10(ish) games for the 2010s pt 4

#7: Overwatch
	It was 2015 and I was at Pax East for the first time.  It was like Mecca for me.  There were hundreds upon thousands of people walking around, just here to enjoy video games.  I obviously knew there was a community of gamers, but this event struck that home for me.  It was the most religious experience I had ever felt.  But I’m not here to talk about how great that event was.  I’m here to talk about this Blizzard game that was there.

	At Pax East that year there was a big-ass Overwatch exhibit which, to be frank, I didn’t care about because it had a massive line and waiting in line is for squares.  Plus, there was Riichi Mahjong to play.  But one of my good friends at the time kept urging me to play it.  Unfortunately I was running on a 5 year old laptop at that time which could barely run anything.  So in the summer of 2016, I finally got a new PC, bought and downloaded Overwatch.

	On its own, Overwatch was fine for a good while.  Like most games, I turned to the support characters because healing is OP (seriously, if you play a cleric in a game I DM, I hate you) and the easy healers were fun to play and pretty strong.  Eventually, they released Moira who I absolutely adored and played religiously.  All in all, the game was fine… until they released Brigette, who was absolutely cancerous.  Damage, CC, Healing, Armor, even Moira only got two of those.  After a few weeks of non-stop Brigette I pretty much quit Overwatch, only playing with friends occasionally since then, and I haven’t touched the game since I started playing Warframe.

	Beyond the weird spiral I had with Overwatch, the game was instrumental in the new wave of game monetization with Loot Boxes.  If you play any F2P game (and many multiplayer games that aren’t free) you’ll be given the “opportunity” to dump cash into a slot machin- I mean a fun experience to try and get rare items.  By dropping this in a pretty well received game, the floodgates were opened for every two-bit developer looking to make quick cash to just dump loot boxes into their games

	What does Overwatch tell us?  Mostly that people will endure anything today… up to a point.  Micrtransactions in a $60 game?  That’s small talk nowadays, especially for non-game impacting ones.  Completely broken playing styles?  Hey, as long as it’s mine.  But there’s a breaking point for everything.  I've found my breaking point with Overwatch and the mainstream games industry.  Let’s see if other do too.