that this article was useful and entertaining.