With A Week Till Launch, 'Overwatch 2' Removes General Chat From Game In Latest Controversial Move

September 27th, 2022 - 4:27 PM EDT by Brandon Wink

13 comments | Contact Newsroom

OW2 promo artwork and the announcement of gen chat being removed.

With a week to go before players are able to start playing the highly anticipated sequel to Overwatch, some drastic changes are already being made to the video game. General chat, which has long served as a catchall chat room for almost all players of online games, is being removed from Overwatch 2 after the developers called it unnecessary to the core functions of gameplay.

This made a lot of gamers unhappy, as general chat within games was seen as an absolutely necessary thing to many, essentially being required to ensure that a sense of community formed within the game, albiet before Discord became a thing. Now, it seems, general chat is considered more harmful than beneficial by the devs, creating a wave of sadness to spread across parts of the veteran gamer community.


However, a notable portion of players was also happy with this change, citing previous examples of harassment that were dished out via in-game chat channels and supposedly never taken care of, leading some to proclaim that removing general chat is good, but removing all in-game chat channels would be better.

However, completely removing the in-game chat, which is something that can be turned off within OW2 entirely for both voice and text chat, would seemingly go against the competitive team-based vision of the game, with people being unable to attempt to communicate with each other on shared goals and objectives.


This change came as a small part of many other contentious decisions, with one of the biggest overall changes being that in order to queue up for ranked, over 50 games of quick-play would have to be won, ensuring that spambots can't enter ranked, as well as guaranteeing that anyone in ranked at least has some level of competency or patience to them.

Also included was news that not every hero will be available on launch to new players, which was not the case with Overwatch 1, naturally leading to some heated reactions as the release date on October 4th draws near.



Top Comments

polandgod75
Delete
Sensitive
polandgod75

Blizzard: Removes general chat (something that basically needed in a TEAM BASED GAME) because of some toxic people will use it

Blizzard: Has a work environmental that really misogynistic and hunted down anyone that criticism of the tyranny of china.

+6
Reply

+ Add a Comment

Comments (13)


Display Comments

Add a Comment


Namaste! You must login or signup first!