It was convoluted and it didn’t do much to cut back on toxicity. Instead of antagonizing your teammates for not getting enough kills, players would just rub their gold medals in each other's faces. In the end, it just led to bullying with extra steps, so for Overwatch 2, the developers replaced it with a good old-fashioned scoreboard. Now players can see exactly how many elimins, assists, and deaths everyone has right away. Flaming your teammates has never been eas

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

As a - very - casual Overwatch fan , the characters have always been my favourite thing about the hero shooter. They only tell vague stories, but they’re so well designed and are bursting with such life that they feel like bigger characters than they actually are. They’re similar to comic book characters; you don’t need to have read the decades long history between Batman and the Joker, you just see their iconic designs and you instantly feel as if you know them. Whether it’s Ashe and her Wild West gunslinger aesthetic, D.Va’s e-girl vibe, or Winston the science monke, the character designs tell their own stories. That’s why the recent Archives event feels like a big missed opportun

As I mentioned before, I haven't played the Overwatch 2 beta, so I know nothing of Junker Queen besides what she looks like. Still, what she looks like is a person who has been methodically grown in a lab in order to drive a tank, so she places high. Junker Queen also feels symbolic of all my confusing feelings towards Overwatch. Blizzard seems to have been a hellscape of harassment, and yet they've created such a diverse (Black women aside) cast of female characters with a range of body types. For relevant web site all the oversexualised Widowmakers and Tracers, we had Zarya, Mei, and Moira putting spotlights on different kinds of women too. Junker Queen, with her exposed midriff, has elements of the Windowmaker philosophy, but also seems highly queer-coded and has the sorts of rippling muscles women are often not allowed in popular culture. In any case, good at tanks I rec

Sexuality is a defining part of your identity, and the passion amongst fans to see this explored in the games is evident, but I will admit it remains drenched in heteronormativity. I committed the cardinal sin of searching for ‘Tracer and Emily’ in Google images and was greeted with far more than the comic introducing their relationship, with crudely animated porn primed on the male gaze being pushed more than anything e

Overwatch finally got a Black woman with the launch of Overwatch 2, but it's odd that they are still outnumbered in the game by animals. In any case, Winston has the opposite problem of Wrecking Ball. He's a big ol' gorilla, and therefore too large for the tank. He's above Wrecking Ball entirely because if you could squeeze him in there (give him a big buttery butt or something), he could probably make a go of it. But also, even then he'd probably break the controls, so second bottom it

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.

It could be argued that Overwatch doesn’t need to waste time focusing on this stuff, pushing an "agenda" that simply takes away focus from actually playing the game. But it should, its queer characters deserve more than just a passing mention to keep us satisfied. Explore these stories, show that Overwatch is worthy of the awards and nominations it has received for doing the bare minimum for representation. Two cisgender white homosexuals feels like a sanitised definition of diversity. Where are the POC, transgender characters, and those who refuse to fit into neat little boxes? The universe is only growing with the coming sequel, and its grasp on representation should do so along with

With a sequel, major characters will likely be reintroduced for a new audience, especially the likes of Tracer and Soldier 76. There’s no need to scream and shout about being queer from the rooftops, but just make that aspect of these characters clear in their history, and how it matters beyond a tick in the diversity box. I care about the relationships and dynamics of queer people, especially when I can see it in games like this, so the last thing I want is to see it shoehorned in and immediately shied away from whenever the situation calls for