Why Did Overwatch 2 Remove My Favorite Feature

Overwatch 2 will be out in the wild soon, and the internet won’t be short of opinions on it. I don’t know if it can ever be as good as the original was, but locking new players out of using its most popular and iconic heroes doesn’t seem like a winning strat


I know some other games do this. Valorant and League of Legends are both successful, and both require heroes (agents and champions, respectively) to be unlocked from the off. But crucially the original Overwatch did not, and that was a major part of the appeal. This unlocking system was at one time commonplace in the fighting genre, until studios realised this was no fun and served no purpose. Overwatch 2 seems to be deliberately making the game less fun in the hopes of ensnaring players to keep playing until their favourite hero is let out of jail. A more confident hand would give you the heroes from the start and trust that it’s good enough for you to stick aro

If I see a skin I really love, I can either grind through the battle pass to earn it or buy things outright. Sure, they’re expensive, but it will run me far less than an infinite amount of boxes trying to pull it. However, my past behaviour means that all of my accounts merging into a single entity with the launch of Overwatch 2 means I already have most of the skins I would ever want. Of course there remain a bunch of cosmetics I’d love to earn and will probably end up treating myself to in the coming months, the repertoire of outfits for each character at my disposal is honestly quite overwhelming. I have 80+ unlocks for D.Va, and that includes over twenty unique skins ranging from Black Cat to Cruiser. She was a real sticking point for me, and every new mech was almost taunting me as I tried my best to earn them whenever a seasonal event rolled around. That struggle remains, but now it’s far more manageable.

Right now I have almost everything I could ever want, and I’m smart enough now to avoid wasting money on currency unless there is something I desperately want. The battle pass is one of the few means of progression right now, with the character levelling system teased in earlier trailers abandoned until PvE rolls around. Seasonal skins that used to justify events are now available whenever we like, or a part of bundles that cycle through the store each and every day.


I know, I know, the medal system was flawed. In an effort to curb toxicity, the original Overwatch team opted to forgo a traditional scoreboard and instead use a medal system that would vaguely tell you how well you’re doing. During and after a match you could see how well you did compared to your team based. Across a series of categories from eliminations, to damage dealt, to healing, the top three performers would receive gold, silver, and bronze medals. If you have a particularly good game, you might even receive gold medals in multiple categor


I’ll start by comparing the two systems. There were two ways to earn cosmetics in Overwatch 2 guide|https://overwatch2Fans.com/: opening loot boxes and spending Credits. You earned a loot box every level and could get three more each week for winning games in Arcade mode. During a seasonal event, you could typically earn five to ten more for free. Boxes contained four random items of varying rarity but would sometimes reward Credits equivalent to the price of a skin at that rarity. In other words, legendary Credits would be enough to buy a legendary skin. Credits could also be earned by completing matches. Receiving duplicate items also rewarded Credits, though just barely a pitta

Overwatch 2 is going through an identity crisis right now, even if this weird transition was one that me and so many others expected. It will be a better game in the end because of this awkward growth, but right now my investment in Overwatch has arguably lessened the investment I have in its successor because there is less in it for me from the off. Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely a me problem , but aside from pushing through the battle pass I’m now stuck waiting to see what else awaits me on the horizon.


Medals are completely meaningless. Other than a minor XP boost from your highest medal earned, you don’t get anything for collecting medals. They aren’t tracked on your stat page or in your achievements, you can’t trade them for cosmetics, and you can’t even see anyone’s medals but your own. What they did do was explode onto the screen all bright and shiny at the end of every match. My Overwatch career is more than 400 hours long, and the medals alone were enough to keep me coming back for m

I can buy skins outright, but they used to be earned through chance, so the value of each skin is twisted in a way that the community is going to take a long time to reconcile. In reality is it no different to how things are done in games like Apex Legends or Fortnite , with the very best skins costing around $15-$20, but we were used to earning them in a much easier way, and thus it feels unfair. For someone like me with more skins than sense, I feel like a dragon sitting atop a mountain of gold unaware of how they stumbled across such riches. I’m serious, using the new values assigned to skins I think my account is worth thousands. Yet it’s also worthless.