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.

Overwatch 2 New Update "General Chat" Deleted 💬

General chat doesn’t serve a productive purpose, and it could be removed without compromising the core mechanics of the game. Other chats will remain in-game for players to use.

👉https://t.co/AyFoEMSGGb pic.twitter.com/ttFKQfL62c

— Naeri X 나에리 (@OverwatchNaeri) September 27, 2022

Lads I'm in ruins, Overwatch 2 is removing general chat as it dosent interfere with "core mechanics of the game".

So what about those heroes in the battle pass lmao pic.twitter.com/wunt65hjjA

— Stylosa (@Stylosa) September 27, 2022

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.

My 50 cent on if you should spend some money on Overwatch 2:

I made like 10 reports in September @Blizzard_Ent for players who harass and attack female players in voice and open chat, guess how often Blizzard takes action? pic.twitter.com/X2DoLLeTFb

— Ralf Singh (@SinghRalf) September 23, 2022

Honestly I'd be OK with Overwatch 2 going further and even getting rid of in-game chat. It's 99% either toxic crying or bad attempts at teamwork. Practically never useful.

— Mike Minotti (@Tolkoto) September 27, 2022

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.

🚨 ALL OVERWATCH 2 NEWS:
- Defence Matrix Initiative
- SMS protect
- Machine learning anti-cheat
- Logging audio transcripts
- First time players don’t have access to all heroes.
- 50 unrated wins to unlock Competitive
- No more general chat
- Hiding all ranks in game

— Warn 🦊 (@WarnTV) September 27, 2022

Requirements to enter Competitive mode are changing with Overwatch 2!

New Players will now need to WIN 50 Games of Quick Play 🏆 pic.twitter.com/CzBRxW07z6

— Overwatch Cavalry 🇬🇧 (@OverwatchCaval) September 27, 2022

I get the new player onboarding experience but "new people who join in Overwatch 2 have to unlock all the original OW1 heroes" is an extremely bad look lmao

— Kawashima Ami (@BitchyAmi) September 27, 2022

i think its really really funny that blizzard is literally forcing people to buy overwatch 2 if they want to continue playing overwatch and then they're making them start from scratch to unlock heroes. and people are going to pay 70+dollars for it regardless

— gal incognito (@bsmygod) September 27, 2022