Overwatch 2 is one of the loneliest multiplayer games I know (kinda rant)

When I start the game I am alone. No global chat, no "hub world" to walk around in with other people, just me and whatever promotional material is currently on the main menu.

When I queue for a game I am alone. No friends to invite and no way to queue with "like-minded" people.

When I am finally in a game, I am probably alone. People barely talk in text chat, much less in voice, and if somebody is even in VC at all you rarely hear more than a couple "Hello"'s in the beginning. Hell, even if I am typing in team chat there is a 5% chance anybody can even see it through all the ping/voice command "spam" that look like regular messages.

When the game ends, I am instantly alone. Everybody gets kicked out of the game, out of all the chats.

Overwatch 2 (started with the later half of OW1 though) has systemetically removed more and more means to be communicate with real people. LFG was removed, global chat was removed, games end way faster than originally and I believe VC is off by default, and you can't even copy-paste a friend code or username to add somebody in another program (although that last one is probably a good thing to avoid malicous links).

This is exacerbated by how few "pauses" OW has. There is near constant action, very little time to chill and type.

To me, this is completely insane. Which multiplayer game can you think of that has so few interactions between real humans? Much less a game that has hundreds of thousands players active? I swear that OW2 is getting carried hard in this aspect by OW1 because friendships have already been made, discords exists now for f2p people to join on, etc. But OW2 right now has barely any means to "just chat". Don't get me wrong, the gameplay is good and polished, but if I wanted to play a game by myself I can play a singleplayer game too, so OW2 should make use of its multiple players.

In contrast I can play a game that has literally less than 10 people online. Join a running match and when I say stupid things in VC I can see the other person type an "xD" in text chat or tell me to be quiet lol, at least it's something.

How do you all feel about this?

Personally I want to see some of the following additions to the game:

  • Re-add LFG
    • The difficult part here was moderation of the names I believe. This can be "fixed" with pre-existing tags, eg.:
    • "Unranked/Mytery Heros/Competitive/Custom Games" (Blizzard knows which game modes are available, just show those for selection)
    • "Mic only/optional"
    • maybe even "Few games / A lot of games or long session"
    • or "Serious/Chill" (for when somebody really wants to grind the battle pass or challenges in a certain gamemode, or wants to practise a new hero in competitive and won't take it as seriously (otherwise it happens anyway))
  • Highlight "real human" messages in team chat so it doesn't get lost in the sea of voice commands (like maybe make them a little brighter blue than normal, doesn't need much)
    • I often times only see that there are messages when there is a whole conversation, and then I often don't notice it at the beginning
    • Deadlock has a thing where messages appear in a speech bubble underneath the character's portrait on the top of your screens. It is a very simple thing that adds so much more to the game, much more than reading the fully spelled out word "(Reinhardt)" next to somebody's name in chat constantly. OW has a pve team UI, they could add it already if they really wanted to
  • Maybe set VC on again by default, or do it like battlebit and ask if the player wants to turn on/off VC the first time they launch the game.
  • Allow for people to continue text-chatting with the people from the last game
    • There is no global chat anyway, so this can "fill the void" after 1 game. This can lead to salt, but if you can leave or mute the chat like with VC it "can be fine". The only hurdle hear imo is how to display who is still in chat so you aren't talking to nobody without knowing it

Anything else to add while we are here?

Clan systems are a thing, but imo that is a much larger undertaking and should be added with more integration to the gamemodes (clan vs. clan?). I wanted to focus on relatively "simple" things that on their own already add a lot, it should not take a lot of effort to hlighlight people's real text messages.