Video Gamers Podcast - Overwatch 2 Beta - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Gaming Heros Paul, Michael and Josh are giving you a full look into Overwatch 2’s Beta and PVP. One of gaming’s best, Overwatch is showing some age. Is this latest entry a full on sequel, or is this more of a glorified patch? We break down everything that’s new, what’s the same, what works and what doesn’t. You don’t want to miss this awesome episode from your favorite gaming podcast! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, let me tell y'all a story about a man called Ted. He loves the multiplayer gaming podcast. He liked it so much, he now supports the show. He got some extra content now, he's having a blast. Hey guys, Michael here. If you're enjoying the content you get on this podcast, consider being like Ted. You can support the show and get bonus content by going over to MultiplayerSquad.com. We're an independent podcast, and we'd sure appreciate it.

Now, on to the show! Hey, what's up, everyone? Thanks for tuning in to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are three dads with day jobs who love gaming, and we release podcasts every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. Please make sure to rate us five stars, leave a written review, follow us on socials at MultiplayerPod, and come join our free Discord server. There's a link in the episode description. Also, if you've been enjoying the podcast for a while, please consider supporting us on Patreon. We are an independent podcast, which means we don't get paid to do this show, and we do rely on listener support to keep us up and running. If you do want to join those ranks, you'll get a shout out on the show, early access to episodes,

and you'll also be able to hear the Squadcast, which is only available to supporters. That is a 30-plus minute episode that we release twice a month that has all three of us present, so come check out support options at MultiplayerSquad.com. Today is a Deep Dive Monday, and we are going to be deep diving the Overwatch 2 PvP beta. I am your squad leader, Paul. I'm joined here by the flanker extraordinaire, the man who has never once been at fault for losing a round of Overwatch, and now that he's got a scoreboard, he knows exactly who to troll and yell at. It's Josh. All of these changes are amazing, and you're very right, Paul. I would never cause my team to lose a round ever. I knew who you were introducing the second you started talking on that one.

And I'm not sure if I like it or not. I think it's very fair. All right. And then joining us, the man who hates aiming in Overwatch 1. I know he was mostly a Mercy main. He was also seen on occasion carrying reinhardt's hammer or shooting shields as orissa it's michael i actually thought you were going to call back to a recent episode and do the opposite of josh and say the guy who's never been responsible

for his team winning a match in overwatch it's michael because that would also be true um i've gotten some victories over the last few weeks so i so I think I got some things to talk about now. Very nice. Michael, I feel like you're still a little too new to the show for me to hit you that hard in the intro, but maybe in a couple weeks here, I'll just start laying into both of you. We'll see how it goes. I put my big boy pants on. At least I put my big boy gym shorts on before every recording. I feel like Michael would deserve it it whereas i don't though paul all right so before we jump into overwatch 2 we do have a little bit of housekeeping to do

guys what's my favorite thing to do on the show oh thank legendary supporters thank legendary supporters epic supporters rare supporters oh guys we hit for the cycle here in the last couple weeks we got a whole bunch of people to thank oh my goodness patreon has really been hopping let's see we've got a shout out to dark ephemeral who joined with rare status nice we need to give a shout out to ace of shame who of course is a legendary supporter and his current subscription was rare and he now bumped that up to epic so we got him to thank applause button and we applause and then we have not just one but two new legendary supporters we've got black star dq who joined discord already legendary which we've never seen before. That's the way to step into it, man.

That's the way to make an entrance. That's like the Kool-Aid man just bursting in through the wall. He's like, I'm not getting my toes wet. I'm jumping all the way in the deep end. Yes, straight in. And then we have long-term supporter Phelps, who's been around for forever. He upgraded to legendary status as well. We have so many people to thank.

Oh, man. Number one, you said, thank you, everybody. But man, what an incredible week and a half it was just to see all these people supporting the show is incredible, man. I know we're all humbled by it. We're all thankful for it. But it's an awesome sign to show what's happening with this podcast. The sky is the limit. The community is the best community out there. It's honestly one of my favorite things other than reading a new review in the morning when I drink my coffee. But people join and they're like, dude, this community, you guys weren't kidding. It's amazing. I've heard you talk about it, but I didn't believe it. And then they joined the Discord. And then people are like, oh my goodness, you guys weren't making this up. Yeah, that's one of the biggest things that I'm so

excited about all the time. First of all, let me just say that in our private Discord where we discuss the shows and so forth, Josh, Paul, and I, I've never seen this many all caps all over that because we were so excited about all the things that happened in the last week and a half with just, just you guys and supporting the show. And just, we love you so much. We can't tell you how much your support means. I know we say that all the time,

but also again, to echo what Josh just said, people are joining the discord and they're like, Hey, it's not just you guys. I mean, we'd love to take all the credit we would, but it's also the community.

It's you as the listeners. So it's so great. It's so humbling to see you guys day in and day out, taking the initiative to start conversations and have a great time. Thank you all to our community. Yeah, absolutely. And then Josh, speaking of you checking for reviews in the morning, have any rolled in that you want to read here on the show? There is. There's been a couple, but I know we have a lot to talk about. So I only picked one. And then also, it's funny because a lot of our long-term

listeners will edit their reviews sometimes and change it yeah and then it like bumps up but i i noticed those too so i see y'all out there that are changing your reviews up a little bit so thank you for that as well um but this one comes in from rui to you it's like, but with an extra O. So would you say that Rui? Roy. Does it say where it's coming from? We can extrapolate the language. It's Roy. No, it doesn't. It's local. Okay. So, alright. So Roy to you. And it's titled

Question. Five stars. This is a great podcast and I love it. But does Josh have a YouTube channel youtube channel and if so is it called let's game it out now all right guys my secret is out there i don't have a youtube channel i know why this guy asked because of course what do you do when somebody says is this your youtube channel i went to that youtube channel and i watched it. And this guy is an agent of chaos. He's one of those guys that just does crazy, stupid things in video games, which fits my nature perfectly. So Roy, to you,

I totally get that question. But no, that's not me. No, Josh did stream for a little while on twitch but not on youtube that's very true there is i think i posted it actually on our multiplayer you uh youtube but there was the craziest night of rust uh ever experienced that video is on our youtube channel you'll have to scroll down a lot but if you want to see how crazy russ can get find that video slavery, gladiator fights, vomiting, raw human flesh. It's all in there. Wait, is that on YouTube? Because you guys talked about that in a Rust episode a long time ago.

Have you never seen this video, Michael? No. It's like a 20-minute video. And this was like three hours of insanity condensed down into 20 minutes. But it is on our YouTube channel. So just go on there, scroll way down past all the episodes, and you'll see it absolutely unscripted, complete shenanigans. So disclaimer to all the listeners right now,

the rest of the episode that you're about to hear, we don't edit these episodes, but there will be about a three-hour edit because I'm going to go right now and watch that video and come back. Hey, guys, welcome back to the channel. I'm glad that I watched that rust video. Sorry. Well, thank you so much for the review, Roy. And thank you to everyone else out there who's already left one. If you haven't yet, please just leave us a quick review. You don't even need to put any text. Uh, if you want, just put the letter a and hit submit. We'll take it. The more reviews, the better. All right. I think it's that time, boys.

Let's jump off the ledge and deep dive Overwatch 2. All right. Here's Wikipedia's description for Overwatch 2. Overwatch 2 is an upcoming hero shooter video game and sequel to Overwatch. Developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment, Overwatch 2 is intended to have a shared environment for player versus player modes while introducing a cooperative player versus environment mode. A major change to address stagnation of the metagame in Overwatch was to reduce team size from 6 to 5 and to rework the functionality of tank characters, requiring several characters to be reworked for the sequel.

Alright, now whenever we do a deep dive on a sequel, we always have to start by talking about what came before it. So, Overwatch 1 released all the way back in 2016. I think it's probably the most well-known and most popular hero shooter that there currently is. What's your guys' relationship to Overwatch 1? I love Overwatch 1. I remember when Overwatch 1, I still actually remember when this game came out, our entire friend group, Nate, the world was hyped, was absolutely hyped. And I just remember playing this game for the first time and seeing the cast of characters and the little portraits. And it was like, who am I going to pick first? And it was just... I remember the excitement and the fun that came

with that. All of us figuring out how to play this game, who was good at what. You had tanks and healers in a shooter, which was very strange. But for a very long time, Overwatch 1 was at the top of our leaderboard. It still is very, very high on our leaderboard. For me, it's one of my favorite video games of all time, to be honest. I was not around when we did the deep dive here on the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast, but I would like to say I have honorarily married this game because I love the game. And I've made my opinions on shooters very public. I don't like being shot at in games because I don't know if I just don't react fast enough, but I'm terrible at them. And in this game, I'd like to say I'm passable at and I enjoy it.

And I loved it because, because again we've talked about this before on previous episodes like i don't have to shoot it's just like what josh said i can heal i can tank and if i if i really don't want to play a shooter i can play a character that's only ability to actually do things from range is to throw a flame strike that hits like a giant radius anyways so i just kind of aim in that general direction um so i loved it i love overwatch it is the only game that i think when my friends are like, hey, you want to love Overwatch? I'm like, yeah, I do, actually.

I do want to do that. And it's kind of like, yeah, just it's something I'll always love, I think. Yeah, I don't think there's ever been a time that I've had a group of friends ping me and say, hey, we've got three, four, five people in Overwatch. Do you want to come play? The answer is always yes. I'm pretty sure that Overwatch has the most playtime by me of any game over my entire life except World of Warcraft. So I know all three of us absolutely love Overwatch 1. It had a stranglehold on our leaderboard in the number one position for well over a year. It only very

recently got unseated because of God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2. So Overwatch won immensely successful. We all absolutely love it. And I think we also should probably at least briefly mention the fact that Overwatch League really drove esports in popularity i remember when they were airing the finals and it was on espn right even espn 2 the finals were on main espn 1 and i remembered thinking like oh wow like overwatch league has really arrived michael i think you were always a big fan of it right that's exactly what i was was about to say. I like this game so much that I did not care about esports early on. Dota 2, League of Legends, didn't. Never watched them.

Maybe casually if I was trying to fall asleep, because honestly, I didn't know what was happening in those games. I never played them back in the day. But I actually have three Dallas Fuel t-shirts that I would wear during the matches as though I was going to a football game. That's how much I like this game and got into the esports. Now, it kind of fell off for a little bit in the middle because honestly, Dallas Fuel, they started to not do as well. And I kind of pulled a fair weather fan on it. But yeah, I was watching a lot of it.

That's so funny. All right. Now, guys, I have a quote here that I wanted to read to you after Overwatch 1 released. Overwatch released to such wide acclaim that I think we kind of forget how beloved it was by everybody. I mean, I remember when it released as well, Josh. We were in there right in the beginning, and the front page of Reddit every day was nothing but ultimates that people would post, or Pharah dropping underneath one part of one of the maps and popping up and using an ult. It was everywhere. And so here's a quote from Wired.com back in 2016. Overwatch's fanbase has been noted to be generally kind and supportive, whereas many

fresh games struggle with an endless stream of player complaints and developer prodding overwatch's community is vivacious and jubilant guys what happened to the overwatch community i don't even know what to say but all i know is i've got a buddy um and i won't give you his username or his real name you know who i'm talking about if you're listening who's been banned like seven times from toxic behavior. Right? I don't know that any of us would say Overwatch is like a terribly jubilant community, but man, it's really fallen from grace.

I don't know if just the shininess wore off and people were so excited when it was new, but yeah, the Overwatch community, not nearly as kind these days. And I can also vouch the Overwatch 2 community is not much better. Yeah, I don't know what happened. I feel like in the beginning it was. And I think it was just because everybody was having so much fun. There had not been a game that hit the world like Overwatch did, to be honest with you. Yes, there was Team Fortress 2.

And I'm not saying that there weren't other class or hero-based shooters previously. But there was an absolute magic that happened when Overwatch released. And I think that everybody was having so much fun with the game that they were just being nice to each other. People were figuring out the characters. There wasn't any of the trolling or the throwing or any of that stuff. I don't know if it's that the more dedicated players stick around for longer. And so they have higher expectations. Let's be honest, it is a team-based shooter. And if you have somebody on your team that is not doing what they're supposed to be doing, it can be very frustrating. And that's one of the things where I'm sure we'll get into, why did they make a sequel? Why did they not just keep updating

Overwatch 1, other than money, of course? But it's one of those things where I think there's very little flaws with Overwatch in general. I think the only real flaw with the game is at times balance, which is hard to dial in when you have 38 characters or whatever it is. And then the other thing is the people. If Overwatch isn't fun, it's because the people you're playing with. And that's really the only fault that the game has. Technically speaking, graphically speaking, gameplay speaking, it's almost flawless. Yeah. And to Blizzard's credit, the things that don't work, they have been able to address over time. They removed maps like paris where you would log in it would say welcome to paris and then 11 names have just left the server and then a good 13 more would join and quit because

everyone hated the map so much you know they got rid of that they got rid of hanzo scattershot which was i think the most hated of all abilities in warcraft, Warcraft and Overwatch. Bastion shield. That was early. Yeah. That was really early. Yeah. Bastion had a shield at release, which people don't remember.

So, you know, they have always been very responsive, not necessarily as quick as some might like, you know, the goats era. I think you in particular, Josh really hated,

but back in November, 2019, they did announce at BlizzCon that Overwatch 2 would be coming down the road so we are now two and a half years after that point there is still no release window but we know it's not going to be this year and we had our very first closed beta test that just opened up on April 26th and all three of us were able to get in, and we got first-hand experience now on the PvP side. Now, the PvE side, no one has yet played. That wasn't a part of the beta, so we're only going to talk about the PvP side of things that we got our hands on,

although maybe at the end we'll talk a little bit about maybe some PvE elements we're hoping for. But let's go ahead and talk about all of these changes that they have made now with Overwatch 2. You know, we've got a couple of things that have been updated, but I think the number one thing to talk about first is that we had a change from 6v6 down to 5v5. So in Overwatch 1, you've got two tanks, two DPS, and two heals with the roll lock mode and now in overwatch 2 you've got one tank two dps and two heels so what do you guys think are some of the pros and cons now of having 5v5 let me give you a huge pro real fast all right less players shooting at me since i'm terrible at shooters there's one less person shooting at me it It's like 17% fewer bullets coming your way, Michael.

Right. Yeah. And I'll go ahead and start and give my thoughts on it. Because I did notice that... It's funny, because maybe that is why in some cases, I enjoyed aspects of this game a little more or characters a little bit more without going into spoiler territory on how I feel about the game. Because I did feel like I could kind of get off if I was playing a flanker. And we'll talk about the maps later. But there are certain maps that kind of have a little more abilities to flank and so on and so forth. There are certain things that happen differently. I found that I could get around people a little bit better. But I also found the other conversely is on an older map that was a little more complex. Let's say like

Eichenwald, where there's a lot more like... If you're pushing the payload and there's that main alley, but there's a lot of side areas and stuff. Sometimes I'd go around looking for someone. I'm not finding anybody there because there's one less person. There's one... And I did feel like the maps, sometimes the known maps... Now, the new maps, I didn't feel this on. But some of the known maps I felt were a little bit more empty. And that's my two first takeaways from it. But yeah. Yeah, it drastically changes the flow of combat, in my opinion. Now, there's a couple things.

Number one, I went back and played a few rounds of Overwatch 1 after having probably put 30 hours into Overwatch 2's beta. I have been playing that a lot um lately number one because i it's just fun you know i mean we we never stop liking overwatch so um the the first thing that i noticed was that the dps queue is like three minutes long whereas in overwatch one it's seven to eight minutes unless you use a priority pass and even then i'm not sure priority passes do a thing. I can vouch 70% of the time it says, this is taking longer than we anticipated.

We will not use your priority pass. Yeah, so I'm not sure that does anything. So I will say it has solved the DPS queue problem in that regard. The other thing is that when you only need one tank, people are willing to fill that role. So I feel like the cues pop a lot faster as well. Now there are a lot of ripple effects to only having one tank. And we'll get into some of those when we talk about the characters and some of the changes

to the characters as well. But like characters that didn't receive any changes at all like naturally got a boost because there's not two tanks to worry about right at that point and so it really did change the feel of combat in the game now they had to buff a lot of the tanks too so as before tanks were you know they could kind of soak damage and you wouldn't want to be right on top of one, but you didn't really fear tanks before. Now, you don't mess with a tank like 1v1. They've buffed them to a level where they're really strong and there are some balance changes that still need to happen. But removing one tank and then strengthening tanks across the board has

really changed a lot of the way the combat feels and how the game works and how some of the characters work and strength levels of some of the characters and stuff like that. That was actually the point that I really wanted to make. And I wasn't sure where to fit it in here or when we talk about the changes in characters is that I feel like the first thing I noticed about the 5v5 was that I did my research before I played the game. I looked at a lot of things about what the different characters were. I'm looking at every tank got not a moderate hit point buff. Almost all of them got a 200 hit point buff.

And there was a balance on all of them. But I felt like it didn't necessarily make the game more balanced than 6v6. It just changed the gameplay a little bit and me as a tank main for the most part you know i started out as a healing main but i just i can't i can't get off me some marisa and reinhardt the whole thing was i felt like it just changed the game made a little more fresh in a certain way but kept the balance whereas i thought it was going to be like this sucks being a tank like i'm just getting picked on all the time i'm constantly dead and i didn't find that to be the, this sucks being a tank. I'm just getting picked on all the time. I'm constantly dead.

And I didn't find that to be the thing. So to your point, Josh, that's absolutely true. Yeah. Yeah, I think another huge pro is just the fact that there's less shields. So I know Josh really hated when you would have a Bastion sitting behind a Sigma and a Rein. And now all you're doing is shooting shields. And that could get kind of boring and so we've drastically reduced that to where a lot of matches have no shields at all

because you'll be playing where one side's got a roadhog the other side's got an orisa there might not be shields at all but i think that also leads into one of the cons which for me is as a healer main i am dying to widows 10 times more than ever in the past because if you play a zen or something and you have no shield and the other team has a widow that's even just semi-competent you're gonna get sniped continually so widows are really having a heyday i think now we're seeing with fewer players and with fewer shields you can have one dps character really carry matches in a way that i've never quite seen in overwatch one so for better or worse i think you see a little bit more carrying well with widow especially too they gave her that

her 25 hit points back that they took away in the last game and so it's harder to dive her now so she's more survivable and she's just picking you off nonstop. It's honestly one of the biggest cons since we're talking about pros and cons. One of the biggest cons with not having a second tank is that... One of the purposes of the off tank was to peel and to protect your healers. I play a ton of Zarya, who is my favorite off tank. And your job as Zarya is to protect the healers, bubble people, and do DPS. And when you don't have a second tank,

your healers are super at risk. And so you mentioned Widow, but Genji. We're seeing this huge resurgence of Genji just absolutely wrecking people's back lines to where Brig is almost like a must at the, like a must pick again because she can kind of deal with Genji. But I said the other day,

I've never seen more cracked out Genji's carrying a team as I have in Overwatch two. And it's because you don't have that second tank to peel when somebody is diving your back line. Yeah. And to your exact point again, sorry, I keep, I keep just taking both of your points. I feel like the guy in the middle is just like, let me add to yours. Let me add to yours. But I had this issue. And I don't think we go into details on maps in this episode. We'll talk about

game modes a little bit, which will cover maps. But some of the new maps are known to have a few more points where you can actually come in and flank and with one less tank that makes it very difficult i found myself as a reinhardt and narisa quite often mostly as reinhardt though mostly as reinhardt having a problem where my shield's low or it's going to break and i want to protect my team but i just have to swing away now because i've got i'm standing in the middle of like a bunch of people behind me a bunch of people broken back line bunch people in front we're trying to push this thing across and we're in the middle of this vulnerable area and as a reinhardt single tank whereas before you'd have the two tanks kind of both take a different side and do different

things and there's a strategy involved that we couldn't use in this and it did make you more more vulnerable yeah i've definitely experienced that same thing all right so you mentioned the game modes michael let's talk about that now so in overwatch 2 they have completely gotten rid of assault maps which was the two control point uh i don't know about you guys i'm a little sad about that i'm really gonna miss some maps like hanamura was the first one that came to mind i love hanamura yeah yeah so those are now phased out entirely and they have now added a new game mode which is called push and And Push is nothing revolutionary. I mean, this has been around in games for years.

It's even in like Splatoon 1. Basically, there's a big giant robot in the middle of the map. And if your team is the only one standing right next to it, you push it toward your enemy's spawn. And so whoever is able to push the robot the furthest the other way, you end up winning the match. So I was kind of curious as to your guys' take. How do you feel about Assault being phased out and now Push being added? I like Assault. I think that some maps were not good Assault maps.

And it was like, oh, this is good. Like Horizon. Horizon Lunar Colony. Oh, it's terrible, right? Like Paris. Boo. Yeah, exactly. Like Blizzard World even, although that was a hybrid map.

But I did like some assault maps. Hanamura was really good. I kind of actually like Volskaya too. I like Volskaya. Yeah. So I would like to see those still in the rotation. Maybe not as much. Maybe it's like a 30% chance that one of those maps comes up or something like that i will say that the new mode i absolutely love like it is one of my favorite modes at this

point i my two favorite modes are the control point ones like maps like ilios uh lucian tower and what's the other one uh the snowy one. I can't remember that one now. Is that Moskaya? No. It's the control point where you have to, you know, oh, total blank. Anyway, like those are my favorite because you have to play best of three rounds.

And then the push mode is great because what it does is it forces people into that area. It forces the teams to clash. There are zero choke points, for the most part, in the push mode. And what's really neat that I like that they did is you're pushing it, the robot moves slowly. But if you lose control and they push it back, when you control the robot again, he moves back very quickly. So it's like... He books it. Yeah, he does book it. And so you can get back to the point where he's actually pushing that wall.

What is that wall anyway? Why is he pushing this thing? I have no idea. He's pushing a whole bunch of suitcases. I really don't know. We got to move these refrigerators. I don't know what he's pushing or why. I honestly have no answer.

But I love the mode. I think it's chaotic. It's great. There's very little choke points. It's very back and forth. I mean, it's tug of war. That's what every... The simplest way to put it is it is 100% tug of war. And I find myself having an absolute blast with it. I love the new push mode. But I'll start with assault mode first, how they got rid of it.

Question mark on why they got rid of it. I know why they got rid of it because they're saying we want to change things up. want to make it different they want to make it more fun and one could say that sometimes because of the choke points and because of certain toxic players that assault mode can be difficult because typically it has a lot of choke points and you've got to like um for instance um uh hanamura right at the end you almost have to go in with like three or four alts and and combine them and just try to get them like it's like if you control that point and the other team misses misses that they've got the point and you gotta wait two or three minutes before you can get that going again whereas push is completely opposite

push is chaos all the time you're constantly able to go in there's still a strategy involved it's not like people are just diving in the whole time but um the two maps for instance one of them and i believe it's pronounced colise and one's new queen street they're beautiful i loved them because that will first of all yeah it's like a roman yeah like the announcer yeah but i i loved it because again you know like the reason the only reason i liked in small i'll die on this hill the only reason i liked the paris map is because i like architecture and history and i thought it was nice to just stand and look at statues that's probably why i'm terrible at this game because i'd be like look at that vincent de milo there no but i think they're beautiful but also what i like about them is they further take the push

concept and these maps actually have more points where you can actually get around and you can flank like there's a lot more spots like there's a lot more um three-dimensional things too where you can kind of get on top of more stuff and come down and i think it's just they said we're going to make something that's a lot more chaotic than the stagnant nature of i control this assault point and i'm probably going to win the game because the other team's diva just blew her bomb outside the door on accident so i got this right um and that's that's one of the things i liked it i found myself giddy every time i queued up and got a push versus something else and so that's a win

yeah i for the most part i absolutely love push i don't know that we needed to get rid of assault entirely but i know the number one complaint people had were the suit the two cp maps so i mean i i get it all right now another big change that they made to overwatch 2 is that almost all crowd control has been removed so for example cassidy used to have the flashbang now it's basically just like a homing grenade it's like a magnetic grenade it'll kind of like attach to someone if you chuck it near them junk rats trap no longer completely stops the enemy it just slows them down where they can still move it does not completely immobilize you and may her freeze gun no longer freezes enemies don't talk i want to talk about me i don't want to me, I think is still my most played character.

There was a time when nobody played may and I decided I wanted to get really good at may and I got really good at may. And it was the, it was the glory days of overwatch because nobody knew how to deal with her. I was, I was literally to the point where if a teammate got hooked by road hog, I could put a wall in between roadhog's hook and him so that they wouldn't get hooked in. It was great. And they have gutted Mei into oblivion now. It makes me so sad. I played Mei one time. And then I basically was like, I'm not playing Mei at all anymore. So it was just... Because that's what I love. That's what I loved about her. She's not doing a lot of damage. The changes they made made to her she does more damage but she's not as much fun in any way shape or form i mean even even though one of the few crowd controls

um left in the game one of the few few crowd controls less than left in the game is anna and they made the cool down on her dart her sleep dart from 12 to 15 seconds like they're like we're not doing crowd control at all. Yeah, they've basically gotten rid of it almost completely. Even some things like Sombra's hack, it doesn't make you completely unavailable to use your items. So I think overall, I get the philosophy behind it. They just want to make it so that way you can keep playing.

They don't want you to get stun locked into Ob oblivion where a Brigitte smashes you and you can't move. Now you get flash banged and you can't move. And now you run into a junk rat trap and now you're dead. So I do think for the most part, they are pretty good changes. Although I will say I really hate Cassidy's grenade now. I hate nothing more than seeing that message like the tracer alt where it says you're stuck and you know you're dead there's nothing you can do about it you wait the one second now you're dead it's brain dead i will say this as much as i mourn may's demise in this game the the them toning down cc was a phenomenal change in my opinion. Oh, yeah. The pacing of Overwatch 2 is much faster,

in a sense, versus Overwatch 1. The one thing that's not faster is how fast you charge your ultimates. That is one thing that I absolutely noticed when I went back and played Overwatch 1 was that you get your ults really quickly in Overwatch 1. And in Overwatch 2, you might only get like two or three a match at that point,

whereas you were getting like four or five or maybe even six back in Overwatch 1. So another great change that I think throws a lot of people off because it changes the pacing. It's Overwatch, but it's different. And it takes a little while to figure out if you like it or you don't like it. Yeah. And the exact same thing. I know, Paul, you just mentioned Sombra. Sombra's hack, of course, gone, like you just said, for the most part. Not gone, though. But instead of being crowd control, now it's just an interrupt. It's a quick interrupt. It's done. You lose your ability for a second. Whatever you're doing is gone. And so it, again, changes the strategy completely with the player as well.

What do you guys think about the addition of the scoreboard? I love it. It's the best change. And honestly, out of the entire changes that they've made, they've added a scoreboard that shows both teams' stats. So you can see how your DPS are doing compared to the other team's DPS. You can see how your healers are doing compared to the other team's DPS. You can see how your healers are doing compared to the other team's healers, how your tank is doing.

I absolutely love it because there were times where it was like, nobody's dying. It's our DPS is fall. Right. And you get, you know, I'm a troll in overwatch, right?

I'm a nice troll, but I'm still a troll in overwatch. And you know, you've got these, nobody's dying and you're looking and you're like, come on, DPS. And then you pull up the scoreboard and you're like, oh, actually,

our DPS are out DPSing their DPS. So maybe it's not their fault. And then you look and it's like the enemy team's healers are just crushing your healers. So then you're like, oh, it's not our DPS's fault. It's our healers' fault.

Get your act together, healers. Come on, man. No, I also love it, and I thought I was going to hate it, but there was a match I was playing with Paul and Josh very early on. I think it was the first time I realized there was even a scoreboard on this thing,

and I'm like, I'm sorry, guys. I just can't heal anybody in this match, and Paul's like, what are you talking about? You got a thousand more heals than I do, and I look down, and I'm like, oh, I do. I do. Okay, I'm not doing so bad. I'm like oh i do i don't i do okay i'm not doing so bad i'm just not feeling like i'm doing it but i'm contributing and i like that i'm gonna play devil's advocate a little bit here okay don't do it i i enjoy being able to see my

stats versus everybody else the problem i have with this is that i fear it's going to reduce Overwatch down to math, where it's, well, why are you playing Cassidy? Soldier's DPS is always going to be higher. Don't play that character. You've got to min-max everything on the scoreboard. And that worries me, because World of Warcraft was a lot of fun in the early days before you had DPS meters. And as soon as you added DPS meters, guess what? We're not taking any druids on our raids anymore because they suck. Or, you know, we got to have at least, you know, five warlocks and we're going to kick you out of the raid because we know that a warlock can do more damage than your class. And so I do worry a little bit that this is taking out a little bit

of the fun and the team strategy because like josh you can crush it as a may uh if you've got gold damage as may you're probably not winning the match but that doesn't mean that may is not the most important character out there i and i will say the changes basically make moira a must play every single match because now that you've only got five on the on the playing field for your team if you've got a mercy who's bringing in a zero damage or you can bring in a moira who does the exact same damage and they can do 7 000 damage i'm gonna tell my mercies get off mercy why are you playing mercy go play something that can dps and heal so i i'm a little worried in that regard i think there is a con and

a pro to your point i think that the not the jolly old trolls but the jerk trolls are going to be jerk trolls and the nice people are going to be nice people i think in more novice matches it's not going to be it's going to be more of a problem because if you look at like a pro match they're going to understand not like pro but like the higher echelons in competitive play you're going to see people understand the importance of the may even though she's not going to do as much damage you're going to see people understand the importance of certain um they call them metas because i always want to call them comps like because it used to be called the composition but then there's a comp mode that got really confusing so i guess it's called meta what's

the meta now but the meta yeah yeah so the meta um you know i i think they're gonna understand there's certain metas that complement each other better. But I still think that when you're seeing a scoreboard, you're going to have people like my buddy who got banned seven times. And he's going to look at a McCree who's not crushing it. I'm sorry. His name is Cassidy. I'm stuck in Old World. He's going to look at Cassidy.

We're going to edit. Keep it in. Leave it in. Don't edit it out. Call that mistake but the whole thing is we're gonna look at something like that and that person is still gonna be just screaming at somebody and saying you've only 2000 dps this and that or 2000 damage and it's so i think there's good i think it's gonna be good and bad i think you're gonna see the trolls be more troll and it could be more good and that's it you know there's just a lot that does not get captured by damage and heals and kills right like if i play as anna and i hit that roadhog with a grenade every time he tries to take a breather which then allows our group to

kill him that doesn't pop up on the scoreboard so the moira next to me might be doing more heals and might be doing more damage so you know that that's just part of what i don't like and it's another reason for why i like playing with groups of friends where you can do a little more strategizing as a team and everybody gets that. So I think the scoreboard has both pros and cons. I love it. Honestly, I absolutely love it. Like I said, it's one of my favorite changes, but it's not the end-all be-all. I mean, honestly, I played a couple rounds earlier with a friend and our team crushed their team in every metric. We out-DPSed them, we out-healed them, we out-tanked them, and they still won. And so it's one of those things where they just worked better as a team. Even though the metrics weren't better than us, we still lost the match. And we were actually talking about that. Like, hey, that's funny. Look at that. We did everything better than them, and yet we still lost. Well, we didn't work as good as a team, right? So the stats are not the end-all be-all. So I don't think you're going to wind up with the min-maxing aspect. I would think not,

because let's be honest, we've all played that match with the Tracer on our team or the torb or the the symmetra where they absolutely are phenomenal at their character and they just carry and you're like dude i had my doubts when you picked that character but you are great at that character you know and so i i mean i don't think you're gonna wind up with the whole min maxing thing i get what you're saying but i just i love the scoreboard because I like to see what the problems are. And I love blaming the people that are the problems. He is not a jolly old troll. No, he's just a troll. No, I am more on Josh's side on this. I really like it. And I think to your point, Paul, World of Warcraft to me seemed like more of a mathematical equation

than Overwatch is. Overwatch, there's a lot more movement. There's a lot more things happening. It's more of a shooter. The M the the ammo to world of warcraft was don't stand in fire don't stand in purple junk on the ground and move around but really just stand there and do lots and lots of dps boss dives faster this game is nothing like that i get where you're coming from i still think it's a good thing. I guarantee you will see zero mercies play this when it releases, unless they do major changes. There are certain characters that are unplayable because people are going to see it on the scoreboard. And I hope you guys are right, but I think you are definitely going to get people insisting that you change because they're going to see it on the scoreboard.

And that's the kind of stuff I don't like. All right. Now, another change that they made to the game, this one's not as major. It's a little bit more minor, but I think it does have a drastic impact on the game. Tanks have had all of their knockback reduced pretty dramatically. Also, tanks now take less damage and less healing. DPS characters now have an increase to movement speed, and all healers now have a passive heal, where if you don't take any damage for two seconds, you will start to self-heal over time. So if you're an Ana, you no longer have to burn your grenade at your feet, you can just let yourself self-heal and use that a little bit more offensively. How do you guys feel about those changes to the passives?

I noticed that with certain characters, they were much more noticeable than others. For instance, when I was healing as a Moira, and I'm like, hey, we're about to charge in. I'm low on health. I really want to throw this gold ball at myself, or I'm out of Healy Juice. You know what I mean? When you run out of Healy Juice, you got to do damage to get the Healy Juice back. It was really nice to have that, to just sit sit there and be like hey i'm gonna recover for a second then i can go out and throw the dps orb out and now i'm doing damage to get my heli juice back and i can heal my friends again things like that um i i i think though that ultimately it again just more balances the game for that 5v5 as well like as far as tanks go you know yeah they take less

heals um and they've got less knockback or they got more knockback resistance right it's just i didn't notice as much for the tanks as i did the movement speed was kind of noticeable but i got used to it real fast i more noticed it with the heels and more on certain healers and others like with mercy i didn't really notice it nearly as much because i'm always flying around healing somebody well mercy as a passive anyway though so that wasn't really a big change for Mercy. Well, but she gets 50% more now on top of it. Yeah. I mean, because she still kept that kind of old passive. I'll be honest. I don't notice. I don't feel like that's a game-changing thing. I do know that they toned it down a little bit in the last patch that they did.

I only noticed it in a few characters. Lucio was nigh unkillable because he had the healing from his aura that he has, and he had the passive healing, and he's just sitting there bouncing off of walls, which makes him super hard to hit. So he would heal up ridiculously fast. And then you had the passive for DPS where they're 10% faster, which you don't really notice that much, except for characters like Soldier and Sombra who have innate speed anyway. And then they were able to just get back to the fight super quick because it's like they had Soldier sprint or Sombra runs faster when she's in stealth, plus the 10%. So that became very, very powerful in that regard. But they

actually just toned both of those down. So Lucio's self-healing is drastically reduced now. And then they've lowered the sprint level for Sombra and Soldier. So they're aware of how the passes have affected a few characters. But as a whole, I don't really think that it's very game-changing or noticeable, to be honest. Yeah. And exactly like i said earlier you get used to a lot of it it doesn't seem to really affect the outcome of matches

except for the couple points you just made um and i like i said i only really noticed on the healers that was it as a lucio player i have definitely noticed do not try to boop tanks it's not happening they move back three inches now so you got you kind of have to like now learn to shut that off and wait for the tank and then try to boop something else so the big green map or the big greek map with the hole in it is no longer the lucio-centric map anymore the well i mean you can uh you can boop other characters but yeah i don't even try to boop like orissa's or ryan's or win's. They barely, barely get pushed at all. All right.

So let's talk about some of the character changes. You know, a lot of characters were completely reworked. The tanks in particular, the healers more or less are almost entirely the same. But what characters did you want to get into? Let's not talk about May at all. Let's not do that. Dude, I think May's almost unplayable, to be honest. It's very sad. It's a big rip we why don't we cover the major changes like the

characters that are almost completely different and then as time allows we can get into some of the smaller changes because let's be honest some characters didn't change hardly at all you know i mean like soldier soldier still soldier i think they nerfed his damage by like one or something like that like we don't need to get into like the really fine details but there's been some pretty significant changes to some of the characters there's been complete overhauls of some of the characters as well i mean complete overhauls we got to start with arisa she's completely different you know uh not in a bad way i think she's number one she needs some balancing because she is way op at this point but arisa is a completely different character now she still has her gun but her gun

works off of a heat mechanic and it does more damage as you're closer to the target so she's much more scrappy if she's in somebody's face they have taken away her barrier completely which is good you're to see this kind of this less shields theme throughout Overwatch 2. She has a javelin that she can now chuck at people, which is honestly one of the coolest things that's in the game. Because if you whip this javelin at somebody and it hits them, it's got a huge knockback. And if you hit them into a wall, it will stun them for a second and do even more damage. So it's got a huge knockback and if you hit them into a wall it will stun them for a second and do even more damage so it's almost like a combination of like doom fists punch um and then some like major knockback thing uh at the same time so that's really fun

and it's also kind of a shield it eats it eats damage too the well well that's her spinny yeah that's yeah the spinny guy right Right. Yeah. And then she can spin the javelin in front of her. She kind of charges forward when she does that. She spins this javelin. It absorbs everything a la D.Va's Matrix almost. And it has knockback. So you can actually push people around with it and it does damage. It's a very kind of all-encompassing skill. And then she still has her fortify ability, which she takes a lot less damage, and she doesn't heat up her gun as fast while she's in Fortify. No more Grav thingy.

I don't even remember what that thing was called. I think it was called where you could suck people into the well and that. But she's a completely different character. You put all of those things together, and honestly, she's OP as anything right now. She's by far the strongest tank in the entire game although she has a worthless salt yeah her old is super i didn't even talk about her all it's it's so there's no point yeah when people are saying when i was looking it up they were saying it's worthless i'm like it's not worthless and like oh yeah it's

worthless because i it's pretty i played a lot of Orisa in Overwatch 1. And I was actually hesitant to actually queue as Orisa in Overwatch 2. Because I'm like, I'm very hesitant to change. And so when I started playing, I started as Rein. And by the way, Rein did not change much, right? We won't go deep into it because he didn't change much. But his changes were stellar. I mean, you know.

Two flame strikes. That's about the only change. Two flame strikes. But he turns faster when you charge. Yeah. which for me was always so frustrating as a ride but i love to reset i won't go in there too much one of the things though that i found myself strangely drawn to is i hated playing doom fist in the original overwatch i was terrible with him and he got a pretty heavy overhaul kind of uh would you guys say he got a pretty heavy overhaul, kind of. Would you guys say he got a pretty heavy overhaul? There were several changes to big abilities.

But I found that having him go to full tank, but then simple things like uppercuts gone, I could never figure it out. Maybe that's why I liked it. So now he just supercharged his next rocket push. But also the way seismic slam works, where you can actually aim with it kind of a little bit differently as opposed to going just at an arc and you can actually go forward um i found myself liking that which was interesting and i didn't even think about the reason why i liked it because josh just said he's

a full tank now and i love playing tanks that's probably it um yeah but there's a lot that didn't change there's a lot that did change i'm trying to go through because i really wanted to talk about it recently because i love her so much i really wanted to talk about may but i can't do it can't stomach it and we already kind of talked about her. I could rapid fire the characters that didn't change and literally just say the names of the characters that didn't change at all if you wanted to. It's probably 24 characters. They didn't change a ton of them.

I mean, tank changes. They gave Zarya the ability to... She still has two bubbles, but she can choose how she uses them. So she can either double bubble herself or she can do double bubbles on somebody else. So you basically have two charges, and you can use them however you want. Roadhog actually just interestingly did not when the beta started, but they just made a huge patch where they changed Roadhog's ult to where it now works like Soldier's ult. So what you do is you slap the scrap in your gun, but he doesn't fire unless you press and hold the trigger.

But it's a channeled ult, which means if you get stunned, your ult's not over. You're stunned during that small little portion, but your ult isn't just canceled. And you can hook people during your ult, or you can take a breather. So you can do everything you normally could so that was a huge change for roadhog well not only that roadhog has 700 health yeah which is honestly

about three times like your average character in overwatch you used to be able to swap to reaper and you could just face roll a roadhog 1v1. You cannot do that anymore. You will lose as Reaper. Reaper also got nerfed. I mean, they lowered the damage of his pellets like insignificantly. But I play a lot of Reaper and he's not nerfed. Well, the only reason that he's nerfed, I think, is there's two reasons.

One, not so much that he was nerfed. Because yeah, they lowered the damage of his pellets. And also, his spread is like 30 larger so you do have to be right up next to something to hit a lot more accurately but the biggest thing is the boost of the tanks i was playing reinhardt and normally when i see a reaper i'm running for my life and now i'm smacking a reaper to death and i can actually 1v1 a reaper now and that's kind of where that nerf comes from that surprised me. And then other characters that got nerfed as well, Tracer having five damage per bullet versus six is surprisingly noticeable.

Like surprisingly, nothing else changed about her. They just make her do a little bit less damage. She can't one-shot healers now is the thing. She can't like one clip a healer now as well. I'm trying to think. Nobody plays D.Va, which is really weird. I've seen very little D.Vas because they didn't change anything about D.Va. I think they bumped up her armor and her health just a smidge more

accurate a little bit that's yeah winston got an interesting change but it doesn't really matter is they gave him the ability to like right click and instead of you know his tesla cannon thing he shoots out a bolt of lightning instead so it's like they gave him this weird range ability but it's not really that good and it doesn't it's like it takes too this weird range ability but it's not really that good and it doesn't it's like it takes too long to charge up and i i don't know i thought it was because i love playing winston but it's like it just really didn't affect anything with him sigma's not changed at all um i mean i think that's pretty much it i'm sure there's another tank i'm forgetting about that i just don't play. Famously, though, the two, and I forget their names, not their names, their last name, but Genji and Hanzo didn't change.

And they were just not nice to that family. Yeah. No need, right? They already work great. The one other change that does make me sad for something so minor junk rat bombs now flash they've got a strobe light on them and i used to love nothing more than to leave my trap with the bomb leave it in a spot you know someone's gonna hit that cannot happen anymore not only because the traps now don't stop you but now everybody can see the

strobe light anywhere on the map, so you can't surprise people with those junk traps anymore. Yeah. That was one of those changes that I really didn't like, because when I do play DPS with my terrible aim, I'm like, I'm going to play Junkrat and just arc these bombs and balls everywhere. And I would always love doing that, the trap, but I don't. Now, as a Reinhardt stepping in the trap i love

the new trap i just gotta go for another two and a half seconds i'm out of it you know but as any other as a junk rat it hurt me to see that but you know there's a lot of changes some are good some are bad but i mean dps wise the two major changes were to bastion and sombra um those characters were almost completely reworked bastion can now move in turret form but it's on a timer which i thought was really cool to kind of limit its functionality so you transform into your turret and you can roll around now so you can actually move which is a very odd sight to see and he does a butt ton of damage when he's in turret form just like he did before but it's on like a six or eight second timer.

And then he transforms back regardless. Um, they took his healing ability away, right? Yeah. He does nothing at that point. I mean, they gave him a little weird bouncy grenade that does nothing. Um, you know, and his ultimate is actually kind of cool, but still kind of does nothing because he's a more, he goes into mortar form and you can choose three spots on the map. You get three mortars basically, and you can just choose on the map where to put them. So if you can blanket like a choke point or a hallway, you're probably going to get a pick or two,

but it's a, it's just weird, man. Bastion is completely different. And unless you're melting people in turret form, then he really doesn't do a whole lot, which is good because we hated playing against bastions and he's super squishy. Now when he's in that turret form, then he really doesn't do a whole lot, which is good because we hated playing against Bastions. And he's super squishy now when he's in that turret form. I swear he takes more damage. I don't know if that's actually a thing, but you get melted in turret form now.

It's probably because you're used to the Bastion holding down the right button to self-heal while running. Maybe that's what it is. And he has no self-heal now. Yeah. Well, Josh just made a bold statement. He said arguably the two biggest changes to DPS were to Sombra and to Bastion. One would say the biggest change to DPS is that we lost a DPS character named Doomfist. Yeah, I don't know. Doom is still the ultimately annoying character, too, when somebody's good with him. Did we get a lot of details on what Sombra's hack lost?

Like how much it changed? And I've played a lot of Sombra, man. I love harassing type characters. Anything I, you know, if I can, give me a character where I can aggravate the other team. Like that's the character I'm going to gravitate towards. That's why I love playing Mei so much too. Yeah.

But yeah, I don't, I mean. I can high level it real fast. I was going to say, go for it. Essentially, they increase the damage to hack targets by 40%, which is like the only good thing. She's a tank killer now. And a wall reveal. Now you've got a little wall reveal during the hack,

but the ability to lock out, the ability to not use your abilities. This is good English, guys. Guys, I'm good at English today. The ability lockout is no longer five seconds. It's one second, which we talked about with that stun. The hit point potion or hit point potion. Man.

All right, Diablo. The hit point spot. What are they calling it? Potions to this game? The health packs. Health packs. Man, I'm falling apart here. The duration was cut from 60 seconds to 30 seconds on health pack hacks.

They increased the cast time and they reduce the cool down like it's a huge overhaul and she doesn't come out of stealth when she hacks a health pack which is really nice she doesn't come out of stealth when she hacks a character although she does become slightly visible which is basically you don't have stealth like i'd never understood that it's pretty obvious because also i've tried to hack the enemy Zen, and then instantly they're like, oh, I see you, boom, you're dead. And it's like, okay,

well, this didn't work, obviously. Also, the range to detect her is farther. So if you can't get as close as a Sombra, are they seeing you? The biggest thing with Sombra is, because I have probably like, I don't know, 70 hours playing Sombra, I really enjoy

the character. Her two biggest changes are number one, when she hacks a tank, because she gets that 40% damage bonus, she can melt a tank now. So that's actually a very significant change. And then her EMP, what they did is they gave her EMP because they took away a lot of the CC abilities. So if you EMP everybody, I think they only have the one second of being locked out of their abilities, which doesn't even really matter, right? But she does 40% of their health as damage.

And so that's a pretty significant change because you can actually jack up the enemy team with a well-placed EMP now. The problem is every Sombra is still EMPs by themselves when the whole team's a well-placed emp now the problem is every sombra still emps by themselves when the whole team's dead it doesn't matter watch this guys okay go and then it's like no we're all dead why did you waste that right dude 90 of emps and 90 of zarya grabs are 1v5 still all right so as we start to kind of wrap up this episode here, I think the one question that everybody

is waiting for us to answer is, is this a true sequel with new content, it's a new game, worthy of being called Overwatch 2, or is this really just like what a lot of people have been joking about,

calling it Overwatch 1.5? I can say that it's a little bit of both. I'll happily buy it to... Again, we don't know because we don't know the PvE aspect as well. But ultimately, here's how I can sum it up. With exception of the major changes, I feel like Overwatch 2 is like an RPG where you just pick different things in the skill trees. Do you want to cast the spell faster or do you want it to not be as long on the cooldown? I feel like it's just little tiny minor changes here that just kind of change it up a little bit. I still like it because it's new content. I really didn't feel like the aesthetics changed that much. at first you notice you're like the graphics are a little better

um some of the sound design was a little better i i think it's a 1.5 to me but i still want to if they charge 50 bucks for it i'll still pay it and play it happily but i'll also play overwatch one i think because the nice thing is, if you own Overwatch 1, you will get the update to Overwatch 2 PvP for free. So you could get this and just experience it as Overwatch 1.5. If you end up buying it, that's going to unlock all that PvE. I think this is absolutely Overwatch 1.5, if not Overwatch 1.4, 1.3. Guys, I played nothing but Overwatch 2 for two full weeks, and then I went back to Overwatch 1,

fully expecting to be like, oh, wow, yeah, these graphics are a lot worse. Oh, yeah, it's not as smooth. Guys, it's 99% the same. Honestly, I am not gonna miss the the beta at all when the beta ends i'm just gonna play overwatch one it's a little different sure the pacing is a little different we won't have sojourn to pick and you got to get used to the changes i was actually kind of shocked at how similar this game feels. It's still 99% the same. Y'all are both crazy, but you're also both very right. I have been playing a lot of Overwatch 2.

It is 100% Overwatch 1.5. Yes, the graphics are a little cleaner and sharper, and they've changed some of the portraits and art style. And I think there's dynamic lighting now or RTX. I don't even know. You know what I mean? It's one of those things, ray tracing or whatever. The graphics do look slightly different. But if you go back to Overwatch 1, they're not so different that you go like, oh, this is a completely different game. I do like some of the sound design changes. Weapons feel more punchy. So there's little things there. The main difference is the flow of combat. It's faster paced. There's less CC in the game. If you like the changes to the characters, then there is a lot to enjoy. If you like that there's only one tank, but they're stronger, like if you like the push mode, I think there's an awful lot to like about Overwatch 2.

But in relation to Overwatch 1, because I did the same thing, Paul. I went back and I played Overwatch 1, and it still felt just like Overwatch. The absolute single biggest change or perk is that Overwatch 2 got people playing Overwatch again that weren't playing it before. So I've been able to play Overwatch 2 with my friends. Whereas if it was Overwatch 1, people just went like, yeah, I'm done with that. And so that's the change is that I've seen more of my friends playing Overwatch 2 and been able to hop in with them and play it and have fun. But the game is not that different

it's really not yeah i feel like to exactly what you just said give it two years and overwatch 2 might be exactly what overwatch 1 would have just become with patches anyways you know like hey guys we're gonna change it up and go to 5v5 we're gonna change your reset this week in two more months we're gonna change the rhyme to this week in two more months we're going to change the rind to this you know and all that stuff's just going to change it like you said you guys hit the nail on the head it doesn't feel like a different game now that being said the reason why i i like both is because i can go back and forth if i want to like uh for instance a couple times i just wanted to go back and play the other arisa because i'm like i kind of like doing that i like

the cheese cup where you put the bastion on top of the Rhine and you make people really upset. But it's 1.5. The Venn diagram for Overwatch 1 and 2 is, you know, they overlap almost entirely. Are either of you like seriously going to miss the beta? Are you going to be sad when it turns off? I'm not going to care. I actually will be because if people stop playing again, I've been having a lot of fun. Like, honestly, I've been having a lot of fun playing overwatch too.

I like it. I like the flow of combat more than overwatch one. Like if you said, Josh, pick one, I'm going to pick overwatch two in that regard. Are there characters that are drastically out of balance right now? Like,

yes. Like they need to make some sweeping balance changes to Overwatch 2, whereas I feel like Overwatch 1 is pretty balanced at this point. So there are some things that are messed up, but I've been having a lot of fun in Overwatch 2. Here's the thing though, right? If you like Overwatch 1, you're going to get Overwatch 2 for free in the PvP portion. Now we're not talking about the PvE because nobody really knows anything about that. Maybe the PvE element to Overwatch 2 is amazing. Like I don't know that it will be, but I could see a world where Overwatch 2 PvE is equivalent to like Destiny 2 raids

or something like that to where it's like you have to have teamwork and everybody has to do their jobs and this is super fun there's neat mechanics and stuff like that like i hope that's what overwatch 2 pve is but for strictly the pvp i am a fan of a lot of the changes they've made if they balance some of the characters i think it's i think the p PvP is way better than Overwatch 1. Way better. Because the only thing you mentioned is it's a slightly different pace.

Like, that's not a sequel. That's a patch. But it feels better to me. It's a better patch. Exactly. Yeah, honestly. I mean, when you're talking about, is this a sequel or is it not? It's not.

But the changes that they've made have made the pvp feel a lot better in my opinion yeah i think that's probably their master stroke that's what they're doing is they're putting out their pvp saying you know we're not going to change it out that much right we're going to make it free for overwatch one players and i think that what they're looking at is they they might be and this is me speculating so speculation time right they might be working on something so great for pve that they're like hey we gotta launch something because we announced this thing two and a half years ago and we got nothing let's put out the pvp tease people and then pve is going to be amazing did i just mix up pvp and pve you get it the pves it's not going to be amazing guys they've released

multiple pves the best thing that they've done is junkenstein and i love junkenstein but i've seen nothing yet to give me any kind of confidence in a pve mode i i hope nothing more than to be wrong with jeff caplan leaving the fact that they've already worked on this for years, and this was the beta test, I really expected to see more changes. But, you know, we'll just have to wait until PvE is available. So right now, what is the grade you would give Overwatch? So like a good old A, B, C, D, F scale. What would you give the current prospects of Overwatch to? Like how confident are you in where it'll be when it releases? F scale, what would you give the current prospects of Overwatch 2?

How confident are you in where it'll be when it releases? Strictly PvP? Just overall. Oh, man. How's it going to sell? Or how are people going to like it? What would you rate the prospects? I feel like I would give it a C. I'm not excited.

I was going to say C+. It's fine. I'm not excited. I was going to say C plus. It's fine. Like C's get degrees. Like this is not, you know, standout, but it's not awful. I wish I had stronger feelings about it all. Overall, I've just felt like I'm playing Overwatch 1 with another patch. I think it's fine. At this point, if we deep dive overwatch 2 i'll buy it uh at this time

i would have no plans to pay for the pve i would take the free upgrade to overwatch 2 and just play it that's that's exactly what i would do if we weren't running the show i would 100 wait for reviews on the pve component if it comes out that this is Destiny 2 type raids with teamwork and mechanics and raid stuff and all that, you've seriously got my interest. If this is the Overwatch 1 seasonal events, PVE just spiced up a little bit with some grindy type because I know you can unlock abilities and stuff like that, that's not going to be worth $40 to me. I'll happily play the PvP portion of it because I love that. That's what Overwatch 1

was, and that's where the magic is. But unless something drastic comes out and we see some really, really interesting things, I have zero interest in the PvE component of Overwatch 2. Ain't gonna happen. I'll probably buy it

just because I buy everything. But I feel like here's my take on it. Which one do you like more? I like them both the same. They're both great. They're both Overwatch. I feel like when it comes down to playing a year or two years from now,

hey guys, what do you want to play? Overwatch? You want to play some Overwatch? Yeah, let's play some Overwatch. Hey, you want 5v5 Overwatch 2 or 6v6 overwatch 1 i don't know we played 5v5 last night let's play 6v6 tonight because you like them both the same that's kind of how i feel i don't feel like it's enough of a change for me to have any strong opinions it's just it's the same but different all right so obviously this game is not on steam it is not

released we can't read the regular community reviews that we do, although I believe Josh has scoured YouTube and has pieced together a couple of comments that he has found, right? I have gone through Mordor, the Swamps of Sadness, and everything to find some decent comments that might be worthwhile. So in lieu of reviews, I tried to find some of the criticisms and some of the other things that people have about the PvP aspect. So here we go.

I like the removal of a lot of the CC abilities. It means a healthier game where you aren't getting cheesed at random. But with the removal of a lot of CC, doesn't this just mean dive comps are going to be like super oppressive with nothing to stop their momentum? The answer is yes. Dive comps right now are absolutely the strongest comps in Overwatch 2 beta. They're super annoying. There's nothing you can do against them because you don't have that second tank.

You know? And historically, our friend group has been awful at dive comps so we might struggle with this yeah yeah just a little bit and uh it's true so uh but that is a very valid and verifiable complaint because they are way too strong all right this next one keep in mind that the new meta will affect some of the DPS who didn't get changes. Less shields will affect Hanzo and Genji, for example, or even Torb's turret. Also, they all got a new passive, 10% speed boost, which is huge on heroes like Symmetra. I will say that Genji is super strong right now. We talked about this early.

I've been playing against so many cracked out Genjis, and honestly, there's nothing you can do. A very good Genji can absolutely carry the other team, and it just becomes oppressive. It's not fun at that point. So, okay, this next one. I'm worried that no CC would mean that a lot of the mobility-based heroes will be harder to counter. Again, see Genji. Yeah, see. Yeah, insert it. harder to counter again see genji yeah yeah insert yeah um lucio i hate lucio i now paul i know you're a fan of playing lucio and you're a great lucio but i said earlier today i was playing with a friend and i said earlier today because a lot of the maps the new maps are very narrow so lucio has walls galore to bounce off of and still be in the fight like it's not like know, he's got to maybe run away for a little while and then come back.

Like he's in it and he's just hopping from wall to wall the entire time. Lucio is oppressive, man. Like I hate Lucio in overwatch too, for that very reason. He's too mobile and there's too many things for him to, to latch on to. Um,

and because there's not enough CC, how do you kill Lucio you stun them right you freeze them or something like that and you can't do that anymore so and now it's just this guy just playing just all over he can come from anywhere and he can be anywhere at all times yeah right and healing non-stop the entire time so yep a lucio moira heal combo is incredibly hard to take down right now yeah Yeah, it really is. Okay, so next one. I really feel like all characters should get some kind of change.

It really feels defeating to discover that your character has very little different after waiting all this time between games. That's a healer main right there. I mean, you know, that's a healer main. That's a Reaper main. I mean, Reaper didn't get any changes. He got slightly nerfed. You know, that's a healer main. That's a Reaper main. I mean, Reaper didn't get any changes. He got slightly nerfed. You know, Soldier, right? Like, Genji didn't get any changes, but Genji's super strong.

Just because there's not all those shields and everything. Or a tank that you have to worry about. So I will say this. If you're going to call it a sequel, then you should have done something different to every character. Now, I know that that's a daunting task, but I 100% agree with this guy that if you give me Overwatch 2 and my character, my three mains are zero different than what I was playing before, I'm disappointed. Yeah, for sure. At that point. I don't care if you just give me a new ability or something, but change something so that I go,

ooh, my character's new and shiny. Right. So not just a new skin. Right. We'll play Sea of Thieves for that. Yep. Okay, next one. At first, this beta of Overwatch 2 felt almost not different from Overwatch.

But after some time, I feel how these tweaks change the meta and the pace. And I quite like it's less frustrating. And characters like Sojourn really bring a new approach to the game, even by just playing against her. Well, maybe Orisa is a bit broken right now. We didn't talk about Sojourn at all. I just realized that. She's a new character. She's fine. She's kind of like Soldier. She's got a railgun. She's basically a combination of Soldier and Widow. She plays like Soldier until you charge your gun up and then she can snipe people with this

railgun shot that goes super fast. I mean, she's not that different, to be honest. She's not like Echo where it was like really unique character or something like that. Well, and also I feel like we went pretty far into Sojourn on a Twig episode and the name was in the title of the episode, if you guys want to go back and hear the thoughts on that too i

think it was a month ago yep that's absolutely right all right last one overwatch 2 is a hard pass for me as a tank player removing a tank slot to please dps players q times just killed the fun of the synergy with your other tank diva winston zarya ryan ball winston sig orisa orisa hog sad he's not wrong you you no longer can play the ryan zarya combo which was so much fun where you could watch the ryan kind of brashly you know uh swing just swing for the fences man but i was gonna say charge past the enemy lines and then you could bubble them while everyone else runs up. Like you can't do stuff like that. Like you used to be able to,

there, there are some tweaks that I'm going to miss overall. I do like the direction of overwatch too. Like I'm not complaining about it. It's, it's just not terribly different. There are some things I'm going to miss. There's some things I'm excited about,

but I do kind of get that. You do lose some of that two tank strategy that I think was sometimes a lot of fun. Winston and D.Va as a dive comp was always a blast. The question is, is it familiarity or is it that it's not as good? You know what I mean? Because there are some great changes, and they've buffed the tanks to where the tank that... If you're playing a tank, you really do feel a lot stronger. Is it just that I'm familiar with that Rein-Zarya combo?

Like I said, I played a lot of Zarya. And Paul, you play a lot of Rein. And so we're used to that dynamic, and that's not there anymore. So is it worse, or is it just and that's not there anymore so is it worse or is it just that that's what we were familiar with yeah it could be a little bit of both um again i i still preferred to queue up as tank when i was queuing in overwatch 2 because i was like hey first of all i'm not as focused on it as any more it didn't seem like it was constantly like oh there's the shields here. Kill the shield.

Kill the shield. Because there's so much more flanking and so much more things going on in this game. There's more happening, especially in the push maps. But at the same point, I feel like later on down the road, you might find new combos that's a different combo than a Zarya-Ryan combo. You know what I mean? I'll say this.

Earlier today, I was playing S playing sombra and my buddy was playing orisa and we talked about how useless orisa's alt is she sucks everybody into her she charges up her her javelin you have to kind of wait almost like you do with cassidy's old and then the longer you charge it the more damage it does but it takes so long to charge that you'd never kill anybody with it because everybody runs out of the circle i was playing sombra and so when he started to charge up i empede well that took off 40 of everybody's health and then it sucks everybody in he only had to hold it for like a second and it wiped the entire enemy team that was like a new a brand new wombo combo right a la zaria hanzo and it was like whoa did we just

discover something like this worked really well so i think you're right michael and that you know there's going to be new stuff to discover in that regard but it just feels very off to not have that second tank yeah it's definitely a recalibration for sure all right so the last thing that i think we need to at least briefly talk about do we want to try to place this game on the leaderboard or do we feel like it's too much in progress that we should just wait until it officially launches but what do you guys think here's my problem we know how we rated overwatch one overwatch one is very high on our leaderboard and that's no pve components so it's like are we gonna place overwatch two above it because then that's saying an awful lot with where overwatch one is ranked on our

leaderboard if we place it below it it's kind of like well why do we have these two Overwatches side by side? Would we remove Overwatch 1 and replace it with Overwatch 1.5? I feel like, yeah, I feel like here's the thing. I kind of said it earlier. I put it exactly with Overwatch. Occupy the same spot because it's the exact same game, just some different aspects of the same game. I feel like we wait. I feel like we wait till the PvE aspect comes out and we give Overwatch the full. But now you could disagree with me and I'll rate it. But at the same point, I don't know. Let's hold off. Let's hold off. Because here's the thing. I'm having a blast with Overwatch 2. But if you're telling me to compare it to Overwatch 1, it's like, but it's

just... It's different in a lot of ways. And it's not done. My biggest complaint right now is that they need to do some balance changes. Until that happens, there's going to be some very frustrating components of Overwatch 2. But it's still Overwatch, which is a great game. Right. It's a great game. Right. You know what I mean? It's the same game. So it's like, how do you rank that? I would say let's hold off. Or we could just put out next to our Overwatch ranking,

put includes Overwatch 2 beta, because it's really the same game with some tweaks that are... Some are good and some aren't so good. So it's probably going to balance out anyway. Well, and like you said just now, Overwatch 1 wasn't perfect when it came out either. They made a lot of balance changes pretty early on, i.e. Bastion's shield got rid of it.

And so I feel like it just makes sense to wait a little bit. And it's a beta. Yeah. Yeah. And when Overwatch 2 releases, we're going to have several new characters, not just Sojourn. They're going to have either four or five new characters the pve content i feel like there's a lot more we need to see

uh but yeah we're fine holding off then and we'll wait for the official release in maybe 2023 maybe 2024 i honestly don't know what they're spending their time on to be transparent i i i would think with that team and all of this time and all of this money they'd be further along in the process but i know that they had to like rework the engine and all this other stuff behind the scenes hopefully we'll see major changes down the road how about this you could only have one installed on your computer are you are you are you picking overwatch one 1 or are you picking Overwatch 2 in its current form? Overwatch 1. Assuming that the beta doesn't go away.

If they just said, here you go, you can have one installed, which one's it going to be? So you're saying you like Overwatch 1 better? 1. It's better balanced. Yeah. Man. See, for me, I feel like I want to cheat and say, how about can I just delete one of them

and install the other one and the next day put the other one because i like them both a lot but i would say that because of what paul just said i'm swayed a little bit in his no i'm not i think i want overwatch too because it's new and shiny and different i'm picking overwatch too it's not shiny it's not different it's i mean it's not it's not different. I mean, it's not. It's polished a little bit. It's not different. I admit it. I'm not saying that it is, but there's something about it that is very hard to put my finger on, but I would pick Overwatch 2 in a heartbeat. I think I would too, even with the balancing issues. I just...

Oh, I mean, if you balance it, it makes it way easier for me at that point. But I still... There's an it factor. I can't put my finger on. Maybe it's just the pacing. Maybe it's the lack of crowd control and I'm not getting booped in 8 different directions for 12 seconds. I don't know what it is necessarily. Maybe it's just the sound. Maybe I like the sound of the weapons and I don't realize it as much. But there is something about it that I do prefer over Overwatch 1. We do know that good sound makes for a great game.

That's right. In Josh's mind. Yes, we do. That's all he needs. Yeah, that's funny that I'm on completely the other end of the spectrum. I would rather play Overwatch 1. I don't feel any desire to play Overwatch 2, other than the fact that we were covering it for the show. And I'll actually kind of be glad when the beta is gone.

I'd rather us all hop into Overwatch 1. I have to wonder if that's because you're a healer. Like, because you're a healer main for the most part. You know what I mean? And healers are getting wrecked right now, to be honest. So I wonder if it's more frustrating for you. There's Widow's spawn camping. There's that kind of stuff going on that I do think makes it a hard go right now for healers.

If you only QS tank and DPS, it might be a little bit of a different experience. Guess what I only QS, Paul. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like the last thing I'll say, and then we can end the episode. I do feel like Overwatch 2 also, almost every engagement is a team kill overwatch 1 you could be a little more strategic of okay we lost two people let's back up and fall back you almost cannot fall back in overwatch 2 because the dps are too fast you have characters like sojourn that

can catch up to anybody around a corner and so it does feel like every battle everybody on one side gets killed and i don't really like that closing point that's a really good closing point i still want to play overwatch too yeah i i hear you it is it is it's new i can't argue that it's new i i agree with you there all right so thank you so much to everyone out there for listening you know just one last reminder if you want to check out our patreon page you can go to multiplayer squad.com and we have our next deep dive on elite dangerous that one will release two weeks from today and as always we will have our next episode on thursday for this week in gaming we really hope that you guys will join us again there and come hit us up on

discord. Maybe we can queue into some overwatch two games together and we'd love to see you guys on there as well. So I think we're not bumping elite dangerous again. Right. Do we have another announcement? Michael, we voted.

Yes. Surprise. No, we will get totally dangerous this time. All right. I actually want to push it out now. I want to play it more. Well, thank you so much, everyone, for listening.

We will see you all on Thursday. Until then, happy gaming. Cheers, everyone. See you, everybody.