sure why not, computer install the bad game

apparently i feel the need to mention this whenever i play a live-service game on here but i really have no idea what's popular anymore. you could see this journal go up and email me saying "uhh why are you playing Overwatch in 2024 instead of Killhell Royale Gold Edition don't you know it's way better and has 1,004,93,9884,0 daily players" ok man i've never heard of that but hope you have fun with it. i was simply thinking back, fondly, to a time when i did keep up with trends, and when Overwatch was the game people were playing

can't believe it's been 8 years dude. those two weeks between the open beta and release in 2016 i was suffering crazy withdrawals; you can't just present to me a world in which Overwatch exists and then take it away. i distinctly remember going for a long walk to try to take my mind off it, but i ended up just anxiously counting down the days. for some reason i pre-ordered the physical PC edition and my order got delayed by a day or two after release, which was torture. looking back it was just nice to be genuinely excited for something. doesn't really happen these days

i don't know if they still do the animated shorts for each character, but i remember them being a big deal back when there was an overarching assumption that all the worldbuilding would amount to anything. so much so that one time they were holding cinema screenings to show off a new one back then, i think for Soldier 76, and i had scheduled to go to one in London. anyway it turned out there were two entirely different places named "Westfield" within London and they both had Vue cinemas. i don't want to talk about it

i only played sparsely after 2016, usually to try out the occasional new character. then after a while they announced """Overwatch 2""", which by that point i was off the train entirely. then the strangest thing happened a day or two before OW2 launched -- i suddenly went from not caring about Overwatch in the slightest, to really itching to get back into it. of course the servers were down to make way for the new update, putting me back in that spot i was in after the beta all those years back

i didn't continue playing "Overwatch 2" for long. the core game was still there; it's still Overwatch, and Overwatch is fun. but this whole 2 business soured me. we lost all forms of progression outside of seasonal competitive rank. we lost the ability to earn cosmetics for free. we lost a UI that wasn't terrible. we lost a player on our team, going from 6v6 down to 5v5. i don't know if this is what a sequel is i don't know if it quite fits the dictionary definition. but it's okay because they're going to justify it later on with a new PvE mode UPDATE: said PvE mode has been cancelled, reverting back to referring to game as simply "Overwatch"

i've never really cared about cosmetics in video games so maybe my opinion doesn't matter here. but i extremely don't understand the appeal in this case, especially when some skins cost twenty-five united state dollar. cosmetics are hero-specific, it's not like i'm getting to play dress-up with my own character. i do not identify with Hanzo enough to care about the color of his legs, that no one else will notice in the heat of battle, nor will i because it's a first-person game. but at least in OW1 i could casually unlock stuff while playing and occasionally go "oh sure that's nice i'll equip that". i guess this system is objectively better than literal gambling but still. twenty of five dollar's

hung around on this screen for a bit while the few dozen steam achievement unlock notifications died down

so why did i download this again, you're undoubtedly asking after enthusiastically listening to me talk about Overwatch on my website for this long in 2024. well i've been playing a lot of a PvP gamemode in FFXIV lately which is just payload but with scuffed MMO combat, and it had me wondering why i'm not just playing this instead. the obvious answer is that playing Overwatch doesn't progress my character in FFXIV, but that sort of ties into another reason. it turns out they recently updated it so that playing Overwatch now, once again, does progress my Overwatch account

it's shallow. but the complete removal of progression, all the way down to a single overall metric to showcase generally how much of an overwatchhead i am, was a little demotivating. you'd think for how corporatified and monetizationalized this game and Blizzard have become they would know that fun alone is not enough of a hook to keep the masses playing your game these days. so it's nice to see they did a 180 on this, though kind of to an extreme degree. more like a 540

if this were an RPG this kind of screen would exhaust me to look at, but thankfully in this game nothing means anything, just in a slightly more meaningful way now. play the game and over time get little icons to show generally how much you've played X gamemode or Y character, it's all good. it's like with cosmetics, i don't really care to go even a little out of my way to get something but if i'm just casually unlocking new things by simply having fun with the game then that's cool and good

i'mma be honest i actually only played this game for like half an hour last night and have spent much longer than that today writing about it. i played a couple matches of Mystery Heroes to dip my toes a little before heading to bed. recoiled whenever it made me play a character released after 2018, all of which i'm totally unfamiliar with. i think tomorrow i'll spend some time gettin to know em. they just added one with a big big drill

i stumbled upon something in the menus!! turns out they did churn out a little of that long-promised story mode last year. a little. sad to see because there was clearly a lot planned for it, just from poking around the menus. it actually did feel like a different game. i was sitting at Winston's desk from his pov and kept clicking on a jar of peanut butter and he kept saying things about the peanut butter

and this is crazy: cinematics were actually available in-game. years back i always found it weird how completely disconnected the actual game was from all the outside worldbuilding. there's like a thousand Overwatch comics hosted for free online can't they be in there too since they're free anyway. lore entries and chat logs as well!! unlocked by playing the story missions, which i was now admittedly excited to do after poring through everything

whoops never mind. instead i spent some time with these new "hero mastery" that a few characters have, which are just these little scored training exercises

bro something occurred to me.. Overwatch (game) is just like Overwatch (organization). in 2016 gaming had become gay and cringe, then Overwatch comes out and it's like a beacon of light. but after years of corporate corruption and mismanagement from higher-ups, now it's Overwatch that has become gay and cringe. and now...the world needs Heroes....and it will have them, in the form of me playing a video game that at the end of the day is still fun and cool to play

i did not spend some time getting to know the new characters because i haven't yet decided if i really care enough. i went back to playing the random Mystery Heroes mode and being confused whenever i got a mystery hero. there's so many characters now dude, there were a lot before but now there's even more of a lot. though out of the new ones i briefly tried i liked Junker Queen most, which makes sense because i used to play Junkrat a lot in OW1. i liked him because i didn't have to be good i just keep exploding things until eventually one of those things by happenstance is another player