Let’s Watch Over The First Year of Overwatch

It’s odd to think that Overwatch has been out for an entire year, as of today. Well, officially out, let’s ignore all that time everyone spent in the various betas leading up to release. I think I alone spent about 100 hours in the game before it’d even come out, odd how things like that work. Regardless, Overwatch is a whole year old today, so it can probably walk and talk by now, I think. How do babies work?

Why is Overwatch turning a year old such a large deal? There have been millions of other games that have turned a year old, many of from the last year. That’s just how time passing works. For most of those games however, they’ve been resigned to be forgotten to history, left to be bundle fillers at any video game retailer. The Division came out last year, do you remember Tom Clancy’s The Division? Of course you don’t. While games like The Division and Uncharted 4 find themselves selling for the low end of £10, or less, Overwatch holds its value to this day and continues to be one of the more heavily bought items, even if there is rarely any stock of it available.

So let’s look at this first year of Overwatch and the trail it left, not like a gross slug trail though, a majestic… COOKIE TRAIL. Yes, cookies. When the game released Overwatch already had a well-established user base, mostly from this prenatal access to the game that seems to be all the rage with Blizzard. Launching with less of a bang than Heroes of the Storm, as there was no awkward and tedious launch event, Overwatch officially launched and all the servers exploded at once. Nerds, me included, played until the small hours of the night trying to be the very best, like no one ever was. The game was well received and everyone loved the game, even me!

With the eventual release of ranked Overwatch went from a delightful romp to an intense stress fueled competition, while it did lead to the normal gameplay being a lot lighter and less elitist, you’d probably be some low level scrub if you were caught playing in Quick Play. The start of ranked was a little shakey, to be honest. Not only was it delayed a bit, but the system had a lot of flaws. The coin flip method of solving ties was the main complaint that most players had, as well as just some fine tuning to the RP and reward system in general. An odd tiered system where it was reported that if you were ranked 50 or more you were in the top echelons of players, despite the ranking system going all the way up to 100.

The Summer Games event also graced Overwatch around the same time. Coinciding with the Rio Olympics, Overwatch released many new sports based skins, emotes, sprays and more. It’s sad to say that the event was met with a less positive attitude than I fear Blizzard expected. The special game mode that went alongside the event felt like an under developed Rocket League, which also suffered from a glitch or hack that allowed a rogue McCree to spawn instead and just kill everyone. The main source of community ire, however, was from the way the event lootboxes worked. The event items could only be acquired through boxes, and any duplicate event skins would go towards your gold coin count, used for purchasing items yourself. The main issue here was that event skins couldn’t be bought and any duplicate event items were ultimately worthless for the event. It all began to stink like Blizzard just wanted everyone to spend money on loot boxes.

As the event came to a close the second season of Overwatch came around. All the major upsets from the first season were gone, for the most part. In the unlikely event of a tie, you’re no longer rewarded with a waste of time, the sudden death system was reworked to work a lot better and no longer punishes fast winners with a coin flip of fate. Everything was coming up Milhouse, one might say. Confidence in the game began to rise once again as it became an increasingly stable and strong experience, they even released a new character, Ana, who managed to merge into the game seemlessly. This was further cemented with Halloween.

Overwatch’s second attempt at a seasonal event and boy did they go all out. Opting for a hoard mode defend-the-point style event, it became an incredibly fun event and, with increasing difficulties, quite a challenge if you were looking for it. The skins and relevant items that all came out felt somehow better and more well designed than the summer games ones and you could buy the skins if you had the gold built up, they were at 3x the price of normal items, but duplicates no longer felt like wasted money or time. All was well in Overwatch.

Since then it’s gone on to have more competitive seasons, continuing the stable gameplay that they settled on in season 2, and have had three more major events. Christmas, naturally, in the winter with cute festive skins and sprays for everyone, as well as the introduction of the Arcade, for those who wanted to play the game but with a few extra quirky modifiers. Sombra was finally released after a long and rather disappointing ARG, as well.

Chinese New Year saw Mei take center stage with new seasonal game modes and skins. Overwatch even went on to win numerous awards, such as Best Multiplayer at the Gaming Baftas, as well as other nominations, as well as even being one of my own games of the year, although I doubt that had any major impact on continuing to cement it in the gaming world like the other awards the game has won.

Most recently saw the release of the Uprising Event, the closest Overwatch has ever been to having any form of playable backstory. Players got to experience Tracer’s first mission with the Overwatch organization as you blasted through the streets of London as robots run riot, and it proved to be quite difficult, although a fan favorite.

Then finally we have today, well, yesterday! Overwatch’s one year anniversary! A simple party event that doesn’t exactly have any overall theme, outside of sweet dance moves, and not even any notable themed gameplay mode, however, instead, it was a wonderful time to reflect back on the year, as I have just done here, as Blizzard and Overwatch released a wonderful summary video that thanked the community for their support. The wonderful thing in all this was the inclusion of many, MANY pieces of art, animation and cosplay done by the community. It didn’t include the vast quantities of Overwatch based pornography, but that’s somewhat understandable. Instead Overwatch continues to show that it’s a game that’s based around its community. There’s a tremendous amount of communication between the player base and the developers and it shows with each new lot of patch notes. The ranking system wouldn’t have been changed so dramatically if it weren’t for the community having so much feedback, the same goes for the events and how they proceed.

That’s why it feels like such a big deal with the first birthday of Overwatch, it’s not only an outstanding game, but its strong connections to its community are what have made it such a favorite of the gaming community. Overwatch gets involved with its fans and I feel that they just want to show that. So here’s to you, Overwatch, you’re a good game.