There is now a new way to play Overwatch 2: just aim at the general direction of the enemy. Thanks, Blizzard.
Season 9 of Overwatch 2 was dropped a few days ago and some players have noticed some bizarre changes coming from the developer team that is responsible for balancing the game out. While some bizarre changes came along recently, they were altered quickly due to backlash coming from the players. To their credit, they were right, getting a healing boost for every hero in the roster does make healing classes redundant while making tanks rather strong on their own.
Now the balance change in Season 9 comes from not heroes, but how heroes play. As we all know, a first-person shooter completely relies on a person’s ability to aim at the targets on a screen. Seems like the Overwatch 2 balance team decided that people shouldn’t get away with having skills and made the hitboxes of the enemies bigger than how they look. This unfortunately results in obvious problems in balance for Overwatch 2 as people now do not need to aim precisely at the enemy hitbox but rather generally look at the enemy instead.
The change heavily favors the heroes that dish out high damage with headshots or have an attack in the size of a huge projectile. Heroes like Cassidy or Ana benefit from it due to headshots and people seem to have noticed a big change with landing headshots. Overwatch 2 had a rough start from the beginning, with the cancellation of the PvE mod to unreasonably expensive skins in the market, it still makes its player base question why Blizzard is making such decisions.
Funnily enough, this is not the first time ever that a player base complained about the size of a projectile not being matched with how it seems. A few years ago, an unlock in Team Fortress 2 by the name of Iron Bomber, had a bigger projectile hitbox than the projectile itself. It would usually lead to getting hit around the corner without seeing the projectile or a shot being completely missed being a hit instead. This issue was later on fixed to give the proper hitbox by Valve.
The difference here is the fact that Blizzard has made all the classes have an easier time hitting shots, whether it is a hit-scan or a projectile-based hero. In Team Fortress 2’s case, it was an unlock for a class and it only affected that weapon, whereas Overwatch 2 could have its meta changed because of it. It is most likely that Blizzard will have to go for an alternative route if the community keeps posting about the change of hitboxes in social media, which happens to be the hottest topic on certain platforms nowadays.
