“The world could always use more heroes” — that was the famous line that launched the original Overwatch in 2016, so spare a thought for Blizzard’s technical support team as one of the year’s most anticipated releases was disrupted by internal and external issues.
Overwatch 2 was released free to play on October 4th and our team have been enjoying it even if it is, as our Overwatch 2 review says, “iterative, rather than groundbreaking.”
At launch many players found themselves stuck in queues to log in to the game, not unheard of for online games, but I personally encountered a daunting queue of 40,000 people in front of me. Being British I instantly jumped at the chance to get in line, and around ten minutes later I was signing in— only to be immediately kicked out by a ‘Login error’.
Blizzard is actively working on this issue and server teething troubles were inevitable with players also reporting frequent disconnections and server drops. But server issues are not the only problem facing Blizzard. The developer has confirmed that targeted DDOS attacks from hackers have been causing some of the issues, with President of Blizzard Entertainment Mike Ybarra confirming via Twitter that these have been causing issues.
Other known bugs are less of an obstacle to playing but still irritating. Many players have seen their collections of skins, emotes and other customizable items disappear along with their account’s hard-earned digital currency, all of which was meant to survive the transition to Overwatch 2.
With the original Overwatch servers now offline, gamers are left with no choice but to fight these issues, wait them out, or find something else to play. Console gamers should look no further than our guides on the best PS5 or Xbox Series X games of 2022 so far.
