After almost 3 years, the highly anticipated “Overwatch 2” has been released, and fans are full of mixed emotions as they experience the game for the first time.

The release of “Overwatch 2” completely replaced the original game. “Overwatch” was taken off the market and instead gamers were greeted by the free game “Overwatch 2.”

During the first week of the game being out, players experienced a mass amount of bugs and issues regarding logging in. People were greeted with a queue of up to 300,000 other players all anxiously waiting to experience the renewal of the weathered game.

With this queue came plenty of other problems, players would be waiting hours just to get to the title screen, only to be kicked back out and put back at the end of the queue.

Blizzard, the company responsible for the “Overwatch 2” release, claimed that the servers were under a mass DDoS attack on the day of launch. Fans are skeptical of these claims, arguing that 2 DDoS attacks on the same date is unrealistic and sounds like a cover up for poor planning.

These problems persisted for longer than just the day of release, issues were consistent for the first week or two that the game was online. Blizzard did take servers down for maintenance a couple times in an attempt to combat the bugs, but little change was seen.

Eventually, the queues did calm down and players were able to enjoy the game how it was meant to be enjoyed, although some characters continue to be disabled as players encounter new bugs.

In addition to the mass amount of bugs, players are upset due to the removal of some key features that were once included in “Overwatch.” 

The game once had a feature called loot boxes, where accounts could play to earn a mystery box to obtain skins for characters, voice lines, poses, and more. In “Overwatch 2” this feature has been replaced by a battle pass and shop, requiring players to spend real money in order to get any cosmetics in the game.

Although the many flaws in this release may attempt to outshine the good parts, there are plenty of reasons “Overwatch 2” is an improvement from the old game.

“Overwatch 2” introduces new characters such as Kiriko, Sojourn, and Junker Queen, along with character reworks to beloved assets such as Orisa and Cassidy. The updated game brought in new game modes that allowed for more diversity during playtime, and overall just allowed for a better gaming environment.