I mean granted, there's good reason why it's hard to make a video with this take. How much of this video has blizzard stopped doing since Overwatch was in it's first few years? They fired the cinematics team, and any advancement to the game's story & lore has been a couple minutes' worth of content in the last several years.
Really appreciate a content piece that feels it did due diligence, instead of playing towards community resentment, rose-tinted glasses, or entirely disregarding how influential the game was at first.
Super excited for this channel. TL production quality still unmathced. I am someone for whom this game has been a extremely formative factor for a large chunk of my life. So this was more of a trip down memory lane than new info but what a trip. I can't beleive how many easter eggs you crammed into 45 minutes. This will also be very helpful and thorough reference when I try to convince people OW's cultural influence was much more than the content they've come across from source film maker. (also, I would like those full length interviews ✋🏽)
My parents wouldn't let me buy video games because back then the mentality of "games are only for boys" was still huge. However, I had a younger brother who WAS allowed to buy games and he would often ask me to play with him or watch him play - and that's how I ended up growing up with stuff like CS1.6, MW2, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2; basically whatever he had, I had. Games simply didn't HAVE female characters in them, and if there was one it was often *literally* just one. (I will always love you, Elissa Steamer...) I don't think people realize how UNHEARD OF it was for an online multiplayer game without character creator to have more than one female characters in them, let alone an equal ratio. Nowadays it's completely normal for games of all genres to have a colorful cast of diverse characters of all kinds of sizes/nationalities/personalities to choose from, but back in my day I could pick between TWO female characters in Mortal Kombat 4 and having a choice was mindblowing! As for my Overwatch story... I had plenty of experience in FPS genre, but funnily enough nowadays it's the only shooter I still play. Now that I'm an adult and I can choose my own games, turns out I'm more of an indie platformer, combat metroidvania kind of gal. Very different from my brother's tastes. Overwatch made me fall in love with optimism and colors, and helped kick off my craving for more games that didn't look brown and military. Kind of funny how dead opposite that is from your average "Overwatch was my first shooter". I think you might be underselling just how phenomenal OW's character design is. Overwatch wasn't the first game with what I would consider "colorful cast of characters" but every single one of them is incredibly iconic and easily holds up nine years later, and the new ones still fit in easily. People really underestimate how much does good character design matter in any media, games included. Sometimes I wonder whether Marvel Rivals would be so successful if their designs weren't taken from a gigafranchise that offers some of the most iconic character designs in the *world*. In a sidenote, incredible video! Hope you guys are proud of yourselves, that must've been a ton of effort to make!
Agree with everything, but trust me marvel rivals is NOT successful because of that. Trust me, I’ve played WAY too many failed marvel games that failed miserably because they were so bad.
Wowowow this video was awesome. I joined the OW wave at the end of OW1 and the beginning of OW2 and its videos like these that help me understand why there’s so much hate against the game now. I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot but just like this deep dive communicates; Overwatch was a titan of a game, its impressions on the gaming industry reset the standard and in many ways, are the standard still. OW now has the opportunity to standback, take notes and recondition itself, rework its gameplay, redesign its structure especially since it’s mellowed out and equalized somewhat within the last year. I think one of the best things about this video is that it doesn’t pass judgement on the players who still play OW, nor does it high-five anyone who left. It’s a very well thought out, very analytical viewpoint of everyone involved from players to workers at Blizzard and it gives everyone hope that a game almost ten years into its life is still around because of how much it changed the world as far as gaming went, and everyone can learn from that.
incredible video with such interesting interview clips and comprehensive overview of different facets of overwatchs phenomenon!!! i really loved the level of detail and research - and especially loved the interviews of various streamers and developers to hear how other game developers had reacted to overwatchs success. to this day, i feel like its such a common thing to hear "overwatch was my first fps game" and id never heard it articulated so well before why thats the case. looking forward to future videos!!
2016 - 2018 Overwatch will forever be that moment where I am grateful to experience it. It is sad to see the game's downfall over the course of years due to mismanagement. But back then, it revitalize the hero genre and inspired games like Valorant, Apex legend to implement there's but also kept their genre of being tactical shooter, battle royal. With Marvel Rival coming out, it revitalize the feeling of 2016 - 2018 Overwatch which made me enjoy the game more. It made me wish Overwatch 2 was like that but it instead became a husk of a game that it once was. Nevertheless, there will never be another game that became so big and was phenomenal that Overwatch was when it launch in 2016. Not even Marvel Rivals.
this is an incredible video. i love the depth to it, credit given to its history as well as the games that came before it. and the interviews were really good too! i love the commentary from industry folk as well as pro players. i think it's as unbiased a video as i've seen so far :) i'll be keeping an eye on this channel to see what else you've got!
Finally a positive video about Overwatch in 2025. Mostly it's an "overwatch is dead" title yet being that persons most viewed video. Great video btw :)
I grew up with Overwatch as well, I was 15 when my dad brought me to GameStop to pick up the preorder edition of the game. Now I'm 24 and it's the first game I boot up when I come home from work. It was my first FPS and really my first keyboard and mouse game and it has introduced me to a whole different world of gaming.
Knowing you guys reached out to bald egg, a Reina main and former cloud9 content creator for London spitfire shows me Bonnie and the team liquid have truly lived through the era of Overwatch Esports, past and present ❤ now how about Team Liquid's future in Overwatch?
@@Kitozanosaying overwatch copied other games is funny when tf2 is nothing like overwatch. even in overwatch 1. the drop from 12v12 to 6v6 meant that overwatch 1 was always a more focused and condensed game than tf2. adding more tanks than heavy, more supports than medic. then later hero limits, than combined offense/defense, then role queue… etc but that moment was decided when they moved away from 12v12 tf2 is a deathmatch surronding an objective overwatch is an objective surrounding a deathmatch
@@awesomeististiism oh so the number of players suddenly change the type of game it was? Like how dumb are you? Does OW have similar game modes? Maybe play tf2 before talking outta your behind
Fantastic video! It's rare to see such a nuanced, compassionate, and curious take. It really is hard to appreciate how earth shattering OW's release was if you weren't there and this video does such a good job of conveying it. I played in the beta and you just knew it was going be enormous - one of my professors in grad school even played which was just nuts to me. It was one of the first times outside of MMOs where i developed a robust, intersectional and intergenerational community. It was amazing. Thanks for the great video essay!
Overwatch's been a part of my life but not the same way as everyone, when it came out I was young with against video game parents, so for years all I could do was watch the cinematics on my mom's computer and I was loving this so much, felt so attached to this world and characters. When I've finally been able to play the game it was already on it's way down (not long before ow2 was anouced and updates stopped), so even if I had a great time on it the lack of new content made me quit. However I returned when ow2 came out and of course the disapointement was huge but the game was still really fun, to be honest it was even funnier than when I played it for the first time, and I played it A LOT. The lack of cinematic and lore make me sad but the worst is internet, people dropped the game (for very legit reasons don't get me wrong) so they don't even realize (or prehaps it's just me), the game itself is fun, really ! It's not new and unique anymore but it's still a great game.
I played this game due to Bastion thanks to a friend and the fact I used to play Plants vs Zombies Garden warfare 1 and 2 alot back then and this game plays similar to it. My skills were transferred over and went through successfully
Seeing OG London Spitfire 😊 Seeing THAT London Spitfire game 😢 I still play and love this game but GOATs killed my interest in OWL, other esports also seemed to handle covid better in the following seasons. I will always have great memories of OWL season 1, my first esport ❤ Great video!
This was honestly the best video I have seen on this topic. I hope overwatch gets reignited someday. How this game was mismanaged was a travesty because they had potential to be the next Disney.
OH WOW THE QUAKE ARENA INSPIRATION MAKES SUDDENLY SO MUCH SENSE!!!! So when I turned 18 (Im 23) my best friend that is around his mid 30s nowadays, took me to my first LAN ever that was organized in a schoolgym with hundreds of participants. I grew up as the little annoying sister of two teenagers, so my sisters are also in their mid to late 30s and so I grew up with a bunch of millennial media and retro games. While some people had a wii already I still played with my ps2 and N64 religiously because my mom wouldn’t bother investing in new consoles if we still had some totally functional ones! I also remember watching my sister as a kid playing quake alot with a dumb bunny mod, so I always asked her to play with the bunnies again😂 So yeah, I already had my infatuation with oldschool games so when the Lan came up i was so stoked, they organized a small little Quake Arena3 tournament with the tournament mod and prior to that day I havent ever played Quake by myself before! Instead I played Overwatch pretty religiously, wasn’t insane or anything I think gold-plat rank in competive to that time, but I really quickly got the hang out of the game especially of how familiar it all felt. The weaponplay, the movement, how the weapons respond. It honestly just felt like 1v1s you would have on maps like Hollywood in Ow when it’s turned into deatmatch-mode. Or Petra tbf. They all feel in retrospective really quake arena inspired. So I basically started maining the rocketlauncher because it reminded me of phara strongly which i mained at the time (the rocketlauncher pretty much behaves the same way which is extremely surprising!) and I got myself the third place in the entire tournament:D I competed against people twice my age that played the game when i was still shitting in my diapers and absolutely wiped the floor with them and they took it extremely chill, one of them even played bit ow themselves and asked excitedly what I mained, a really cute moment i fondly remember. All by just learning the game that weekend :D So yeah I was suprised how easy it was for me to get into the game and with the background of Ow being also highly inspired by quake (which i actually didn’t know till now) it all makes sooooo much sense! Especially when you compare Ow to similar games that just don’t quite scratch the same itch for me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on it why. Now it all brings it together and makes much more sense why. I think quake just had found an incredible recipe of how to make fps shooters incredibly fun and not alot of games copy from that recipe anymore sadly.
Blizzard struck gold with OW, but it's crazy how badly they ended up handling the franchise. I miss the excitement and optimism, when their cinematics had set the bar in quality and we get to see more of the world and story be expanded. Now, all they seem to care about now are their collab skins.
After all these years. Even with it's flaws, bad decisions etc... There's still no other shooter that feel so alive, true to it's design and refined as Ow. Mobility, aiming customization, quick gameplay, character kits, dynamic maps. It's got everything. Not talking as an Ow fanboy, as a Shooter gamer, it does feature A LOT more good stuff than bad. "Cringe" and irrational hate will deprive many from still getting to experience the outcome of learning from it's mistakes. Such biased hateful angry people you've become to prefer Rivals wich is just a party game. Play what you deserve.
Wtf are you talking about, Marvel Rivals is miles better than Overwatch in regards to things you mentioned. Marvel Tivals is already on pace to be the best game ever released
I hope that Overwatch finds it way back... I didn't like when Overwatch 2 launched, so i gave it a bit more time to evolve. Man i wished i played Overwatch 1
Great video! IMO OW was lightning in a bottle... those first two and a half years were magical. OW was the first time I played an online PVP game of any kind... everything was just so bright and colorful with wonderful characters... after a free trial weekend I jumped in... I just didn't want to miss out on what felt like something that could be very special... and for a brief moment it time... it was.
I haven't played it *quite* that much, but I did play day 1, constantly for a few years, and probably more days than not for the last few years I don't think a lot of people understand how good it *still* is. Granted, I've been on Rivals mostly, since it came out.
This video is a banger! I have been playing overwatch for a long time at this point and this video feels very accurate. I love the research that went into and the fact that it doesn't just feed into the doomer outlook while still recognizing the flaws and mistakes that happened in the history of the game. Very excited to see more videos on this channel whether they are on overwatch or not!
I prefer server based match making. It is so much better for building communities, and in a lot of cases, u end up familiar with the regular players and their play style and they also get used to you so it feels more like a community, and it's much more fun to play against or with people you're familiar with than complete strangers It is also good for moderation because those servers have their own moderation teams and if someone says weird stuff they get nuked
U know im cooked when im watching the goats clip, on the edge of my seat knowing full well that one mistake from one of those players means a teamwhipe whwn the other team pressed q haha
It's funny looking back at the goats meta now. A lot of people, myself included, look back on it quite fondly due to the team play aspect it encouraged. I would argue that the double shield meta that came after was worse for the game as it went for much longer and had neither team play nor satisfying game play.
Not bad of an essay I feel like there wasn't enough info about how Loot Boxes became illegal and that altered all of Blizzards monetization across all it's games. The search for ways to bring back the massive amount of profit that loot boxes made is a big part of Overwatch's downfall. So along with free to play becoming more popular their main monetization, player retention, and progression systems had to replaced. Then on top of all that, their rush to make their games into e-sports also lead to so many bad updates in the chase to keep the game "competitive" instead of just keeping it fun to play, so all their failures were being broadcast by themselves. Even casual players couldn't avoid seeing the downfall happen. Broken metas, Jeff Kaplan leaving, failed promises and rolling back bad ideas where brought back up by fans in every developer update or e-sports tournament. Sure Blizzard made a lot of missteps but it's largely because they were forced to alter the entire skeleton of the game while it was live and losing lots of money. In that condition most companies and games would end up making the same short sighted decisions as Blizzard.
I absolutely loved and hated OW over the years, OW2 was such a slap in the face, 5v5 is bad, the game feels awful and just so unrewarding, a VICTORY with 42 kills and 0 death means nothing and is just a meh gg, a DEFEAT when you're top heals as Ana with more dps than your damage too, it is absolutely depressing. Sadly as a daily player for years, I've left the game for good with the arrival of Marvels, its a shame and I do actually feel sorry for OW but they did it to themselves and screwed every player over with their greed, bad decision making and toxic culture, RIP Overwatch, you were once great and game of the year, now you're the lowest rated game in history on Steam
great video. nowadays its hard to find content that is fair with overwatch whithout being overly critical or ignoring overwatch's big mistakes. Overwatch is very very far from dying. But when the time comes in a few decades, i hope the game legacy can be preserved by documentarys with such a fair view
Only kinda agree about overwatch not dying, only because blizzard as a franchise is dying... ALL of their IPS are scammy cash grabs... POE2 dethroned Diablo, FFXIV dethroned WoW... rivals is currently taking the throne from OW...
I would have agreed with you a month ago but by seeing the success of rivals, the things it brings it on the table that Overwatch better said blizzard failed on delivering, Im not sure I can agree with you anymore as someone who raked up around over 4k hours on that game since 2018. I played it religiously every day till a month ago and tbf even when the IP went strong, the dev team tried to listen to players feedback, there is still that decaying state it’s in for the last couple of years. You notice the drop of quality alot, lack of genuine good content that doesn’t feel like filler. All the “improvements” the devs are trying to make to the game are just slow fixes to the destruction they caused themselves that no one asked for. It’s insane how they now after ignoring the fanbase for two years now finally listened to players demand of returning 6v6 and advertise it like they announced the return of the messiah’s , instead of just fixing the game slowly back to its original state. Not improving it but fixing it. Something that we had 5 years ago. So yeah from a critical viewpoint of the game itself and the gameplay the game is absolutely dying, the IP itself not so much, it’s right now more in its life-support stage. The fandom on the other hand is absolutely in shambles, it can’t even compare to it’s hype stage of 2018 which was the peak of the Overwatch fandom culture. And especially with the story of Overwatch being silently shadowdropped in from of boring sidestory novels or comics instead of the pvp mode, the planned netflix show or even cinematics anymore. It feels like the game desperately tries to clutch to it’s last straws, trying to somehow maintain the fans that came from all different niches in an halfassed way. I think they just lack recourses and direction at this point and for me in a spiritual sense, the game was already dying for the last 2 years. Not in the means of the game is literally dying and losing playercount and relevance but more in the sense it’s dying as the game it was once used to be. Now Im not sure if it might die player wise as well, afterall according to steamdb ow is in its lowest olayercount state it has ever been in and tbf in all those years I haven’t even felt like touching the game once and it has been a month now. I hope blizzard wakes the fuck up now and starts competing because if they don’t they might be dead soon, especially after XQC’s accidental pve leak for rivals. They are about to deliver what Overwatch has failed in and if they don’t want to lose the loyalty of their playerbase now they should start waking up and start to cook, cuz if they keep operating in that same demented and senile speed they might be the ones being cooked once and for all.
I’m sure this piece took a long time to write and produce - and the production value speaks for itself! But it did feel incomplete without some detailed overlook of Marvel Rivals, and how it seems to have come the closest to capturing that 2016-2018 Overwatch feel Like, obviously it’s a new game, and when you wrote this video (six months to a year ago?) there was no way to know if it would be a success or another flop. Overwatch killed *so* many hero shooters in its wake, only for Rivals to be in the right place at the right time. But when thinking about your thesis over this video, about what made Overwatch special and influential, and especially that “everyone from every community playing this game right now” feeling - I really thought I would never get that again until Marvel Rivals launched. Especially with the hero drought from Overwatch - getting FIVE new heroes for Season 0 from the beta, and then four more for Season 1? That’s insane to me. It genuinely seems to be built as a live service, unlike Overwatch 2 at launch. Hero bans for comp to address for balance? GOATS would have never been as devastating as it was if Jeff had been pro-hero bans. It just seems like Marvel Rivals is the logical endpoint to your thesis, but again - would have resulted in a lot of last minute rewrites, and it’s so fresh it’s hard to know how it would shape up. Just thought I’d leave a comment about it!
This wasnt as much as popular compared to cs and league in our country and that really upset me so much cus not even computer cafe/shops had the game 😭
You literally forgot quake arena and unreal tournament🥲 which had more relevance in fps competitive shooters then Half Life in a long mile (not saying for fps in general but in specifically the competitive fps scene)
i was there in 2016. marvel rivals today gives me the same feeling. solid game. happy times. ow isn't cringe but it's devs and general management surely very bad. i dont think corpo environment of microsoft helps either. it's kind of a discarded game they left some incompetent folks to manage and milk some money out of. unfortunate. i think the game is doomed forever. even a tv show can't revitalize it because i'm sure it will not be done in a proper way. the soul of the game gets lost in business world. the game has no owner, in a bad way. it's sad. maybe the game has too much democracy. it lacks auteur's touch, vision of mastermind. maybe it's too focused on how to best monetize the game rather than how to make a genuinely good game.
Great video. I think you should've put a greater emphasis on how Blizzard's sexual harassment lawsuit and the immense negative press and public scrutiny impacted development. That plus COVID definitely messed up OW2's development, delaying it a lot and limiting the scope of PvE. Plus, something you didn't cover (and I think you would've if you read Schreier's book), Kaplan always wanted OW to be primarily a PvE game. Hence his influence as game director insisted on pushing the sequel towards PvE, I think in an attempt to eat into Destiny's player base. But combining PvE with PvP when the latter is already development intensive, is perhaps not possible for a game with a relatively smaller player pool compared to Fortnite. You could've also mentioned OW's failure to capitalise on its rich lore and world, in a way that Riot did with Arcane. The cinematics, while amazing, are few and far between, and the fans have been clamouring for a TV series or movie that Blizzard either chooses to ignore or refuses to engage with due to a lack of resources. OW has been a pinata for bad press for the past few years. It's a good decision they took by abandoning PvE and focusing on PvP, but it really feels like the team needs to come up with the next big thing in order to face Rivals, otherwise OW might just end up being a thing of the past.
The pandemic also completely wrecked the esport. 2020 was meant to be the year where the very corpo hands-on franchise league would scale to its full potential with dozens of localized LAN tournaments per season. The awesome casters and producers made it work as best they could and 3 more years of Overwatch League were played, but the original aspirations were pretty dead after that.
the way you talked about the pve really makes sense, it wouldn't really fit in the game these days, i love the lore of overwatch but a lot of people playing don't really care cuz they are just casual gamers! it would be like the story missions currently in game. played once and forgotten. even though it would be a far better experience...
This should never be an e-sport game, is too chaotic, constantly changin meta is so annoying, all this MOBA mechanics are for me actually completly breaking FPS rules, that is more about spaming "skills" than using yourown arsenal to the best way. Games like Quake,Unreal,Halo, they are one of the best High Copetitive Game, simple to Understand, but hard to Master. Even TF2 is a much better option of an Copetitive, only 9 classes, and nothink more, there is no any changing meta, the entire game is 100% Gungame, no barriers, stuns, teleportations, or ultimates, Hilander I think is the best, both teams having all 9 classes, using all their capeabillities.
Overwatch is still way better than any shooter game out there for me. Nothing scratches the competitive shooter itch for me like it does. Marvel Rivals is so bad imo.
@ no I want to hear straight from those who tries to minimize what went wrong to OW. It would be better if Blizzard made an apology video of how they failed their customers lol
4:32 People always forget PvZ Garden Warfare's games were almost certainly an influence too. There are a lot of parallels in classes to OW in that game, many similar design principles that arent from tf2 but are in OW and the PvZ:GW games, and it was another hero shooter that predates it along with tf2. That series sold VERY well too and people still play it, like it still has players on the second game. Its weird everyone just sorta forgets about it.
I love an overwatch video in 2025 that it is just not trash talking the game.
We get it omg
It’s the new meta, “game is dead or trash or woke, give me 1000 likes and 1000 views.”
I mean granted, there's good reason why it's hard to make a video with this take. How much of this video has blizzard stopped doing since Overwatch was in it's first few years? They fired the cinematics team, and any advancement to the game's story & lore has been a couple minutes' worth of content in the last several years.
i mean the game is getting rekt so, they aren't lying
this doesn't change how bad is now.
Really appreciate a content piece that feels it did due diligence, instead of playing towards community resentment, rose-tinted glasses, or entirely disregarding how influential the game was at first.
With all due respect to how it was at first. It is garbage now.
@iyammatt well yes but actually no
@@Bluemansonic let it go ow2 is failed game
Super excited for this channel. TL production quality still unmathced. I am someone for whom this game has been a extremely formative factor for a large chunk of my life. So this was more of a trip down memory lane than new info but what a trip. I can't beleive how many easter eggs you crammed into 45 minutes.
This will also be very helpful and thorough reference when I try to convince people OW's cultural influence was much more than the content they've come across from source film maker.
(also, I would like those full length interviews ✋🏽)
What an incredible video. If you keep up this quality for future videos this channel will go far and wide. Well done to everyone who made this video.
My parents wouldn't let me buy video games because back then the mentality of "games are only for boys" was still huge. However, I had a younger brother who WAS allowed to buy games and he would often ask me to play with him or watch him play - and that's how I ended up growing up with stuff like CS1.6, MW2, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2; basically whatever he had, I had. Games simply didn't HAVE female characters in them, and if there was one it was often *literally* just one. (I will always love you, Elissa Steamer...) I don't think people realize how UNHEARD OF it was for an online multiplayer game without character creator to have more than one female characters in them, let alone an equal ratio. Nowadays it's completely normal for games of all genres to have a colorful cast of diverse characters of all kinds of sizes/nationalities/personalities to choose from, but back in my day I could pick between TWO female characters in Mortal Kombat 4 and having a choice was mindblowing!
As for my Overwatch story... I had plenty of experience in FPS genre, but funnily enough nowadays it's the only shooter I still play. Now that I'm an adult and I can choose my own games, turns out I'm more of an indie platformer, combat metroidvania kind of gal. Very different from my brother's tastes. Overwatch made me fall in love with optimism and colors, and helped kick off my craving for more games that didn't look brown and military. Kind of funny how dead opposite that is from your average "Overwatch was my first shooter".
I think you might be underselling just how phenomenal OW's character design is. Overwatch wasn't the first game with what I would consider "colorful cast of characters" but every single one of them is incredibly iconic and easily holds up nine years later, and the new ones still fit in easily. People really underestimate how much does good character design matter in any media, games included. Sometimes I wonder whether Marvel Rivals would be so successful if their designs weren't taken from a gigafranchise that offers some of the most iconic character designs in the *world*.
In a sidenote, incredible video! Hope you guys are proud of yourselves, that must've been a ton of effort to make!
Real af.
Agree with everything, but trust me marvel rivals is NOT successful because of that. Trust me, I’ve played WAY too many failed marvel games that failed miserably because they were so bad.
The slight fade in of DJ Khaled felt like a jump scare
FUCK WHY DID I HAVE TO READ THE COMMENTS I SPOILED MYSELF OF THIS
Unfun fact: the casters originally wanted to get Khalid and it somehow got lost in the game of secret telephone of trying to organize such an event
Wowowow this video was awesome. I joined the OW wave at the end of OW1 and the beginning of OW2 and its videos like these that help me understand why there’s so much hate against the game now. I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot but just like this deep dive communicates; Overwatch was a titan of a game, its impressions on the gaming industry reset the standard and in many ways, are the standard still. OW now has the opportunity to standback, take notes and recondition itself, rework its gameplay, redesign its structure especially since it’s mellowed out and equalized somewhat within the last year.
I think one of the best things about this video is that it doesn’t pass judgement on the players who still play OW, nor does it high-five anyone who left. It’s a very well thought out, very analytical viewpoint of everyone involved from players to workers at Blizzard and it gives everyone hope that a game almost ten years into its life is still around because of how much it changed the world as far as gaming went, and everyone can learn from that.
incredible video with such interesting interview clips and comprehensive overview of different facets of overwatchs phenomenon!!! i really loved the level of detail and research - and especially loved the interviews of various streamers and developers to hear how other game developers had reacted to overwatchs success. to this day, i feel like its such a common thing to hear "overwatch was my first fps game" and id never heard it articulated so well before why thats the case. looking forward to future videos!!
2016 - 2018 Overwatch will forever be that moment where I am grateful to experience it. It is sad to see the game's downfall over the course of years due to mismanagement. But back then, it revitalize the hero genre and inspired games like Valorant, Apex legend to implement there's but also kept their genre of being tactical shooter, battle royal.
With Marvel Rival coming out, it revitalize the feeling of 2016 - 2018 Overwatch which made me enjoy the game more. It made me wish Overwatch 2 was like that but it instead became a husk of a game that it once was.
Nevertheless, there will never be another game that became so big and was phenomenal that Overwatch was when it launch in 2016. Not even Marvel Rivals.
I think overwatch is still good. Overwatch 2 is the same game as Overwatch 1.
Game of the Year ❤🥲
Overwatch 2....😒
Top quality channel & video!! Great commentating took this up a notch too (I may be biased though)
this is an incredible video. i love the depth to it, credit given to its history as well as the games that came before it. and the interviews were really good too! i love the commentary from industry folk as well as pro players. i think it's as unbiased a video as i've seen so far :) i'll be keeping an eye on this channel to see what else you've got!
Finally a positive video about Overwatch in 2025. Mostly it's an "overwatch is dead" title yet being that persons most viewed video. Great video btw :)
The positive is about overwatch 1 the OG but the down fall of overwatch is overwatch 2
last line hits mega hard, crazy to think that even now whenever a new hero shooter-esque game comes out the first comparison is ALWAYS overwatch
I grew up with Overwatch as well, I was 15 when my dad brought me to GameStop to pick up the preorder edition of the game. Now I'm 24 and it's the first game I boot up when I come home from work. It was my first FPS and really my first keyboard and mouse game and it has introduced me to a whole different world of gaming.
Wrestle. With - JEFF - Prepare. For. DEATH
THEYY USED THE ASPEN AD
Lmao
Knowing you guys reached out to bald egg, a Reina main and former cloud9 content creator for London spitfire shows me Bonnie and the team liquid have truly lived through the era of Overwatch Esports, past and present ❤ now how about Team Liquid's future in Overwatch?
Overwatch really was the blueprint
No it wasn’t lol. Why did it copy other games if it was the blueprint?
@@Kitozanosaying overwatch copied other games is funny when tf2 is nothing like overwatch. even in overwatch 1. the drop from 12v12 to 6v6 meant that overwatch 1 was always a more focused and condensed game than tf2. adding more tanks than heavy, more supports than medic. then later hero limits, than combined offense/defense, then role queue… etc
but that moment was decided when they moved away from 12v12
tf2 is a deathmatch surronding an objective
overwatch is an objective surrounding a deathmatch
@@awesomeististiism oh so the number of players suddenly change the type of game it was? Like how dumb are you? Does OW have similar game modes? Maybe play tf2 before talking outta your behind
@@KitozanoI don't get it. Overwatch and TF2 were both integral to (hero) shooters.
tf2 was the blueprint....
This was an amazing video, super well written and a very fun watch!
Fantastic video! It's rare to see such a nuanced, compassionate, and curious take. It really is hard to appreciate how earth shattering OW's release was if you weren't there and this video does such a good job of conveying it. I played in the beta and you just knew it was going be enormous - one of my professors in grad school even played which was just nuts to me. It was one of the first times outside of MMOs where i developed a robust, intersectional and intergenerational community. It was amazing. Thanks for the great video essay!
Overwatch's been a part of my life but not the same way as everyone, when it came out I was young with against video game parents, so for years all I could do was watch the cinematics on my mom's computer and I was loving this so much, felt so attached to this world and characters.
When I've finally been able to play the game it was already on it's way down (not long before ow2 was anouced and updates stopped), so even if I had a great time on it the lack of new content made me quit.
However I returned when ow2 came out and of course the disapointement was huge but the game was still really fun, to be honest it was even funnier than when I played it for the first time, and I played it A LOT.
The lack of cinematic and lore make me sad but the worst is internet, people dropped the game (for very legit reasons don't get me wrong) so they don't even realize (or prehaps it's just me), the game itself is fun, really ! It's not new and unique anymore but it's still a great game.
the production quality is SO good for someone with only 200 subs, oh my god
this is everything.
wdym
11:29 shoutout to PMAJellies for the aim trainer workshop mode, literally fixing the practice range the devs were refusing to update
I still play overwatch whenever I have the time. No other game can take me away from a game like this.
I played this game due to Bastion thanks to a friend and the fact I used to play Plants vs Zombies Garden warfare 1 and 2 alot back then and this game plays similar to it. My skills were transferred over and went through successfully
@@xlbthedemigod5662 i played bastion in the beta he was legit busted😂 i quit the game in like 2020 tho
As a kid in 2016 I had such an amazing experience playing Overwatch. Marvel Rivals today kinda revives that feeling I've never had for so many years.
Seeing OG London Spitfire 😊
Seeing THAT London Spitfire game 😢
I still play and love this game but GOATs killed my interest in OWL, other esports also seemed to handle covid better in the following seasons. I will always have great memories of OWL season 1, my first esport ❤ Great video!
This was honestly the best video I have seen on this topic. I hope overwatch gets reignited someday. How this game was mismanaged was a travesty because they had potential to be the next Disney.
I hope seeing marvel rivals success will push them to invest more into it, because foundationally ow is the better game imo.
@@Dras7 agreed
OH WOW THE QUAKE ARENA INSPIRATION MAKES SUDDENLY SO MUCH SENSE!!!! So when I turned 18 (Im 23) my best friend that is around his mid 30s nowadays, took me to my first LAN ever that was organized in a schoolgym with hundreds of participants. I grew up as the little annoying sister of two teenagers, so my sisters are also in their mid to late 30s and so I grew up with a bunch of millennial media and retro games. While some people had a wii already I still played with my ps2 and N64 religiously because my mom wouldn’t bother investing in new consoles if we still had some totally functional ones! I also remember watching my sister as a kid playing quake alot with a dumb bunny mod, so I always asked her to play with the bunnies again😂 So yeah, I already had my infatuation with oldschool games so when the Lan came up i was so stoked, they organized a small little Quake Arena3 tournament with the tournament mod and prior to that day I havent ever played Quake by myself before! Instead I played Overwatch pretty religiously, wasn’t insane or anything I think gold-plat rank in competive to that time, but I really quickly got the hang out of the game especially of how familiar it all felt. The weaponplay, the movement, how the weapons respond. It honestly just felt like 1v1s you would have on maps like Hollywood in Ow when it’s turned into deatmatch-mode. Or Petra tbf. They all feel in retrospective really quake arena inspired. So I basically started maining the rocketlauncher because it reminded me of phara strongly which i mained at the time (the rocketlauncher pretty much behaves the same way which is extremely surprising!) and I got myself the third place in the entire tournament:D I competed against people twice my age that played the game when i was still shitting in my diapers and absolutely wiped the floor with them and they took it extremely chill, one of them even played bit ow themselves and asked excitedly what I mained, a really cute moment i fondly remember. All by just learning the game that weekend :D So yeah I was suprised how easy it was for me to get into the game and with the background of Ow being also highly inspired by quake (which i actually didn’t know till now) it all makes sooooo much sense! Especially when you compare Ow to similar games that just don’t quite scratch the same itch for me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on it why. Now it all brings it together and makes much more sense why. I think quake just had found an incredible recipe of how to make fps shooters incredibly fun and not alot of games copy from that recipe anymore sadly.
Blizzard struck gold with OW, but it's crazy how badly they ended up handling the franchise. I miss the excitement and optimism, when their cinematics had set the bar in quality and we get to see more of the world and story be expanded. Now, all they seem to care about now are their collab skins.
Good research.
Such a great video! Would love those side interviews to be post, similar to frontline on PBS for those dorks out there who know. I hope to see more!
20:03 we got bros origin
Definitely need a video on Counter-Strike next.
great video!!! i'm subscribing RIGHT now thank u for the extremely well made content, Team Liquid Deep Dives team
Publish those interviews!
I can't believe you have that clip of Tim pulling the DVa bomb into the team. Classic.
0:13 My first guess was TF2
Then I guess you're not very bright :(
my first guess was COUNTER-STRIKE
in a sense, you aren't wrong! No OW without TF2
Last ten years bruh the last time Tf2 was relevant was the 2015 tough break update lmfao the game has been dead since
@@apple-de8tx yes, and how long ago was 2015?
After all these years. Even with it's flaws, bad decisions etc... There's still no other shooter that feel so alive, true to it's design and refined as Ow. Mobility, aiming customization, quick gameplay, character kits, dynamic maps. It's got everything. Not talking as an Ow fanboy, as a Shooter gamer, it does feature A LOT more good stuff than bad. "Cringe" and irrational hate will deprive many from still getting to experience the outcome of learning from it's mistakes. Such biased hateful angry people you've become to prefer Rivals wich is just a party game. Play what you deserve.
Ow was a party game... it might be still on top if they hadn't shifted focus and fumbled literally everything that could be fumbled
Wtf are you talking about, Marvel Rivals is miles better than Overwatch in regards to things you mentioned. Marvel Tivals is already on pace to be the best game ever released
I hope that Overwatch finds it way back... I didn't like when Overwatch 2 launched, so i gave it a bit more time to evolve. Man i wished i played Overwatch 1
Great video! IMO OW was lightning in a bottle... those first two and a half years were magical. OW was the first time I played an online PVP game of any kind... everything was just so bright and colorful with wonderful characters... after a free trial weekend I jumped in... I just didn't want to miss out on what felt like something that could be very special... and for a brief moment it time... it was.
Great video. Ive played overwatch almost every day since may 2016. Best game I've ever played
I haven't played it *quite* that much, but I did play day 1, constantly for a few years, and probably more days than not for the last few years
I don't think a lot of people understand how good it *still* is.
Granted, I've been on Rivals mostly, since it came out.
banger
Hello there 👋 @shuseph
Omg is this shu from contenders
Overwatch ❌plants vs zombies garden warfare ✅
This video is a banger! I have been playing overwatch for a long time at this point and this video feels very accurate. I love the research that went into and the fact that it doesn't just feed into the doomer outlook while still recognizing the flaws and mistakes that happened in the history of the game. Very excited to see more videos on this channel whether they are on overwatch or not!
I prefer server based match making. It is so much better for building communities, and in a lot of cases, u end up familiar with the regular players and their play style and they also get used to you so it feels more like a community, and it's much more fun to play against or with people you're familiar with than complete strangers
It is also good for moderation because those servers have their own moderation teams and if someone says weird stuff they get nuked
Wdym game started with 3 classes? It was 4 on release before they merged attack and defence characters
U know im cooked when im watching the goats clip, on the edge of my seat knowing full well that one mistake from one of those players means a teamwhipe whwn the other team pressed q haha
and before overwatch there was tf2
It's funny looking back at the goats meta now. A lot of people, myself included, look back on it quite fondly due to the team play aspect it encouraged. I would argue that the double shield meta that came after was worse for the game as it went for much longer and had neither team play nor satisfying game play.
Not bad of an essay I feel like there wasn't enough info about how Loot Boxes became illegal and that altered all of Blizzards monetization across all it's games. The search for ways to bring back the massive amount of profit that loot boxes made is a big part of Overwatch's downfall. So along with free to play becoming more popular their main monetization, player retention, and progression systems had to replaced. Then on top of all that, their rush to make their games into e-sports also lead to so many bad updates in the chase to keep the game "competitive" instead of just keeping it fun to play, so all their failures were being broadcast by themselves. Even casual players couldn't avoid seeing the downfall happen. Broken metas, Jeff Kaplan leaving, failed promises and rolling back bad ideas where brought back up by fans in every developer update or e-sports tournament.
Sure Blizzard made a lot of missteps but it's largely because they were forced to alter the entire skeleton of the game while it was live and losing lots of money. In that condition most companies and games would end up making the same short sighted decisions as Blizzard.
Great video
Excellent video!
6:33 oh egg man here too 😅
Enjoyed the video a lot, brought a lot of nostalgia and just a nice narrative to remember how great the game is/was amidst all the negativity now.
I absolutely loved and hated OW over the years, OW2 was such a slap in the face, 5v5 is bad, the game feels awful and just so unrewarding, a VICTORY with 42 kills and 0 death means nothing and is just a meh gg, a DEFEAT when you're top heals as Ana with more dps than your damage too, it is absolutely depressing.
Sadly as a daily player for years, I've left the game for good with the arrival of Marvels, its a shame and I do actually feel sorry for OW but they did it to themselves and screwed every player over with their greed, bad decision making and toxic culture, RIP Overwatch, you were once great and game of the year, now you're the lowest rated game in history on Steam
great video. nowadays its hard to find content that is fair with overwatch whithout being overly critical or ignoring overwatch's big mistakes. Overwatch is very very far from dying. But when the time comes in a few decades, i hope the game legacy can be preserved by documentarys with such a fair view
Only kinda agree about overwatch not dying, only because blizzard as a franchise is dying... ALL of their IPS are scammy cash grabs... POE2 dethroned Diablo, FFXIV dethroned WoW... rivals is currently taking the throne from OW...
I would have agreed with you a month ago but by seeing the success of rivals, the things it brings it on the table that Overwatch better said blizzard failed on delivering, Im not sure I can agree with you anymore as someone who raked up around over 4k hours on that game since 2018. I played it religiously every day till a month ago and tbf even when the IP went strong, the dev team tried to listen to players feedback, there is still that decaying state it’s in for the last couple of years. You notice the drop of quality alot, lack of genuine good content that doesn’t feel like filler. All the “improvements” the devs are trying to make to the game are just slow fixes to the destruction they caused themselves that no one asked for. It’s insane how they now after ignoring the fanbase for two years now finally listened to players demand of returning 6v6 and advertise it like they announced the return of the messiah’s , instead of just fixing the game slowly back to its original state. Not improving it but fixing it. Something that we had 5 years ago. So yeah from a critical viewpoint of the game itself and the gameplay the game is absolutely dying, the IP itself not so much, it’s right now more in its life-support stage. The fandom on the other hand is absolutely in shambles, it can’t even compare to it’s hype stage of 2018 which was the peak of the Overwatch fandom culture. And especially with the story of Overwatch being silently shadowdropped in from of boring sidestory novels or comics instead of the pvp mode, the planned netflix show or even cinematics anymore. It feels like the game desperately tries to clutch to it’s last straws, trying to somehow maintain the fans that came from all different niches in an halfassed way. I think they just lack recourses and direction at this point and for me in a spiritual sense, the game was already dying for the last 2 years. Not in the means of the game is literally dying and losing playercount and relevance but more in the sense it’s dying as the game it was once used to be. Now Im not sure if it might die player wise as well, afterall according to steamdb ow is in its lowest olayercount state it has ever been in and tbf in all those years I haven’t even felt like touching the game once and it has been a month now. I hope blizzard wakes the fuck up now and starts competing because if they don’t they might be dead soon, especially after XQC’s accidental pve leak for rivals. They are about to deliver what Overwatch has failed in and if they don’t want to lose the loyalty of their playerbase now they should start waking up and start to cook, cuz if they keep operating in that same demented and senile speed they might be the ones being cooked once and for all.
I’m sure this piece took a long time to write and produce - and the production value speaks for itself! But it did feel incomplete without some detailed overlook of Marvel Rivals, and how it seems to have come the closest to capturing that 2016-2018 Overwatch feel
Like, obviously it’s a new game, and when you wrote this video (six months to a year ago?) there was no way to know if it would be a success or another flop. Overwatch killed *so* many hero shooters in its wake, only for Rivals to be in the right place at the right time.
But when thinking about your thesis over this video, about what made Overwatch special and influential, and especially that “everyone from every community playing this game right now” feeling - I really thought I would never get that again until Marvel Rivals launched.
Especially with the hero drought from Overwatch - getting FIVE new heroes for Season 0 from the beta, and then four more for Season 1? That’s insane to me. It genuinely seems to be built as a live service, unlike Overwatch 2 at launch.
Hero bans for comp to address for balance? GOATS would have never been as devastating as it was if Jeff had been pro-hero bans. It just seems like Marvel Rivals is the logical endpoint to your thesis, but again - would have resulted in a lot of last minute rewrites, and it’s so fresh it’s hard to know how it would shape up. Just thought I’d leave a comment about it!
hmmmmmmmmmmm i wonder why they posted this now
Overwatch and tf2 always have a place and my heart and are still goated shooters of all time. Seeing both of them fall by the wayside was sad.
Are you joining OWCS???
One of the original creator of Street Fighter played Overwatch and Elon also played OW1 :)
This wasnt as much as popular compared to cs and league in our country and that really upset me so much cus not even computer cafe/shops had the game 😭
This is some high quality content
1990's - Half Life
2000's - Team Fortress 2
2010's - Overwatch
2020's - ?
You literally forgot quake arena and unreal tournament🥲 which had more relevance in fps competitive shooters then Half Life in a long mile (not saying for fps in general but in specifically the competitive fps scene)
@@LightingCatxD true, unfair comparsion
2020’s - Marvel Rivals
Good video about a game that used to be good
rapha!!
i was there in 2016. marvel rivals today gives me the same feeling. solid game. happy times. ow isn't cringe but it's devs and general management surely very bad. i dont think corpo environment of microsoft helps either. it's kind of a discarded game they left some incompetent folks to manage and milk some money out of. unfortunate. i think the game is doomed forever. even a tv show can't revitalize it because i'm sure it will not be done in a proper way. the soul of the game gets lost in business world. the game has no owner, in a bad way. it's sad. maybe the game has too much democracy. it lacks auteur's touch, vision of mastermind. maybe it's too focused on how to best monetize the game rather than how to make a genuinely good game.
I NEVER KNEW GLITCH PLAYED OVERWATCH!!!!!!
Overwatch 1>>>
Great video. I think you should've put a greater emphasis on how Blizzard's sexual harassment lawsuit and the immense negative press and public scrutiny impacted development. That plus COVID definitely messed up OW2's development, delaying it a lot and limiting the scope of PvE. Plus, something you didn't cover (and I think you would've if you read Schreier's book), Kaplan always wanted OW to be primarily a PvE game. Hence his influence as game director insisted on pushing the sequel towards PvE, I think in an attempt to eat into Destiny's player base. But combining PvE with PvP when the latter is already development intensive, is perhaps not possible for a game with a relatively smaller player pool compared to Fortnite. You could've also mentioned OW's failure to capitalise on its rich lore and world, in a way that Riot did with Arcane. The cinematics, while amazing, are few and far between, and the fans have been clamouring for a TV series or movie that Blizzard either chooses to ignore or refuses to engage with due to a lack of resources.
OW has been a pinata for bad press for the past few years. It's a good decision they took by abandoning PvE and focusing on PvP, but it really feels like the team needs to come up with the next big thing in order to face Rivals, otherwise OW might just end up being a thing of the past.
The pandemic also completely wrecked the esport. 2020 was meant to be the year where the very corpo hands-on franchise league would scale to its full potential with dozens of localized LAN tournaments per season. The awesome casters and producers made it work as best they could and 3 more years of Overwatch League were played, but the original aspirations were pretty dead after that.
the way you talked about the pve really makes sense, it wouldn't really fit in the game these days, i love the lore of overwatch but a lot of people playing don't really care cuz they are just casual gamers! it would be like the story missions currently in game. played once and forgotten. even though it would be a far better experience...
wow
Someday overwatch will be big again
We have competition so that should force blizzard and Microsoft to care
Not with greedy Blizzard
Ohh god. I love this game. 😭
W content
Why are we making content on a dead game that noone cares about?
The thumbnail makes absolutely no sense
Because Overwatch is dying ?
just drop the roster already chief, this aint funny no more
This should never be an e-sport game, is too chaotic, constantly changin meta is so annoying, all this MOBA mechanics are for me actually completly breaking FPS rules, that is more about spaming "skills" than using yourown arsenal to the best way. Games like Quake,Unreal,Halo, they are one of the best High Copetitive Game, simple to Understand, but hard to Master. Even TF2 is a much better option of an Copetitive, only 9 classes, and nothink more, there is no any changing meta, the entire game is 100% Gungame, no barriers, stuns, teleportations, or ultimates, Hilander I think is the best, both teams having all 9 classes, using all their capeabillities.
10/10
Poggers
Overwatch ❤
👍
Gonna miss overwatch
It's not going anywhere what are you gonna miss
@@ArdaSReal lost his soul since Ow2 release
Overwatch is still way better than any shooter game out there for me. Nothing scratches the competitive shooter itch for me like it does. Marvel Rivals is so bad imo.
Copium
🥲
mentally ill cope.
Overwatch doesn't do anything innovative. It's entire game model is taken from Team Fortress, so really, the video should be about TF and TF2 instead.
lol why didn’t you go in-depth why OW failed?
Because there are 5 videos uploaded daily that already do that
@ no I want to hear straight from those who tries to minimize what went wrong to OW. It would be better if Blizzard made an apology video of how they failed their customers lol
@Kitozano tf are you talking about lmao apology video bro thinks a company is the same as a youtuber
@@ArdaSReal did I say blizzard is a YTber? Are you braindead? Also OW has their own YT page. Bro didn’t bother to look lmao
L ragebait 😂
4:32 People always forget PvZ Garden Warfare's games were almost certainly an influence too. There are a lot of parallels in classes to OW in that game, many similar design principles that arent from tf2 but are in OW and the PvZ:GW games, and it was another hero shooter that predates it along with tf2. That series sold VERY well too and people still play it, like it still has players on the second game. Its weird everyone just sorta forgets about it.
🦍 WINTON 🦍 jump 🦍 WINTON 🦍 zap 🦍 WINTON 🦍 ult 🦍 WINTON 🦍 nap 🦍
banger