Most live-service games don’t get as many chances as Overwatch has gotten, but most of them aren’t made by Blizzard, which can afford to fumble, refocus, and rise from the ashes. The problem any game that’s gone on for 10 years faces is that different versions of it exist in the minds of everyone who’s ever played it.
If you stopped pushing payloads during the height of the game’s domination, you may have a rosy image in your mind of a game that doesn’t really exist anymore. Those of us who came in later have only really known Overwatch as a fallen titan struggling to get back on its feet. When the sequel came out and never actually delivered the cooperative campaign Blizzard had promised, plenty of people dismissed Overwatch as a failed experiment and a fumbled bag. Even I, a person who has put over 1000 hours into Blizzard’s hero shooter, fell off for a brief period, though I kept my Soldier: 76 keychain on my ring even when I wasn’t playing.
© Blizzard EntertainmentBut last year, something shifted. Overwatch 2 may not have become the story-driven sequel I wanted, but Blizzard showed that even if its original plan had fallen through, it wasn’t going to leave the game as a skin-driven cash cow doing nothing more than giving Mercy fans another one hundred outfits in which to dress up their favorite medic. The introduction of Perks, or character-specific tweaks that change or lean into different playstyles on typically one-note heroes, and the build-driven Stadium mode, showed that all that work on skill trees and buildcrafting hadn’t been a complete waste of time.
Now, in 2026, Blizzard is integrating the story in a way that’s probably more sustainable than a PvE campaign microtransactioned out over the course of years would have been. It’s taking its seasonal rollout and completely restructuring it to accommodate a linear story, rather than just leaning on character-setting lore drops with no forward momentum. It’s not the game we were pitched in 2019, but the Blizzard team that was leading the charge on that has been desecrated over the past few years.
Game director Jeff Kaplan left Blizzard before Overwatch 2 launched, the narrative and events teams were subjected to layoffs that left the story in limbo until the campaign was canceled, and for a while, it felt like Overwatch was back on life support similar to how it was during the years-long content drought leading up to Overwatch 2’s launch.
© Blizzard EntertainmentFor some, it doesn’t matter that Overwatch has grown, changed, and gotten more than simply better, instead reaching a level of greatness some thought lost. For those people, that moment of disappointment when they stopped playing it remains too vivid, that betrayal too great, for them to so much as reinstall the game. People love a No Man’s Sky or Final Fantasy XIV moment in which games that stumble in the beginning get their shit together. Those are becoming less common, however, in an industry that invests millions of dollars into service games it’s unwilling to support longterm. Players, meanwhile, are growing tired of live games that feel like obvious ploys for their time and money at a time when both of those things are becoming more scarce and precious.
In our modern, post-patch world in which games sometimes launch broken and get fixed later, people are becoming more jaded to the notion of bad or just lackluster games becoming good ones months or years down the line. There are too many games to play to waste time on one that isn’t giving you what you want right out of the gate. Most live-service games are sent out to die, Blizzard just has the institutional resources and stubbornness to not let a game like Overwatch slip through the cracks. In the past decade, Overwatch has become a symbol of both the potential live games have to reach and even surpass their former glory, and the fact that only the biggest companies can afford to fail now.
I talk to friends who stopped playing Overwatch years ago and feel like I’m running up against versions of the game that haven’t existed in years. Age-old complaints that were long patched out or reworked still linger in their minds, or major overhauls merely exist as passing headlines they read once but never actually played for themselves.
© Blizzard EntertainmentLive games are kind of like the friend you had growing up that let you down in one way or another, and if you’ve gone no contact, you might not know they’ve turned their life around. But the people who left for slights from years ago are often defining the narrative about the state of the game just as much as the people who are still playing and know what the game is like now.
Whether it’s because actual competition in the form of Marvel Rivals and Deadlock showed up kicking Blizzard in the ass or because the Overwatch team has finally been able to rebuild itself after years of strife, Overwatch is in the best state it’s been in the past decade, and finally has a pipeline that is letting the team take massive swings like releasing ten heroes in one year and giving the story the momentum and direction it’s desperately needed, even if it’s not what we once thought we were getting. There will always be skin imbalances to complain about, “what ifs” to ponder, and potential it feels like Blizzard failed to live up to. But the game we have now is the best version Blizzard’s ever given us. I guess we’ll see if it’s enough to correct the narrative in the months and years to come.
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