Getting Back Into Overwatch - Revisiting the Game After a Two Year Hiatus

It's no secret that we here at Too Much Gaming have spent hundreds of hours playing Blizzard's hero shooter, Overwatch. But as with most things, interest wanes and we move on to other games that demand our attention.

This doesn't mean that I've outright dropped the game. After playing Overwatch almost non-stop since its release for almost 2 years on two different platforms, it became something that I'd at least boot up once or twice during an event to claim a free loot box here and there or try out a new character either in beta or release but I haven't fully gotten the urge to play the game since that initial run.

As mentioned, the only reason I would boot up Overwatch nowadays is to try my luck at the gacha game for an event exclusive character skin. The culprit this time being Pharah's new Lifeguard outfit. I was never much of an FPS mark but I played Quake 3 back in the day and rocket launchers are fun. Naturally leading to Pharah being my go-to DPS character.

When my gacha luck didn't play out for the free event lootbox given upon your first login, I thought to try to grind some wins in order to earn the weekly lootbox rewards. Having not played for the past 2 years, I was fully expecting to do terribly and get yelled at by my rando solo-queued teammates. To my surprise, the fundamentals that I've learned over all of my past games never really left me. Playing the barrier game as Zarya with our Reinhardt was working as well as I remembered. I was still getting decent picks with my DPS favorites in most games. And I still remembered how to properly play support, at least for the most part. The rust was there but there was a sense of comfort that enveloped me as I played. It was almost as if I never left.

As I cycle through the different characters both new and old, being fully aware that I haven't followed any of the patch notes and changes since my hiatus, my mind would break when I would discover how things have been reworked. I was still present during some of the more major tweaks, like the Mercy changes, but absent for the Torbjorn overhaul. But it was some of the smaller buffs that made my jaw drop. The biggest example was discovering that Junkrat can now hold 2 remote mines. That may not sound like much but for a person who was a scrubby Junkrat main for a good portion of their early Overwatch career, that's a huge change.

You heard the lady.

I personally find it difficult to play for long stretches of time. Most of my gaming sessions over the past few years average at around 2 to 3 hours at most before fatigue begins to set in. If I do exceed those hours, I'm usually still very conscious of my game time. It takes a special type of game to make me ignore all of that and then just realize only after the fact that I've been playing non-stop. It's safe to say that Overwatch has yet again ruined my sleep schedule.

It’s hard for me to say if this game will hook me in again the way it did before. I might very well stop playing the moment I obtain that Lifeguard Pharah skin or I might just keep going. Only time will tell. For now, it's good to be back.

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