Overwatch 2
There’s something fundamentally unsatisfying about Overwatch that I struggled to articulate for a while, but I think I’ve finally put my finger on it: the game is designed around immediate results and efficiency at the expense of depth and mastery.
Don’t get me wrong, mechanically, it’s polished. The abilities feel responsive, the visual feedback is satisfying, and there’s an undeniable moment-to-moment appeal to the action. But beneath that surface-level polish, I found myself craving something the game simply isn’t interested in providing: space for exploration, experimentation, and genuine growth with a character.
The core issue is that Overwatch actively discourages the kind of engagement I find meaningful in competitive games. Encounter a counter? Just swap. Team struggling? Switch to the meta pick. The path of least resistance is always right there, and the game’s design philosophy, along with its playerbase, pushes you toward taking it. There’s no real incentive to sit with a challenge, to learn the matchup, to figure out how to outplay your counter through creativity and adaptation. Why would you, when you could just click a different hero and solve the problem instantly?
And that mentality permeates the entire culture. Players are hyper-focused on winning now, on climbing the ladder as efficiently as possible, on executing the optimal strategy someone else already figured out. There’s this overwhelming sense that the destination is all that matters, the journey, the learning process, the satisfaction of genuine mastery… those things feel almost quaint in the face of Overwatch’s relentless optimization culture.
I think I just prefer games that reward depth over efficiency. Games where the community values understanding your craft, where there’s room to sit with difficulty and find your own solutions, where people are playing for the experience and not just the outcome. Overwatch, for all its polish and production value, just isn’t that game. And honestly? That’s probably fine for the people it’s designed for. It’s just not me.
Don’t get me wrong, mechanically, it’s polished. The abilities feel responsive, the visual feedback is satisfying, and there’s an undeniable moment-to-moment appeal to the action. But beneath that surface-level polish, I found myself craving something the game simply isn’t interested in providing: space for exploration, experimentation, and genuine growth with a character.
The core issue is that Overwatch actively discourages the kind of engagement I find meaningful in competitive games. Encounter a counter? Just swap. Team struggling? Switch to the meta pick. The path of least resistance is always right there, and the game’s design philosophy, along with its playerbase, pushes you toward taking it. There’s no real incentive to sit with a challenge, to learn the matchup, to figure out how to outplay your counter through creativity and adaptation. Why would you, when you could just click a different hero and solve the problem instantly?
And that mentality permeates the entire culture. Players are hyper-focused on winning now, on climbing the ladder as efficiently as possible, on executing the optimal strategy someone else already figured out. There’s this overwhelming sense that the destination is all that matters, the journey, the learning process, the satisfaction of genuine mastery… those things feel almost quaint in the face of Overwatch’s relentless optimization culture.
I think I just prefer games that reward depth over efficiency. Games where the community values understanding your craft, where there’s room to sit with difficulty and find your own solutions, where people are playing for the experience and not just the outcome. Overwatch, for all its polish and production value, just isn’t that game. And honestly? That’s probably fine for the people it’s designed for. It’s just not me.
Mini Review: There’s something fundamentally unsatisfying about Overwatch that I struggled to articulate for a while, but I think I’ve finally put my finger on it: the game is designed around immediate results and efficiency at the expense of depth and mastery. Don’t get me wrong, mechanically, it’s polished. The abilities feel responsive, the visual feedback is satisfying, and there’s an undeniable moment-to-moment appeal to the action. But...
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