Overwatch 2 Expert Pro Tips

Overwatch was the game I played constantly at university, overwatch2Fans.com and playing around with its existing roster while delving into each new hero was a big part of its appeal. My flatmates and I would fall in love with specific roles, or gravitate towards certain heroes because their aesthetic called out to us. I’m a filthy weeb and also very gay, so my mains ended up being D.Va, Mercy, and Lucio, with venturing into DPS territory rarely.

To me, this doesn’t feel like a reward for players who decide against spending any money, but a forced incentive to cough up the dough or get lost. Why wouldn’t you pick up the battle pass if it meant a new hero immediately and a selection of other rewards for the time you’re going to be investing anyway? Blizzard likely sees this as good business, but I really hope this isn’t how each season is going to play out, with new heroes being held hostage by the premium side of things instead of providing a way for us to test them out or toy with the wider roster without restriction. Only time will tell, and Overwatch 2 still needs to find its feet.


Hello, welcome. You’ve fallen into my trap. I will now spend the next 500+ words defending Overwatch’s much-maligned medal system. While I agree with the consensus that Overwatch 2’s scoreboard is better, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Most notably, there’s no longer a post-match screen that reveals your overall performance. I earned those gold medals Blizzard, why won’t you give them to


I loved seeing three or four gold medals pop up at the end of a particularly good match. It was the perfect cap on a great experience. Sometimes when my team played well, we’d sit on the medal screen for a minute or two talking about the high points of the match and bragging about our medals. I took a screenshot of my last Overwatch game before the servers shut down where I earned three gold medals and three career bests. In Overwatch 2, matches just sort of end. There’s no fanfare, no time to reflect on how well you did. You can’t even see the scoreboard anymore once the game is over. I’m glad we have a real scoreboard, but we didn’t have to give up the medal completely, did


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


Despite my praise for the designs, Overwatch is not a game with in-depth characters - it’s all skin deep. Any attempt to flesh them out usually comes through fine print in the lore, promo reels, or external material like comic books. I understand why fans want these great designs to be built upon further, and I appreciate that a hero shooter all about utilising powers and fast PvP play is not the ideal genre for deep, interconnected stories. Overwatch has two queer characters, which is more than most triple-A games, but it’s hard to give it too much credit when their queerness has been so completely downplayed. It’s often lauded for its diversity - it even once had a GLAAD nomination - but that fact is its two queer characters are white, cis, and straight passing, while there are more playable animals and playable robots than there are playable Black women. That’s not too much of a stretch though, given that there are zero Black women in Overwatch’s heaving roster right now - Sojourn will join in Overwatch 2, but that feels too late for a game with playable 32 charact

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.

On the surface, the game is making all the right decisions. Both versions of the battle pass are packed with skins, sprays, charms, and a variety of content that outweighs anything its predecessor had in its first few months. Seasonal events are established, and an existing roster of heroes we’ve already fallen in love with have a generous roster of cosmetics and lore to build upon. I’m already invested, and for Blizzard that is half the battle right now.

Overwatch 2 being a free-to-play live-service is the right call. Since the original game launched in 2016, we’ve seen games like Fortnite , Apex Legends , Destiny 2 , Genshin Impact , Warframe , and myriad others emerge and redefine what it means to progress in a multiplayer landscape. Battle passes are a thing now, while the loot boxes that Blizzard once helped bring into the mainstream are frowned upon outside the freemium mobile space.