Overwatch 2
This review contains spoilers
The World Could Always Use More Seasons: Overwatch 2 and the Slow Cancellation of the Future
On October 4, 2022, Overwatch stopped existing. It wasn’t retired, archived, or left running on a dwindling server for nostalgic holdouts. It was overwritten. Players who logged in found its successor in its place: same maps, same heroes, mostly the same menus, now with a “2” in the corner and a battle pass where the loot boxes used to be. The original, a game that in 2016 had felt like a confident bet on the future of the medium, became something you could only remember. That founding gesture tells you most of what you need to know about Overwatch 2. It is a sequel whose most decisive innovation was the elimination of its predecessor, and a game about the future that has spent its entire life struggling to arrive anywhere new.
Mark Fisher argued that the defining condition of late capitalist culture is not a lack of novelty but a lack of futurity. There is an endless churn of new product and almost no sense that anything is going anywhere. He called it the slow cancellation of the future: a culture that can still recombine its past with great technical polish but can no longer imagine forms that would break with the present. Overwatch 2 is almost too neat an illustration. The numeral promises progression, a next chapter, a world that has moved on. What it actually delivers is the original game, run through a new revenue model and played in the past tense.
A future borrowed from the past
It helps to remember what the first game was selling. Overwatch's world was retro-futurist optimism rendered with Pixar warmth: gleaming cities in Numbani and Oasis, a scientist gorilla on the moon, a hamster piloting a wrecking ball. Its tagline insisted the world could always use more heroes. This was a future, but a curiously secondhand one. It was the jetpack-and-monorail tomorrow of mid-century advertising, filtered through the reassuring humanism of an animated family film. Fisher would recognize this as a hauntological object: a work animated by futures that were promised long ago and never came, now available as a pleasant aesthetic rather than a political horizon. The future in Overwatch had always been a mood board.
Overwatch 2 deepens the haunting by making the original game itself a ghost. The maps from 2016 are still there, but they now belong to a game that cannot be played. Longtime players speak of “OW1” the way people speak of a demolished venue: the six-person teams, the shield-heavy stalemates, the specific chaos of a particular era. Blizzard has periodically flirted with bringing back 6v6 in limited tests, and every one of these experiments has the texture of a séance. The past returns only as a temporary event mode, a nostalgia drop with a countdown timer.
The cancelled campaign
The real cancellation is more literal. Overwatch 2 was announced in 2019 on the strength of a story-driven cooperative mode: persistent hero progression, skill trees, a campaign that would finally move the world’s narrative forward after years of lore told through cinematics and comics. This was the future the “2” referred to. In May 2023 Blizzard announced that the ambitious Hero Mode had been abandoned. What remained arrived months later as a handful of story missions sold as a paid bundle, competent and brief, more an epilogue to a promise than its fulfilment.
It’s hard to think of a cleaner case of the future being cancelled by the logic of the present. The cooperative mode was expensive, slow, and finite. The competitive live-service loop was cheap to extend and endlessly monetizable. The game’s world, a story about a reformed peacekeeping force facing a robot uprising, was effectively frozen so that the business could keep moving. The narrative did not end. It simply stopped being where the game’s energy went, and the lore migrated into the shop, where it now arrives as a mythic skin’s backstory or a limited-time event’s flavor text. Fisher’s phrase “business ontology,” the conviction that everything should be run like a business because nothing else is thinkable, describes this exactly. Even the story became a deliverable, and deliverables that don’t hit their targets get cut.
The permanent present of the battle pass
The battle pass is where Overwatch 2 organizes time itself, and it’s the game’s most Fisherian feature. Every nine weeks or so a new season arrives with a new map or hero, a new set of cosmetics to grind toward, a new theme. Each season is announced with the language of transformation and lasts just long enough to be replaced. The result is a temporality of permanent novelty without development: things are always changing, and nothing is going anywhere. Fisher described a culture of “depressive hedonia,” an inability to do anything except seek pleasure, a compulsion that persists after the pleasure has thinned out. The daily challenge list, the weekly XP cap, and the tier counter are its interface. You don’t play Overwatch 2 so much as maintain your standing in it.
Early in the game’s life this logic extended to the heroes themselves. New characters such as Kiriko sat deep in the battle pass for free players, so a fighting style, a playable person, became a reward for sustained attendance. The arrangement was later loosened under pressure, but the original design shows where the system’s instincts lie. The collaborations make the point from the other direction. Anime crossovers, K-pop skins, and branded sports cars float through a world that was supposed to have its own visual identity. When everything can be a skin, the world has no outside, no boundary that commerce can’t cross. This is capitalist realism in miniature: not that the game’s world is grim, but that no alternative to the shop is imaginable within it.
Playbor and its discontents
Here Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter sharpen what Fisher’s melancholy tends to leave in soft focus. In Games of Empire they argued that video games are not just products of global capitalism but its exemplary media. Games train players in its rhythms, fuse leisure with labor, and depend on enormous reserves of underpaid, overworked creative workers. Their concept of “playbor,” the unpaid value players generate through engagement, data, community, and attention, describes the battle pass more precisely than any notion of fun. A free-to-play game doesn’t sell you a product; it rents your time and resells it to its own metrics. Your grind props up the concurrent-user figures that justify the next season’s budget.
What makes the authors’ framework indispensable here is that they never forget the other workers, the ones making the game. Overwatch 2 was developed inside Activision Blizzard during the period when California’s civil rights agency sued the company over widespread harassment and discrimination. The game’s resident cowboy was renamed because his original name belonged to a developer implicated in the scandal. The studio then passed into Microsoft’s ownership amid rounds of industry-wide layoffs. The labor conditions behind the live-service treadmill are the treadmill’s other side: a permanent present for the players requires permanent crunch for the developers.
The authors also insisted that Empire breeds its own counter-forces, which they called the “multitude.” In 2025 the developers who make Overwatch organized as a union. Players have their own forms of collective refusal, most visibly when the game’s Steam launch drew a flood of negative reviews, almost all directed not at the play but at the business model and the abandoned campaign. These are small gestures. But they complicate Fisher’s sense of total enclosure. The people inside the machine have not simply been absorbed by it.
The cyborgs in the shop window
The most interesting tension in Overwatch 2 lies in its characters, and this is where Donna Haraway pulls hardest against Fisher’s despair. Few big-budget games are as thoroughly populated by what Haraway called cyborgs: boundary creatures who mix human, animal, and machine and refuse the purity of any single category. Genji is a ninja rebuilt almost entirely from prosthetics. Echo is an AI who learned to be a person by copying her creator. Zenyatta is a robot monk; Orisa is a war machine rebuilt by an eleven-year-old; Hammond is a hamster genius piloting a ball. The game’s central political conflict, between humans and the sentient robots called omnics, is a story about whether these boundary beings deserve rights and kinship. In 2016 this looked like a quietly radical premise wrapped in a hero shooter.
Haraway’s cyborg was never naïve, though. She described it as the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, a figure born from the war machine that might yet betray its parents. Overwatch 2 sits right in that contradiction. Its most vivid new character is Ramattra, the leader of the omnic militant group Null Sector, who has concluded that coexistence with humanity is a failed project. In lore and voice lines he is a genuine political subject, the one character who insists the world’s peace is built on robot subordination. He is also a product: introduced as a season’s headline unlock, with a premium skin line. The game’s most revolutionary figure is the season’s sales driver. That is a Fisherian image if ever there was one, the radical gesture pre-incorporated, critique arriving already priced.
Haraway would refuse to leave it there, and her refusal is worth taking seriously. She asks us to “stay with the trouble,” to look for kinship and possibility in compromised, impure situations rather than mourning a lost authenticity. Her cyborgs don’t wait for a clean origin. Seen through that lens, the playerbase’s attachment to these characters is not merely captured desire. People build fan communities around Zenyatta’s serenity and Kiriko’s family history. Trans and queer players have embraced the game’s increasingly open characters (Tracer, Soldier: 76, Lifeweaver) as a rare mainstream space where they are recognized. These attachments outrun the monetization model even as they are routed through it. Fisher’s late hope for an “acid communism,” a reawakening of collective desire that capital had hijacked, finds a faint echo here. The desire is real, even when the shop channels it.
The fight itself
None of this explains why people still play, and an honest essay has to admit why. Moment to moment, Overwatch 2 is often superb. The shift to five-player teams made fights faster and more legible and turned tanks into the brawling protagonists they always wanted to be. The hero design remains among the best in the genre. Each character is a distinct grammar of movement and intention, and a well-coordinated team fight produces a rare feeling of collective improvisation, five strangers briefly becoming a single organism. Later seasons, including the perk system and the build-focused Stadium mode, showed a studio still capable of real invention when it is allowed to make something rather than just sell something.
That is precisely the game’s tragedy. The best thing about Overwatch 2 is a form of play that resembles solidarity: shared risk, mutual protection, the healer keeping the tank alive so the damage dealer can finish the job. Everything surrounding that play pushes the opposite way, toward individual progression, private collection, the lonely arithmetic of the battle pass. The game’s core experience imagines a cooperative future its business model cannot tolerate.
Overwatch 2 is neither a failure nor the triumph its name promised. It is something more representative and more depressing: a handsomely built, frequently thrilling machine for keeping the future just out of reach. It preserves the shape of hope — heroes, robots seeking dignity, a world worth saving — while making sure that hope never cashes out as narrative change, only as a new season.
In February 2026, the 2 was dropped and the game became simply Overwatch again, a name borrowed from the predecessor it had erased. The studio explained that the game had outgrown numbering, which is true in the most revealing sense: a numeral marks a before and an after, and this game no longer has either. What came back was story, finally, but story built to the dimensions of the fiscal year: a six-season arc, a faction war with performance rewards, a counter that resets to Season 1 every January. It would be ungenerous not to see a real concession to players here, and some of what arrived with it is genuinely charming. But the rename completes the circle the launch began. A sequel that started by abolishing its original ends by taking its name, and the future the 2 once promised is quietly folded back into an endlessly renewable present.
The world could always use more heroes, the old slogan said. The game we got suggests that what the world can always use more of is seasons.
On October 4, 2022, Overwatch stopped existing. It wasn’t retired, archived, or left running on a dwindling server for nostalgic holdouts. It was overwritten. Players who logged in found its successor in its place: same maps, same heroes, mostly the same menus, now with a “2” in the corner and a battle pass where the loot boxes used to be. The original, a game that in 2016 had felt like a confident bet on the future of the medium, became something you could only remember. That founding gesture tells you most of what you need to know about Overwatch 2. It is a sequel whose most decisive innovation was the elimination of its predecessor, and a game about the future that has spent its entire life struggling to arrive anywhere new.
Mark Fisher argued that the defining condition of late capitalist culture is not a lack of novelty but a lack of futurity. There is an endless churn of new product and almost no sense that anything is going anywhere. He called it the slow cancellation of the future: a culture that can still recombine its past with great technical polish but can no longer imagine forms that would break with the present. Overwatch 2 is almost too neat an illustration. The numeral promises progression, a next chapter, a world that has moved on. What it actually delivers is the original game, run through a new revenue model and played in the past tense.
A future borrowed from the past
It helps to remember what the first game was selling. Overwatch's world was retro-futurist optimism rendered with Pixar warmth: gleaming cities in Numbani and Oasis, a scientist gorilla on the moon, a hamster piloting a wrecking ball. Its tagline insisted the world could always use more heroes. This was a future, but a curiously secondhand one. It was the jetpack-and-monorail tomorrow of mid-century advertising, filtered through the reassuring humanism of an animated family film. Fisher would recognize this as a hauntological object: a work animated by futures that were promised long ago and never came, now available as a pleasant aesthetic rather than a political horizon. The future in Overwatch had always been a mood board.
Overwatch 2 deepens the haunting by making the original game itself a ghost. The maps from 2016 are still there, but they now belong to a game that cannot be played. Longtime players speak of “OW1” the way people speak of a demolished venue: the six-person teams, the shield-heavy stalemates, the specific chaos of a particular era. Blizzard has periodically flirted with bringing back 6v6 in limited tests, and every one of these experiments has the texture of a séance. The past returns only as a temporary event mode, a nostalgia drop with a countdown timer.
The cancelled campaign
The real cancellation is more literal. Overwatch 2 was announced in 2019 on the strength of a story-driven cooperative mode: persistent hero progression, skill trees, a campaign that would finally move the world’s narrative forward after years of lore told through cinematics and comics. This was the future the “2” referred to. In May 2023 Blizzard announced that the ambitious Hero Mode had been abandoned. What remained arrived months later as a handful of story missions sold as a paid bundle, competent and brief, more an epilogue to a promise than its fulfilment.
It’s hard to think of a cleaner case of the future being cancelled by the logic of the present. The cooperative mode was expensive, slow, and finite. The competitive live-service loop was cheap to extend and endlessly monetizable. The game’s world, a story about a reformed peacekeeping force facing a robot uprising, was effectively frozen so that the business could keep moving. The narrative did not end. It simply stopped being where the game’s energy went, and the lore migrated into the shop, where it now arrives as a mythic skin’s backstory or a limited-time event’s flavor text. Fisher’s phrase “business ontology,” the conviction that everything should be run like a business because nothing else is thinkable, describes this exactly. Even the story became a deliverable, and deliverables that don’t hit their targets get cut.
The permanent present of the battle pass
The battle pass is where Overwatch 2 organizes time itself, and it’s the game’s most Fisherian feature. Every nine weeks or so a new season arrives with a new map or hero, a new set of cosmetics to grind toward, a new theme. Each season is announced with the language of transformation and lasts just long enough to be replaced. The result is a temporality of permanent novelty without development: things are always changing, and nothing is going anywhere. Fisher described a culture of “depressive hedonia,” an inability to do anything except seek pleasure, a compulsion that persists after the pleasure has thinned out. The daily challenge list, the weekly XP cap, and the tier counter are its interface. You don’t play Overwatch 2 so much as maintain your standing in it.
Early in the game’s life this logic extended to the heroes themselves. New characters such as Kiriko sat deep in the battle pass for free players, so a fighting style, a playable person, became a reward for sustained attendance. The arrangement was later loosened under pressure, but the original design shows where the system’s instincts lie. The collaborations make the point from the other direction. Anime crossovers, K-pop skins, and branded sports cars float through a world that was supposed to have its own visual identity. When everything can be a skin, the world has no outside, no boundary that commerce can’t cross. This is capitalist realism in miniature: not that the game’s world is grim, but that no alternative to the shop is imaginable within it.
Playbor and its discontents
Here Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter sharpen what Fisher’s melancholy tends to leave in soft focus. In Games of Empire they argued that video games are not just products of global capitalism but its exemplary media. Games train players in its rhythms, fuse leisure with labor, and depend on enormous reserves of underpaid, overworked creative workers. Their concept of “playbor,” the unpaid value players generate through engagement, data, community, and attention, describes the battle pass more precisely than any notion of fun. A free-to-play game doesn’t sell you a product; it rents your time and resells it to its own metrics. Your grind props up the concurrent-user figures that justify the next season’s budget.
What makes the authors’ framework indispensable here is that they never forget the other workers, the ones making the game. Overwatch 2 was developed inside Activision Blizzard during the period when California’s civil rights agency sued the company over widespread harassment and discrimination. The game’s resident cowboy was renamed because his original name belonged to a developer implicated in the scandal. The studio then passed into Microsoft’s ownership amid rounds of industry-wide layoffs. The labor conditions behind the live-service treadmill are the treadmill’s other side: a permanent present for the players requires permanent crunch for the developers.
The authors also insisted that Empire breeds its own counter-forces, which they called the “multitude.” In 2025 the developers who make Overwatch organized as a union. Players have their own forms of collective refusal, most visibly when the game’s Steam launch drew a flood of negative reviews, almost all directed not at the play but at the business model and the abandoned campaign. These are small gestures. But they complicate Fisher’s sense of total enclosure. The people inside the machine have not simply been absorbed by it.
The cyborgs in the shop window
The most interesting tension in Overwatch 2 lies in its characters, and this is where Donna Haraway pulls hardest against Fisher’s despair. Few big-budget games are as thoroughly populated by what Haraway called cyborgs: boundary creatures who mix human, animal, and machine and refuse the purity of any single category. Genji is a ninja rebuilt almost entirely from prosthetics. Echo is an AI who learned to be a person by copying her creator. Zenyatta is a robot monk; Orisa is a war machine rebuilt by an eleven-year-old; Hammond is a hamster genius piloting a ball. The game’s central political conflict, between humans and the sentient robots called omnics, is a story about whether these boundary beings deserve rights and kinship. In 2016 this looked like a quietly radical premise wrapped in a hero shooter.
Haraway’s cyborg was never naïve, though. She described it as the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, a figure born from the war machine that might yet betray its parents. Overwatch 2 sits right in that contradiction. Its most vivid new character is Ramattra, the leader of the omnic militant group Null Sector, who has concluded that coexistence with humanity is a failed project. In lore and voice lines he is a genuine political subject, the one character who insists the world’s peace is built on robot subordination. He is also a product: introduced as a season’s headline unlock, with a premium skin line. The game’s most revolutionary figure is the season’s sales driver. That is a Fisherian image if ever there was one, the radical gesture pre-incorporated, critique arriving already priced.
Haraway would refuse to leave it there, and her refusal is worth taking seriously. She asks us to “stay with the trouble,” to look for kinship and possibility in compromised, impure situations rather than mourning a lost authenticity. Her cyborgs don’t wait for a clean origin. Seen through that lens, the playerbase’s attachment to these characters is not merely captured desire. People build fan communities around Zenyatta’s serenity and Kiriko’s family history. Trans and queer players have embraced the game’s increasingly open characters (Tracer, Soldier: 76, Lifeweaver) as a rare mainstream space where they are recognized. These attachments outrun the monetization model even as they are routed through it. Fisher’s late hope for an “acid communism,” a reawakening of collective desire that capital had hijacked, finds a faint echo here. The desire is real, even when the shop channels it.
The fight itself
None of this explains why people still play, and an honest essay has to admit why. Moment to moment, Overwatch 2 is often superb. The shift to five-player teams made fights faster and more legible and turned tanks into the brawling protagonists they always wanted to be. The hero design remains among the best in the genre. Each character is a distinct grammar of movement and intention, and a well-coordinated team fight produces a rare feeling of collective improvisation, five strangers briefly becoming a single organism. Later seasons, including the perk system and the build-focused Stadium mode, showed a studio still capable of real invention when it is allowed to make something rather than just sell something.
That is precisely the game’s tragedy. The best thing about Overwatch 2 is a form of play that resembles solidarity: shared risk, mutual protection, the healer keeping the tank alive so the damage dealer can finish the job. Everything surrounding that play pushes the opposite way, toward individual progression, private collection, the lonely arithmetic of the battle pass. The game’s core experience imagines a cooperative future its business model cannot tolerate.
Overwatch 2 is neither a failure nor the triumph its name promised. It is something more representative and more depressing: a handsomely built, frequently thrilling machine for keeping the future just out of reach. It preserves the shape of hope — heroes, robots seeking dignity, a world worth saving — while making sure that hope never cashes out as narrative change, only as a new season.
In February 2026, the 2 was dropped and the game became simply Overwatch again, a name borrowed from the predecessor it had erased. The studio explained that the game had outgrown numbering, which is true in the most revealing sense: a numeral marks a before and an after, and this game no longer has either. What came back was story, finally, but story built to the dimensions of the fiscal year: a six-season arc, a faction war with performance rewards, a counter that resets to Season 1 every January. It would be ungenerous not to see a real concession to players here, and some of what arrived with it is genuinely charming. But the rename completes the circle the launch began. A sequel that started by abolishing its original ends by taking its name, and the future the 2 once promised is quietly folded back into an endlessly renewable present.
The world could always use more heroes, the old slogan said. The game we got suggests that what the world can always use more of is seasons.
Mini Review: Overwatch 2 is a sequel that mostly replaced its predecessor rather than moving it forward. Through Mark Fisher’s idea of the slow cancellation of the future, it reads as a game about tomorrow that stays stuck in a permanent present of seasons and shops. Its cyborg heroes hint at real kinship, and its team fights feel like genuine solidarity, but the business model keeps pulling toward solitary grinding. Often thrilling, rarely going anywhere.
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