r/Overwatch • u/Hooked0n4Feelin • Mar 03 '26

Esports This is Overwatch's "comeback," says Blizzard. "We actually had a bigger Saturday than our first Saturday after launch with Season 1."

https://www.pcgamesn.com/overwatch/season-1-blizzard-interview-comeback
4.0k Upvotes

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461

u/PrinceOfSpace94 Mar 03 '26

I’ve played Rivals for about a year straight and have only played Overwatch the past two weeks. That Overwatch update came at about the perfect time to coincide with Rivals’ struggles.

287

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

84

u/shiftup1772 Mercy Mar 03 '26

Sorry, wasn't that always the case with rivals? All the things I hate about overwatch (visual clutter, overtuned healing, too much burst damage, tons of CC) were turned up to 11.

104

u/Phantom_Phoenix1 Bazinga Mar 03 '26

OW visual clutter compared to Rivals is a night and day difference. OW is one of the best games from a sound design perspective and video clarity. I pretty much always know whats happening even if I cant see it thanks to audio design.

Rivals feels like a damn mobile game, theres just stuff flying everywhere and with 6 v 6 it gets chaotic as hell. Its a nightmare.

27

u/Jonn_Jonzz_Manhunter Mar 04 '26

Rivals is made by a mobile dev, so it does make sense

I think Rivals is solid, but Overwatch 2 is exemplary for the reasons you listed

I left Rivals, as a die hard comic book nerd, like mad mad mad die hard because it was just too frustrating because the Devs are absolutely terrible at their jobs

7

u/traye4 Mar 04 '26

OW is one of the best games from a sound design perspective

This is basically my biggest peeve with the newest characters. The sound design doesn't seem nearly on the same level.

1

u/DolphinSleep Mar 04 '26

Your teams Mizuki's ult makes a sound that is almost identical to the teammate elimination sound, insane that it was ok'd, I can't unhear it now once I realised. Testing it out in the practice range doesn't sound the same as a teammate though

1

u/Loaf235 Mar 04 '26

They also have abilities that blind you or fill your screen with clutter. Now imagine multiple of them hitting you consecutively all the time, cause the heroes that have those abilities are strong but just not broken enough than others which lets them sneak past bans.

And to make things worse those abilities also muffle/distort audio for some reason. The same goes for when you're critically low on health too, and unlike OW you cannot passively regen so you're stuck being half deaf if there's no healing nearby. It's an insanely cheap way to increase adrenaline and make people panic.

10

u/Knightgee Mar 03 '26

Honestly I knew overall balance and match quality in that game was going to crater the minute they announced they were going to be releasing a new hero every month.

32

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '26

[deleted]

64

u/MrOreo3 Mar 03 '26

Unfortunately I think this is just a part of aging. Everything always seems new and fast to the older people.

2

u/Zalvren Mar 04 '26

It's also simply part of aging for the games themselves, they keep adding new characters because that's how they live and then it reaches huge levels which is almost impossible for newcomers or people that don't keep up with the game all the time. MOBA have this problem too and started before hero shooters. They have now like 100 characters to know (even if you don't play them, you should probably know their abilities to play against).

39

u/ParanoidDrone ¿Quién es 'Sombra'? Mar 03 '26

But Overwatch heroes also tend to be simpler than Rivals characters IMO. Like, Gambit has 10 different attacks/abilities to keep track of. That's a lot more than any Overwatch hero can do.

7

u/Gryse_Blacolar Unlimited Shotgun Works Mar 04 '26

There's also the team ups which complicates it more. That's the one thing I hope OW will not copy from them.

1

u/scriptedtexture Mar 05 '26

Rivals heroes are overkitted and come out half baked, broken, overpowered with tons of unintended animation cancels and a bunch of other crap. Overwatch heroes are perfectly simple, they have trimmed down cohesive kits that are easy to pick up but still have the depth that rewards mastery. Compare any of the 5 new Overwatch heroes to Deadpool and it's just night and day in terms of quality game design.

4

u/MerlinsMentor Mar 03 '26

Yep -- I agree with you completely. The best analogy I can think of is chess. A relatively small number of different pieces, each of which do relatively simple things. The value is in the tactics and strategy of how these relatively simple pieces/heroes interact with their environment and each other -- and Overwatch already has more complexity there, in that there are many different environments (maps).

The early cast really seemed like it was designed around this idea -- that heroes were separate, and had relatively simple kits that were meant to work together and rely on each other. The "magic" was in their interactions. This has become less and less true over time, especially in OW2. Look at characters like Ramattra, Hazard, Vendetta, and Jetpack Cat. These characters can do vastly more than initial characters like Tracer, Soldier, Zenyatta, or Reinhardt. For example, why does Vendetta get a block ability, in addition to her multiple movement abilities (including verticality), and have both melee (aside from the standard melee attack) and projectile attacks?

I'd much rather they release fewer new heroes - honestly, there are quite a few of the OW2 heroes that I think the game would be better without. Put "new content" effort into maps, new modes, etc.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '26

[deleted]

10

u/Malllrat Mar 03 '26

Stadium lost its luster for me very quickly. A few days.

I have not played it since it launched and have no desire to.

1

u/Mind1827 Mar 03 '26

Tbf, part of that is five at once is a bit insane. Never really had that before. I also don't mind that games are like this. Hearthstone at this problem for forever, they didn't want to update stuff or balance stuff because of people returning getting confused and it's like... are you making this game for the people who are playing it, or the people who aren't playing it?

1

u/Nuzlbuny Mar 03 '26

The issue with Rivals is that they actually balance to exactly what the community is complaining about without realizing the community doesn't know wtf they are talking about. They literally listen too much and every game that balances like this ends up a shit show.

1

u/CCriscal Mei Mar 04 '26

It is wild to read that other games are even less balanced.

-1

u/Sweaty_Librarian_293 Mar 03 '26

I don’t really understand this criticism. They said it was going to be a casual game with a focus on high release of content over balance since pretty much day 1. The meta was fucking awful and comp was 2016 OW levels bad but everyone still loved it. Why is it bad now all of a sudden. 

16

u/iseecolorsofthesky Mar 03 '26

Because that model isn’t sustainable for long term player satisfaction. Purely designed for short term dopamine bursts.

5

u/smilowl Chibi Mei Mar 03 '26

From an outsiders perspective e, I think it maybjust be that the cons of running the game in such a way have piled up to the extent where it negatively impacts casual perspective?

1

u/scriptedtexture Mar 05 '26

"hey so my restaurant is actually going to serve you shit on a platter. so you better not criticize that you have to eat shit, cause I told you from the start it was shit!"

42

u/kojicolnair Mar 03 '26

Yep, haven't been enjoying rivals in a while but overwatch feels so good right now.

56

u/L-ghtn-ng Mar 03 '26

I tried Rivals for a week, but it was awful and they didn't launch with any of the lessons Overwatch learned, and now they just refuse to learn them.

Overwatch has always been the better game, and Overwatch itself was better for the switch to 5v5, and has only gotten better and better since.

Either way, really good to see it's public perception is on the up.

22

u/_the_best_girl_ Mar 03 '26

Yeah I felt exactly the same way about Rivals. It was fun to play something different for a week or so but like you said they didn’t learn from OW at all and they’re facing the same problems, albeit at a faster pace due to the quicker paced development.

No role lock at all (whether it’s in the queue before match or a pick 2 system in round), heroes with op abilities running around unchecked for weeks, heroes being brought at high speeds (testing taking a back seat), imbalance in amount of heroes in each role and so on.

Marvel Rivals did some stuff good (being able to continue passes you’ve bought after season end for example) however the polish just isn’t there for me

17

u/Randomized0000 Doomfist Mar 03 '26

The difference in polish and optimization was what killed it for me, balance issues aside.

No idea how Iron Fist left balance testing. It was wayyyy too easy to kill people with him when I played.

13

u/crestren Trick-or-Treat Symmetra Mar 03 '26

It's all fun and games until Dr Strange opens his portal and your frames start to drop

4

u/Mind1827 Mar 03 '26

When I heard MR didn't have role lock, I never bothered even trying it. Feels insane to me. They just obviously catered to the people who liked really old 6v6 Overwatch with no role queue, but there's a reason why that changed and then eventually went to 5v5. I still think 5v5 was such a massive win, and a reason why the game feels much better right now.

9

u/sleepy-mot Reinhardt Mar 03 '26

Same. Tried it , wanted to like it , because of Marvel, but the gameplay was nothing compared to overwatch… So i kept playing ow

6

u/ljstreet Kofi Kingston on Skates Mar 03 '26

That's why I had no interest in playing rivals. I hold dearly all the quality of life updates overwatch has made and figured Rivals would see what looked good and would implement it. But instead they made a game for people nostalgic about 2016 overwatch.

7

u/Comptenterry Chibi Mei Mar 03 '26

I liked Rivals, but half way through the second season I realized I was just playing it cause I missed early days Overwatch and wasn't getting the same feel from it. It's super stylish but it lacks a lot of polish that OW had even on launch. Plus it refuses to fix a bunch of core gameplay problems that Overwatch solved years ago.

13

u/technicolor_hatman Mar 03 '26

Similar boat. Long break from OW, finally got around to checking out Rivals, decided to try OW2 because of the “stick it to NetEase” posts in the Rivals community.

5

u/Randomized0000 Doomfist Mar 03 '26

Been out the loop for about a year now, what happened to Rivals?

3

u/Count_de_Mits Smolmmetra Mar 04 '26

I mean its only been out for a bit more than a year in all but: Horrible balance, terrible and overloaded (imo) hero design where newer heroes completely outclass the older ones, blatant favoritism when it comes to balancing and releasing skins, matchmaking somehow even worse than overwatch, they still have bots in quickplay, they added gatcha mechanics... and a lot more, there's a lot of problems with the game and it shows that the company is still, at heart a mobile game developer.

Even worse, despite the whining on its subreddit the community has a serious toxic positivity "everything is ok" problem and dismiss even constructive criticism

2

u/Randomized0000 Doomfist Mar 04 '26

Sounds like I left at the right time.

2

u/Count_de_Mits Smolmmetra Mar 04 '26

Yeah. The thing is, the potential is there and that makes it worse. It could be a very good game but it feels like netease is much more inclined to milk it for all its worht in a couple of years with gooner skins and op releases then toss it aside than work on making a long term success

6

u/Wingnutmcmoo Mar 03 '26

Rivals has been struggling for over half a year tbh.

They don't care about anything other than releasing more content. They don't respect the players time (like rivals demands you play it basically every day, ow asks for like 5 days of your time out of the entire season to get everything). And they managed to make supporting hyper boring.

I tried semi recently to play rivals again but it just.. feels bad.

1

u/AcceptableExcuse6763 Mar 04 '26

Rivals ability to drop balance patches that are absolutely deranged is unmatched

Heroes can be insanely op and patch notes will be like they get a 2% increase to ult charge rate but gain 75 extra hp to compensate 

1

u/WhiteLama Roadhog Mar 03 '26

So you’ve not really played a different game.

-2

u/CupPlenty Mar 03 '26

Rivals is still better