As we bid farewell to 2024, it’s time to celebrate the highs and confront the lows in the gaming industry. MonsterVine’s annual Best of 2024 Awards shine a spotlight on the games that defined our year, for better or worse.
Unfortunately, not every title lived up to its promise, and this year’s Most Disappointing award goes to Overwatch 2, a game that turned one of gaming’s most beloved properties into a cautionary tale of squandered goodwill, baffling design choices, and missed opportunities.
Most Disappointing – Overwatch 2
Tom: It’s pretty funny that Blizzard had a huge lead and massively popular game with Overwatch and shit the bed with it so thoroughly that Overwatch 2 is now rolling out modes from Overwatch as a “hey guys, we got that mode from the first Overwatch you liked so much! Wow! Exciting!” and in the meantime, Marvel Rivals comes out and does Overwatch better than Overwatch is doing. The shame of it is, the beta and early launch era of Overwatch was incredibly fun…kinda like Marvel Rivals is now. Modern-era Blizzard: just cannot stop filling their own diaper with bad decisionmaking (See also: Diablo 4) to the point that they get lapped by, let’s see, NetEase(?!).
The continual fumbling of what was once a core PC juggernaut into the kind of company that clowns itself and trips over its own feet to the point that it gets outplayed at, literally, its own game is testament to the power of unchecked capitalism to strip things down to the studs and then shrug when there’s nothing left, similar to private equity buying once-beloved stores and franchises, piling them up with debt, and then they go out of business again because there’s no viable business model but being a vampire squid.
James: Approaching nearly ten years of Overwatch, it’s hard to feel deep disappointment about the state of the game. Overwatch 2 never received the PvE content that was meant to justify the transition from the original game and has instead offered nothing but expensive microtransactions as part of the new experience. The launch of Overwatch 2 also saw the switch to 5v5 instead of 6v6, removing a tank from each team. This has led to balancing issues with the tank class and a toxicity in-game, since the sole tank player on each team now has far too much responsibility.
Every balancing choice has been made to keep the highest ranked players happy, but has resulted in so many interesting characters being unplayable due to the focus on competition, making it largely frustrating to play. Now that Marvel Rivals has arrived and entirely eaten Overwatch’s lunch, Blizzard is finally bringing 6v6, but it’s far too late to get back the lost goodwill. After over 1,000 hours of play time, I have no interest in ever returning and that’s just sad.
Spencer: In college, I had an Overwatch poster on my wall. That’s how much I liked it. Now, I haven’t thought of playing the game in years. It’s wild how that happens.
Frank: After getting thousands of people to buy a new Overwatch game on the promise that it HAD to be done to give us the PVE content we have clamored for and were promised. Then they said, nah never mind and left us with a worse game than we had with even worse, more predatory monetization. You couldn’t be a Team Fortress 2 for me Overwatch, and now you absolutely never will.
