Overwatch 2 Botched Launch

Blizzard Has Apologised For Overwatch 2’s Botched Launch

It's not been good so far.

Earlier this week, Overwatch 2 developers apologised for what they called a rocky start, but the game has remained plagued by misfortune after misfortune since, seriously harming the free-to-play’s reputation, less than a week after its official launch.

It started with a pair of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that prevented players from joining active servers during the launch because they were already populated to capacity by malicious traffic. This caused prospective players to sit in queues for hours and hours, sometimes behind tens of thousands of other players, while others failed to connect to Overwatch 2’s online services entirely.

Meanwhile, many players who had successfully managed to bypass the absurd queues experienced missing or mistakenly locked cosmetics, inaccurate match history data and buggy cameras; issues that fans feel should not have made it all the way to launch day.

Finally, on the list of unmitigated Overwatch 2 related pain in the ass; Blizzard’s new security requirements. During the login process, players were required to provide a mobile number to correspond with their account to, in Blizzard’s words, help cut down on ‘both cheating and disruptive behaviour’. This new two-factor authentication process, however, caused a serious barrier for players who were rejected for using pre-paid mobile service providers and for players who don’t have an active mobile number at all.

Fortunately, the profound backlash from players means that Blizzard has since scrapped the whole phone number thing entirely and is working, seemingly around the clock, to fix the other issues that have been disappointing and frustrating players since day one. While it has evidently been somewhat of a dumpster fire of a launch, it is worth noting that millions of players have been able to log into Overwatch 2 and that many of them are enjoying the reinvigorated format and new playable characters.

In a post on Blizzard’s forums, the company said: “First, we want to apologize to our players. We expected the launch of Overwatch 2 to go smoothly. We hold ourselves to a higher standard and we are working hard to resolve the issues you are experiencing.”

You can find a full list of the issues they’ve already noted and what they’re fixing HERE.

We spent some time with Overwatch 2 before its launch, applauding the new maps and game modes but addressing the lack of innovation in a title that feels a lot more like a major update than a sequel. You can read the full review right here.