The first installment of Overwatch brought with it a $60 price tag, lootboxes earned by leveling up or playing arcade game modes, and a virtual treasure trove of cosmetics to unlock. That's why the disappointment was palpable when Overwatch 2 adopted a battle pass system with very little opportunity to unlock skins. The in-game currency was effectively gone unless you purchased it in the shop, and buying enough for a new skin meant shelling out a good deal of real money. Grinding the battle pass was barely worth it if you paid for it; free-to-play players unlocked even less.
Realistically, not everyone is an inherently competitive person. Grinding ranked games and training yourself through untold hours of practice isn't for every single member of the Overwatch player base (and with the recent ranked system that has required change after change to allow players to climb, even highly competitive players seem disillusioned with the game mode lately). Casual players require a different incentive to play frequently and keep coming back season after season, and skins help fill that void.
The power of FOMO is an incredible motivator, and I'm not just saying that because I once played for eight hours straight just to get the Mei-rry skin (it was a dark time.) Half the fun of Overwatch used to be trying to 100% your main's cosmetics, and now that's nearly impossible unless you have deep pockets. Removing the chance to work towards free cosmetics hampers the game's playability for people who like to have a visual representation of their progress — and people who just like when their characters look pretty.
At least Blizzard is starting to right this wrong. Season 3 will reintroduce Credits — and that could very well begin to bring the original Overwatch's player base back into the fold. Players can now earn up to 1500 Credits through the free battle pass and an additional 500 Credits with the paid one.
It's a good start that the Credits are skewed so that free-to-play players can earn the bulk of them, but the system still isn't perfect. Season 3 also reduces the price tag of Legendary skins to 1500 Credits, but even with this cost change, that shakes out to one new Legendary skin a season if you manage to grind the battle pass fully. On top of that, only Legendary skins from the original Overwatch are available to purchase with Credits; Overwatch 2 skins are, more than likely, still locked behind a paywall. While this system seems geared towards players who didn't have the chance to earn those skins in Overwatch 1, or original players who are looking to fill the gaps in their collections, it still doesn't fix the bulk of the issue: the actual payoff for all those hours of gameplay is still minimal.
This is absolutely a step in the right direction for the Overwatch team, but there's still a ways to go before the fan base is happy. A good deal of the original player base would have preferred the $60 price tag up front to a free-to-play game with a battle pass system, and until that feeling is alleviated, the game just won't be quite the same as it used to be.
Still, these changes are promising — they bring with them the hope that our voices are being heard, and that, eventually, Overwatch 2 will recapture some of the magic of the original we loved.