Overwatch 2 players enjoying its latest update still have one major wish

Overwatch 2’s season 15 update, which added Perks and reintroduced loot boxes, among other things, has been out in the wild for two days now.

For the most part, players seem to be enjoying the additions, so much so that the game’s recent reviews on Steam went from Mostly Negative to Mixed, which is a big change for OW2 on that platform. And players speaking out on social media have had a mostly positive sentiment as well. But as always, no game is perfect, and some players who are pleased with the game’s new direction still have some wishes that they hope to be granted. One such wish is for battle passes to be permanently available, which is something that OW2’s top competitor Marvel Rivals introduced late last year.

“I understand that they want to keep some amount of exclusivity in order to give Battle Passes value, but there has to be a certain point where that becomes irrelevant,” one such player said in a Feb. 20 Reddit post. “Who is rocking skins from season 1 because they want to show off to players who weren’t around for that season? The logic they used to justify making mythics available for everyone applies just as much to regular skins.”

With battle passes always available to be leveled up and have their content like skins and other cosmetics free to be unlocked at any time, it removes the fear of missing out (FOMO) for many. But that does seem to be a common tool used by all sorts of companies these days when it comes to retaining players.

“FOMO is a hell of a marketing tool,” one gamer replied, noting how Blizzard probably has data backing up that sentiment. And while making old battle passes permanently available for players to unlock at their leisure, people in the Reddit thread also noted that it’s probably a business practice that loses the company money, at least in the short-term.

One thing does seem certain, though, and that’s that Marvel Rivals is applying pressure on OW2 in a contest to win players’ time and money in the free-to-play, live-service hero-shooter genre. Even OW2 director Aaron Keller recently said that the game “hasn’t evolved as much as it should have,” but the team is excited about the competition in the genre.

“We’re obviously in a new competitive landscape that I think, for Overwatch, we’ve never really been in before, to this extent where there’s another game that’s so similar to the one that we’ve created,” Keller said. “There’s actually something kind of exciting about this, for a few reasons. One of those is, it’s really great to see a game kind of take a different direction with some of the things you’ve kind of looked at before. But also, we think it’s a forcing function to our team – this is no longer about playing it safe. And I really think that seasons 15 and 16 are us not playing it safe.”

Will Blizzard hear player cries for battle passes that don’t expire? Stay tuned to see if Keller and co. at Blizzard continue to not play it safe, or stick with what it’s done thus far.