The End Of Overwatch | Six Years In The Making 

I played Overwatch for about 3-4 years. I was so proud of myself for grinding up from silver to diamond. I still miss it and consider myself a fan despite not touching it in almost 3 years.

I've mained junkrat for 3 years and thats somehow the most creative insult that I've heard.

“OW didn’t die. 2016 died.” I felt that in my soul. RIP the good old days.

Oh man, I used to be all about Overwatch. I played the crap out of it. And then just...didn't. They started to change so much and it stopped being the game I loved playing.

"The Overwatch didn't die. The 2016 die" is the most fucking True thing about this game. Even considering I started playing it in 2017 when I was only 12, I felt that phrase. Unfortunatly, we can't bring back time when we was younger and happier. So sad. Anyway I think I'm gona visit Overwatch tomorrow, thanks to your video. And I'm a Junkrat and Mercy main. Hate me.

your content is consistently getting better and better, even with games I personally don't really care for you manage to make the videos entertaining it's impressive keep it up bbg

The "thing outta left field" that me and my friend does is nano valking mercy, and it gets like 2 or 3 elims every time

I definitely know what you mean about the fact that 2016 died. Like my fond memories of staying up super late on a warm summer night to play overwatch with my friends are over, and that's just something I gotta accept. Still, I'm glad it happened anyway and that Overwatch existed when it did, and I don't think there's anything wrong with the fact that it didn't last forever cause like... I don't think any multiplayer game is supposed to. Here's to all the future experiences I'll have and memories I'll make when the next multiplayer competitive game rolls around lol

I think what is was with my friends and I was that it just lost its charm for us. I still have vivid memories or me and my friends watching the newest trailer for the next hero or event. We ended up speculating about what would happen it the next event. But after echo since they stopped updating the game me and my friends had nothing to look forward to. While me and my friends have just recently came back to the game and are still having fun playing it. We just can’t get that charm back again. Although it does look like overwatch 2 is going to be very fun and eventful, me and my friends don’t really have the money to buy a game that is basically a free dlc.

Overwatch had such a high point before they decided they needed to balance everything around the competitive scene. Not just comp, but specifically the E-Sports and Grand Master level. Such a limited number of players sit up there that any problems they have likely arent felt by the brainlets of the lower echelons. Zen got a huge discord orb nerf after one player in the comp scene took home insane damage and healing numbers for the finals and they decidedly reverted the change since Zen was almost never impactful after that. There's other issues the game still has like Pharah being impossible to kill since hitscan is continuously nerfed because its too oppressive in high level gameplay but thats really it. If they focused on the majority crowd and not a minority consisting of less than 5,000 people out of their millions then it may still have a massive playerbase to this day

I’m loving all of the new comic comedy you’re putting in these new videos, it really spices everything up

Just found your channel and I have to say I love all the references you put in your content! It makes it so much more enjoyable to watch and gives a slight break from the more rant like feeling it gives and just pulls me back in with a quick laugh or a smile. Keep up the good work man love your stuff just subscribed and I hope to see more content from you!

About the toxicity: In the first ever comp match I played, it ended with me getting a dm full of salt

the fact that overwatch only ever had 1 MMR reset (a hidden one with the introduction of role lock) is reason alone for me to believe that A) they've never taken balancing seriously and B) don't actually care abt succeeding as a game but rather whatever will make then money if they cared abt success as a game worth playing then they'd have listened to their community at any step of the way past the brigitte release and also maybe would have employed basic balancing changes that didn't seem like they reached into the reddit grab bag and blindly chose some balance fixes

Love the content as always Rowby! Keep up the great work man!

OW is really fun at the higher levels, but I think its biggest issue is that Blizzard tends to not listen to the community on balance changes. OW2 looks promising, but my biggest worry with it is that the support role will just die out after people get tired of getting backlined every 5 seconds.

Unfortunately overwatch 2 really isn't the saving grace we had hoped for. I myself was praying that we would get massive changes with all sorts of new characters and game modes, but role queue is still here, attack and defense are still gone. And the game just doesn't feel like it has grown at all. It still feels like the same overwatch from the past 2 years

I'm glad you made this. I have a love hate relationship with this game and finally came back to it last week after about two years of a break

OW, the game I bought 3 different times, fell in love on Open Beta, gave up with Brigette, and has now become the game I download every few months for a few matches, shrug, then hop off. The best kind of games.

I loved this video dude, keep up the great work. Your hard work really payed off here

As a counter-strike boomer my friends and I liked to just stack Widowmaker. We stopped playing when they put hero limits in.

I remember the summer of 2017, me and a group of friends from school would play overwatch. We remember this time so fondly, Many great memories and laughed shared thanks to overwatch. As time went on we all slowly stopped playing overwatch but every now and then one of my friends will bring up those good times from 5 years ago and we all get to reminisce about those good memories. I was one of the last out of my friend group to stop playing overwatch, but I recently got back on with some friends and it’s been enjoyable .👍

I remember playing the first Plants vs Zombies Garden warfare game in 2014, and then playing it's sequel in February 2016. Then I heard of overwatch and thought they were copying the only shooter I every enjoyed (Their both basically the same). Then hammond released and solidified that thought in my head.

i stopped playing a few years ago when the game felt very unbalanced. i tried it again a few months ago when my friend said she couldnt think of anything new to play. its still really fun, the balancing does feel better, and i do recommend people give it another shot.

0:25 i'd mention Team Fortress 2- the game a majority of people thought was going to be killed by Overwatch- but then i remembered that we havent had an update since Overwatch released, so... edit: 0:47. Nevermind. You got it. Edit 2: I don't blame my own team when I lose. I blame the enemy. Yes, I am a tank main. How'd you know?

Ironically enough, I was one of the few people who enjoyed Overwatch content vicariously via RU-vid, and when I saw a sudden resurgence back in 2021, I finally picked it up. After 5 months of casually playing it on the side of mainstream games, I've enjoyed what little content is left in the game. People have their comparisons that the current events are nothing like the past but I could care less. Maybe that charm will fade like it did for me in DBD but for now I just hope Blizzard can get their stuff together for OW2. why do the most interesting games have the worst developer communication with the community :P

I wasn't playing right when it came out but I was playing in 2016 and found myself not playing it like you did as my friends moved on. But that was 3 or 4 years after it came out. I then got back into it like 8 months later and have been playing it since. Now I even get the chance to make content about it and play the beta. Your video was really well said and is almost completely relatable 👏

The year is 2017. You're in competitive, Eichenwalde. Last round, your team got absolutely steamrolled, you barely managed to capture the first point. Two of your teammates left. But hey you say, I have a plan. You pick Mercy, your friend Bastion. With a Reinhardt and Torbjörn, you hold the line, and somehow pull out a win. Overwatch wasn't perfect, everyone knows this, but there was just nothing else really like it. When it came to console, it was one of the first time you could actually communicate with a team and make a strategy. Nothing else really had that. You really hit the nail on the head with the whole "mini-sagas" that happened in the community. One good one I remember was the Mei-Wall Glitch in the 3v3 Ecopoint: Antartica map. Every game would be two wall hacking opponents with Bastions, Mei's and Junkrats trying to outplay each other out of bounds. I feel like so much negativity came from people taking the game seriously, where if you just played normally most of the time you'd have a good time. Because at the end of the day, what do people actually remember when they look back on things? Really great vid man, keep up the great work. It's cool to see the retrospective style not only talking about a game but the Zeitgeist of the time and community it was released in. Because especially with these types of games, they don't exist in a vacuum. They live on the hype, the updates, the community creators, the meta's, the "one trick for every hero", the memes, Jeff from the Overwatch team, the salt, and so and so forth. I really do wonder how Overwatch 2 is going to do. It'll definitely be interesting. Thanks for the flashbacks.

Nice video, brought back some good memories of 2016-19 where I played it, but I have to say, I feel bad for being a Reinhardt main after this, I mean I just wanted to protect the team and I thought I did an good job, I didn’t knew tanks where the problem

Holy shit I thought I was the only one who remembered “FINE GAME BITCHEEEES”. Damn I miss that channel…

The fact that people can take an end of a video game and always try to make it a fall from grace never sit right with me. Also that Anthem explanation hurt.

Alright, you got me, I don’t have a witty comment. That was just a great video. Maybe I should check my old buddy Overwatch out again soon.

Two things: tf2 isn’t a hero shooter (no powers/ults), and Overwatch isn’t meaningfully more toxic than other shooters. It’s been like this forever and likely will be. Also, a game dying doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful. It means it died. If it was stillborn and dead on arrival, it doesn’t really die; it is already dead.

This is definitely your best video. Funny and insightful, you should be proud, dude.

The core problem with Overwatch is that the game was designed by arrogant smoothbrains who think they know better than the actual players. It took them SIX YEARS to remove 2CP... and they still didn't take it out of Overwatch 1. If the devs realized they had to answer to the community-- 2CP would have been removed before 2017 rolled around. People already understood how stupid it was back in 2016. I was there, I know. There is just no excuse for Blizzard's level of arrogance and callous disregard for the changes the community really wants.

I find this so funny because I too stopped a bit after Doomfist was added. But the thing you mentioned about just randomly stopping one day and not returning, that happened with me and Apex. I went home for Spring Break and haven’t played Apex since.

You know my passion for this game left I still play it with friends

The whole rising hype around OW2 made me return to Overwatch after a 4 and a half year break. And I’ve been having a great time! Just very little stakes compared to the game that replaced it for me, R6 Siege

I loved the Scott VS The World movie referance at 12:42. Unfortunately I can't relate with this video because i havent played Overwatch in over at least 3 years

this is a positive way of looking at things. i like you

24:21 "Just because it over doesn't mean it was a bad thing" i totaly agree that not every game that looses relevance became terrible... _everything must come to an end, the drip finally stops_

my over all problem was that as a support main mainly mercy and brig not knowing when my hero that I mained would be nefed so hard that they come out as unplayable was what drove me away from this game even when all my friends left never to return.

OW was the bang for me and my friend group, we used to breathe this game, day, night, week in and out, you name it, and specially for me, someone that was aways the "second best" at everything in life, being called the best of our immediate group and in a lot of comp matches(even though we were pretty mediocre both in skill and in ranks) was so awesome for that small kid with no perspective back in the day, sadly with time everyone that I used to play moved on, and I stayed playing alone for some time, grinded even more since I didnt had to wait for my buddies to log on and without expecting achieved a rank that I couldnt think I could, but one day I stopped playing because of some personal issues, and ever since then, even when I really try, I dont get into the game anymore, of course play the stray recycled event every now and then, and also played the OW2 beta and found it awesome and refreshing, but in the end... well... maybe I feel that if nobody is playing with me, the game we used to, is it even worth it?

When he talks about 6 stack monkey and torb I thought he might have played against me and my friends

okay that kamakura joke was underated, it flashed by in an instant, but you get my props rowby

That creatures throwback caught me off guard and really hurt my feelings. Thanks 🙏🏻

7:43 no the frog will jump out when it gets too hot

You weren't around for brigitte meta oh you blessed soul

Great vid as always! Also did you just ship yourself… with yourself?

3:50 Wait, is healer NOT supposed to be a stressful nightmare? I only have experience with TF2 and Overwatch, and assumed it was that way with every team-based game.

I think the first time i hit masters I finally started to realize how much the game annoys me because it’s too team oriented, and all my friends hate the game. So i moved over to apex like almost all my friends who played overwatch and I’ve stuck to it for 3 years and somehow have more time in apex than overwatch now

Oh I wasn't expecting this

I played overwatch a lot and wound up being a grandmaster support player for a season before switching to tank and staying at the high masters area. Everything you said is exactly what happened to me. Over time I slowly fell into Diamond and then I kinda stopped caring about it. Around the same time Echo came out I went to…dead by daylight and Siege. Along with the game I have played since 2015 Smite. I was on my colleges Overwatch team and played other colleges during the Goats metta. But the game decided it would jo longer update and I lost fun in it. And with all my other friends doing the same thing…I just stopped. I hope overwatch 2 is good but I don’t have high hopes.

I played overwatch a ton, a relate heavily with you saying you feel like you burnt out on your grind to masters cause I was never more depressed in my life than when I was grinding to top 500. Punched several holes in my walls, was constantly yelling and blaming everyone, I was not myself at all. The competitive aspect of the game drove me mad. One night after punching a hole in my wall I took a look at myself, and all the PlayStation messages I’ve sent fuming at innocent players, and just quit. Right there on the spot, dropped the game in 2018 and told myself it wasn’t healthy for me. I came back to it in 2020 during the pandemic, and I had a lot of fun. I had a new perspective that “winning” was not the most important aspect and fun took priority. I could tell that everyone felt weaker and the game sorta became “diet overwatch”. I feel like the devs like you said would never buff anyone and would always nerf them till it didn’t feel like a hero shooter, but a shooter with different weapons and abilities. I firmly believe that if every hero was broken in a unique way the game would be more fun. I have hopes for ow 2, but from what I’ve seen it doesn’t justify the 3 years of absolute nothing the game has gotten. If they just kept the same pace we probably would’ve had like 20 maps and 3-5 heroes in that 3 years. Just 1 hero and daytime changes leave me feeling disappointed. Hope it gets better tho

i can relate to youyr experience alot. i played it from launch on ps4 and just like you said, another game just took my attention and i stopped playing. i actually got a friend of mine who stopped playing it back into it and got a friend who never played it to get it.

Great video.

This video is the story of my life joining in 2017, getting severely addicted, climbing to master and getting burned out of the try hard culture to the point that I throw myself down a couple ranks, moving to pc hoping for vindication, then taking a break and now rapidly trying to catch up with the new meta changes. I now actively fight against the meta in my fight to have fun in a game that took some many hours of my life and changed my entire perspective on video games.

YESSS ROWBY VIDEO

By your own metric, having a parity in numbers with TF2, is damning of the future of the game. TF2 came out almost a decade before OW and its last major update has been almost further away than OW launch... Bury it and move on, TF2 only has staying power because of the community and more casual focus.

I appreciate the arby n chief snippet. a bygone era

Well, as a tank player I'm embarrassed when I look at some of my bros. Like mercy cannot heal u faster if u forgot. But tbh we have so little to choose and sometimes tanks cancel each other especially on lower ranks. It can drive a man crazy.

the unit lost bit killed me, that was pretty much me and Your overwatch lol

....this video had me thinking about OW so bad that I just got it on PC. A lot of fun to come back, especially with no voice chat 😁

Wow can't believe overwatch is keeping up with a game made in 2007

good video. i'm gonna go be sad about the passage of time now.

When Anna came out I played her daily and got stupid good at her. Like I found my name near the top of leaderboards for about a month. I was in between middle and highschool and had too much free time. Then semester started and I couldn't grind like 8 hours a day and fell off hard. Slowly transitioned to tank main, got hardstuck in platinum and eventually got bored.

This video is awesome but in my honest opinion with all the changes to the game I won't ever come back to Overwatch. They kept nerfing McCree and renamed him Cassidy(ew.....). They forced role queues which I strongly hated and now I have to make a blizzard account to play it which is irksome as hell.

Honestly great video, you clearly love this game and spend a fuckton of hours in it. Good takes non stop, can't agree on the balancing ones but thats just minor details. keep up the good work man

i like how they gave rienhart a dragon blade as his normal weapon and thought it was fine

Loved the vid dude and I’ve never played overwatch, you mentioned rainbow a couple times would be sweet to get a jerks guide to rainbow six

The most memorable thing I've done in overwatch is win every hide & seek server

Honestly as someone who has played the Beta of OW2 I have to say the changes to the tanks is really good to the overall experience. It reduces the overpowering force of tanks by having the tanks be more focused on displacing the enemies and making space. Along with this they removed most non tank stuns (only exception is Ana’s sleep) which basically means tanks are less likely to get bullied relentlessly whenever they have to play their role. It makes it playing tank more fun especially for tanks that were fucked over by the new characters in OW1 like Winston and DVA. I’m curious if you got the chance to try it out, hopefully you’re enjoying it

I feel so old

I used to LOVE Overwatch with a passion. I built a PC rig so I could play it. I reunited with many old friends and there was a golden age of my life where I played the shit out of it. When I fell out with my friends I dropped off on playing overwatch. Around 2020 I revisited it for a while as a last hurrah of sorts but I think it’s safe to say I’ll never go back. Between Blizzard’s controversies and the fact that Overwatch 2 is basically a glorified DLC insures that I’m probably never going to play it again. It’s a shame. Made some fond memories on that game.

2016 was such a great year for me. I was a longtime blizzard fan and looking forward to the new Legion expansion for WoW, which turned out to be the best and most fun I’ve ever had in modern wow. It came out a few months after overwatch, and I’d repeatedly cycle between playing those two games throughout the week with my friends. I miss it

I love your content but I won't ever go back to Overwatch. Or buy another Activision Blizzard game ever again.

5:05 Ouch. That hurt.

i have been playing for near every day, ever since the first beta released on console, and even as a migrated to pc, i kept playing it to this day. I'm playing the ow 2 beta now as well. I'm still stuck in plat.

I never really stopped playing so overwatch is the reason for my depression

OW launched in 2016, the same year that the hit asymmetrical horror game called Dead by Daylight launched, the best game of all time.

Overwatch never died, it just started losing speed, so it hid itself in a cocoon to be reborn as OW2

GM Lucio player for 4 seasons here and it was today when I noticed there was an actual meter for being on fire… 😐

This video is a comedic masterpiece

dumped 2200+ into this game before i deleted it, real shame what they did to it

When overwatch 2 officially comes out you should make a how to play/how to counter bastion video

1:30 Im just glad im not the only one, i loved that channel XD

As someone who got into overwatch as my first shooter and first ever competitive gaming experience I loved the game when it first released. I got into it a bit late and spend my first year grinding out genji on a small laptop with 35fps but it was my first game that I actually tried to be good at. Its a bit weird to me that so many people hate systems like hero lock and role queue because as someone who played 95% competitive I think those changes made the game so much more fun. I guess its because I never had a large friend group to play the game with so I almost always took it seriously. I also followed the Overwatch league ever since 2019 which kept me up to date with the game even if I started to drift away from it since Valorant released. Its still my first fps love and I have only ever got burnt out on the game once in which I left for a few months and then came back enjoying the game even if it was just casual at that point. I'm excited for OW2 because I feel like the PvP doesn't need to be completely overhauled, just re-defined. My only major concern is how giving so much agency to tank players will make competitive matches more coinflipy. I already experienced it a lot in ow1 (I was 2900-3100 for most of my time playing. The most coin-flip rank in the game.) but in the beta having your tank player a crayon eating titan main causes the game to completely fall apart and makes it basically uncarryable from a DPS perspective. I think there is a lot more dps impact when your tanks are on even footing but its the one role that is super reliant on the player being at least decent, which isn't always the case in ranked.

I used to spend all day playing OverWatch on my PS4. I loved the game and my time allowed me to just sit on it everyday. But I recently turned 18 and I'm about to leave for college. Not only is the game too taxing for me, but I just don't have the time for it anymore, even if I wanted to come back and play.

I mean I had fun with the game, I think what made me stop was all the allegations against Blizzard. I can’t play the game in good spirits anymore but I also started other games so

5:25 once I tried playing Junkrat, someone drops on me, I'm practically dead but because panic pressed M1 & Shift + M2 I survived and I just said "fuck it I'm taking that kill no arguing coming from me"

I have 1000+ hours on junkrat and play from the open beta days. The game is still super fun to me.

Overwatch 2 is not Overwatch *2*. It’s Overwatch *1.5*. There’s 3 new heros (as of now) and you have to buy the battle pass to unlock them. Blizzard somewhat sealed oberwatches tomb on this one with corporate greed.

When they changed the entire matchmaking system (no, not the role queues, but the rework of the casual/comp split) I quit. People who played casual, weren't casuals. They were comp players that got to a higher rank than what they realistically are through carries/luck who didn't want to lose their digital "world's largest cock" award. The push for esports & all balancing being focused on that didn't help either. Why would I play a game if I can't even have just a casual bit of fun anymore in the CASUAL gamemode?

When OW came out that was the year Bo3 come out. I left for siege when that came out. Left siege for destiny 1, left that for titanfall 2 but then went back to overwatch

"I dont understand what causes games to stay alive", its pretty simple really, it all depends on replayability, which relies on content being played, and content can only be played if it is viable in the meta and if there is new content, so games must make sure all their content is balanced while also adding new stuff to the game, there's no point in adding something to a game that is so bad that no one wants to play it, thus not adding replayability to the game in the case of overwatch, they simply haven't added anything new or interesting to the game, no skill trees, no increase in the complexity, no increased number of playstyles, its still very simple and very limited

I agree so much with the thing about wanting to have a chill game where you can just respawn. Btw overwatch 2 is still a thing and is basically a free update to overwatch 1, they tried to rework a lot of heroes and reduce the impact of shields to the point that Orisa no longer has a shield at all. Bastion also no longer can heal himself and the turret is now a limited time ability and it can move like the tank ultimate. Mei can no longer freeze but deals way more damage.

I miss screaming "FOR THE EMPEROOOOR!!" While reinhardt charging some one off a cliff :/

"Overwatch didn't die, 2016 died" Jesus christ dude... I was NOT ready for that one...

I think league is also a good example of a game not dying. The damn game is on the 12th season and still growing

i still play overwatch i started playing it in 2019