Overwatch: Classic makes me come to terms with the fact that the OG Overwatch kind of sucks, but also that Blizzard can learn a few lessons from it

Maybe Overwatch was bad. Maybe 2016 was a fluke, and Blizzard’s hero shooter isn’t worth spending the next eight years of my life on for 3,000 hours. When the OG Roadhog got hijacked from another planet or Mei got frozen, I wondered why I even thought this game had one all those years ago.

But then I get into a match where I’m Roadhog or May, and the quirks of old Overwatch become a reminder of what it was like before the drastic balance changes destroyed much of its charm.

Overwatch: Classic quickly ripped off my rose-colored glasses. It only took a couple of matches to get killed by three tanks or wiped out by Widowmaker shooting across the map to realize I was remembering a completely different game. Blizzard wouldn’t even let me blame it on the small inaccuracies in Overwatch’s gameplay since it was on launch day. Not only are each character in the same state they started in—Mercy resurrects the ultimate back and D.Va dies from her own mech explosion—but it’s also inexplicably ~~mistakes~~ techniques like The ledge of Genji also returned.

Esports writer and shit writer Bonnie Ku said it best: “If they released OW: Classic to make us realize how much better we have it now, it worked discreetly.” That’s what I thought when playing Roadhog and getting hit by every type of bullet in the game just trying to catch someone with my grappling hook. It doesn’t matter if you’re a tank, every hero explodes as soon as a team targets them. Overwatch 2 may seem underwhelming as a support, but the complete lack of healing and lifesaving abilities in Overwatch: Classic makes everyone surprisingly fragile.

When you don’t have heroes that fly and slide like in Overwatch 2, everything takes longer.

And the lack of mobility in the register slows the pace of the game to a crawl. When you don’t have heroes that fly and slide like in Overwatch 2, everything takes longer. But if you take too long out of cover, you’re toast. In Overwatch: Classic, it’s much more important to time your moves because the punishment for mistakes is very fast, which means that if you watch these matches from a bird’s eye view, the heroes move like chess pieces. As Roadhog, I had to mentally go through a checklist of things that could kill me before I took a step. You can imagine how hard it is when there are six heroes to keep track of, each with cooldowns that I can’t quite remember.

Part of me thinks that the MOBA-like complexity that Overwatch used to have is kind of beautiful. There’s still something deeply satisfying about playing Mercy and swooping in to resurrect three of your teammates while enemies are busy escaping your May’s mini-blizzard. Or being Zaria who knows exactly when to protect her tank from certain death to charge her gun and melt the entire enemy team. Any small decision can lead to a big impact that can change the entire match.

Then you screw up one of those decisions and watch helplessly as the enemy team takes turns raking your corpse with dirt. Overwatch: Classic’s hard-hitting rock-paper-scissors is the reason why Blizzard scrapped the original game and replaced it with a faster, smoother sequel. Simple things like allowing Roadhog to move and heal himself at any time, or allowing Mercy to shorten her flight and shoot in a different direction, make Overwatch 2 a much more intuitive game.

Overwatch: Classic could be a nightmarish reminder of what we had.

The cost, of course, takes away from how expressive Overwatch was. You won’t get a hero like D.Va with the ability to remove projectiles from the air in a game where simply shooting your enemy first will solve the problem faster. Overwatch was originally intended to be a tactical FPS, so Overwatch 2 could soften those ideas for players who can’t be bothered to learn every ability interaction to have fun. I think Overwatch 2 has gone too far, especially with the remakes of heroes like this sombra and new modes like Clash, but I can see how we got here. Overwatch 2 is simply a game that’s easier to pick up and play, and you don’t have to worry about following all the rules.

But I kind of miss some of those rules now that I’ve played Overwatch: Classic. I miss powerful ultimates more than twice a match; I miss the thought of it being a second before your Mercy revives your team for another push; I’m missing more than one tank on my side. Overwatch: Classic may be a nightmarish reminder of what we had before, but it’s also a great example of what Overwatch 2 has been missing for the past two years, something I hope Blizzard takes note of.