I appreciate this is late, but there are legitimate reasons behind such lack of urgency, mainly around much uncertainty surrounding the future of Overwatch, and more specifically, what exactly Overwatch 2 would look like from a trophy list perspective.
It turns out, Overwatch 2 never got a brand new list after all, and the trophies for Overwatch 2 were a mere DLC continuation of this list, with tweaks made to the existing Overwatch trophy requirements for it's heroes - which has been symbolic of this game's life cycle.
Overwatch has been an interesting game to tackle and I'm going to review the Platinum trophy as well as the accompanying DLC packs that came with it all in one go, which is fitting for a game which has been somewhat unique in it's journey towards full completion.
Most of the challenges within the Overwatch trophy list don't necessarily stem from the trophies themselves, but are more to do with the infrastructure of the game and how this has evolved over time throughout it's lifespan.
This isn't a game I intended to finish this suddenly, but building up to the release of Overwatch 2, there was alot of speculation over how Blizzard was going to handle the trophy list of Overwatch 1, and after numerous flings with this game over the years, I felt the best course of action was to just dive in and grab the outstanding trophies, leaving nothing to chance.
For full disclosure, the main reason I'm rating this trophy list the maximum score possible is because I've done something I've never done before - Openly boost portions of the trophy list in organised boosting events.
I've always been a big advocate of giving games an honest shot, regardless of their difficulty, and I did do this with Overwatch. I managed to unlock the majority of trophies just naturally playing through the game and fulfilling their requirements in organic fashion, but there are alot of trophies that I feel are way beyond realistic expectations of most players in their requirements, and some of the changes Blizzard made to the design of this game became big barriers for trophy hunters, which I will elaborate on throughout this piece.
The notable trophies in this instance will simply be the ones I had to boost, and whilst these are by no coincidence also some of the hardest trophies in the list anyway, being bound by both time constraints and some awkward game design features, I felt this was the best way forward in the interest of full completion.
The main reason I'm bundling the DLC packs into this piece is purely because everything that can be said about the Platinum trophy is fully applicable to the DLC packs, which are just hero specific trophies for the batch of new characters that were added to the game post-release. They suffer the same challenges as everything else in the main list, so we can easily group them all together.
Overwatch is a Multi-Player only, First Person Shooter (actually referred to as a "Hero Shooter") with over 30 different playable characters, each with their own unique set of weapons, tactics and special moves. Game modes vary from escorting a Payload from point A to B and capturing specific zones on the map, all surrounded by fast and frenetic, run and gun gameplay.
The cast of characters is vast and adds tons of personality to the game, and each and every one of them brings something different to the table that keeps the game fresh and full of variety. Along with a unique graphics style, it all combines to make Overwatch an excellent title.
The main trophy list is large in size and contains 60 trophies, including the Platinum Trophy. Both DLC packs add a combined total of 22 additional trophies, with 12 and 10 respectively for each new pack, so this is a huge list all in all.
Of these 82 trophies, a massive 64 of these are dedicated to the 32 playable heroes in the game, with each hero having 2 hero-specific trophies in this list. The rest of the trophies are for random feats that can mostly be earned naturally through just playing out games, and these aren't really the main talking point here.
Before I go on to discuss the game design, previously mentioned for being the biggest challenge in regards to this trophy list, it is important to note that these hero-specific trophies themselves lie across an incredibly broad spectrum in their difficulty scale. Some of them are very achievable and some of them are incredibly tough and you can definitely make a strong argument for the Platinum difficulty rating being high enough without further consideration to anything else purely due to the requirements of some of these trophies in the main list. Some of the DLC trophies are even worse, and actually border impossible.
Time constraints aside, I could have sat here forever and not achieved some of these trophies, such are the unrealistic expectations of their requirements, and I would actually go as far to suggest they somewhat ruin the game, especially if you're of a trophy hunting disposition.
However, that's just the tip of the iceberg here, and as previously eluded to, Overwatch is a game that has changed alot over time, and not necessarily for the better in context of trophy hunting.
For starters, some of the trophy requirements have been altered over time. This hasn't happened with all of them, and in all honesty, I don't know the level of regularity this has occurred across the entire list, but I do know the conditions for these trophies have been tweaked in accordance with ongoing game updates to the characters in the game, and thus, it makes true analysis somewhat implausible.
If you'd already achieved the trophy under a previous condition, then this wouldn't have any impact, though just to add some extra confusion, the trophy description would still change and reflect it's most recent form, but I have no idea if some of these requirements made these trophies more difficult compared to their previous iterations or not.
Purely going by their achievement rate, some of these trophies I unlocked legitimately seem to be fairly rare, but did they become more rare because there was an adjustment that made them more challenging to accomplish? Or were they always a challenging trophy straight out of the box? I'm sure I could put together some very detailed analysis on this and draw some conclusions if I really wanted to, but the complexity of that punctuates this point nicely when it comes to reviewing trophy lists.
Secondly, one of the big changes Overwatch made to it's game design was the Hero queuing system.
When the game was first released, players had a freedom of choice amongst the entire character cast to choose whoever they wanted to use without restriction. This would sometimes create balance issues if the majority of players on the team decided to choose a certain class of character, of which there are 3 (Tank, Damage and Support).
They eventually changed this and made it a mandatory requirement to split teams of 6 into 2 of each role, and as a direct consequence of this, introduced a queueing system. If you want to play as a Tank or Support class, it's roughly a 2 minute wait, however, if you want to play as a Damage class, the wait times would be within the 15-20 minute time period.
I understand why they had to change this. If nobody wanted to choose a healing character, for example, the balance of the team suffers and you'd more than likely play out alot of uncompetitive games, but from a trophy hunting perspective, it's an absolute nightmare to have to queue for potentially 20 minutes, just to be able to choose a character you needed trophies for, and then to also face the possibility of not achieving the trophy you needed within that game. The game also does not have any lobby continuation, so after every game, you're thrown back to the main menu and have to join into the queue again, repeating this process.
This was a big driver for exploring boosting options. I didn't have the time to waste sitting in queues just to be able to attempt the trophies I needed for damage characters knowing that every time I was unsuccessful, I'd have to burn another 20 minutes in a queue waiting for another go at it.
Finally, in another game feature that was changed further down the line, each hero is restricted to a single presence per game, so if you need trophies for a particular hero, but someone else chooses that hero and doesn't change, you don't have any options other than to hope they switch, which can also feel like you're wasting your time. Imagine queuing for 20 minutes, getting into a game and then someone else chooses the character you wanted to obtain the trophies for.
This is another deal-breaker for trophy hunters, and there was a time when players could choose to be the same character. Again, I understand why these changes had to be made, and developers only ever have the best interest of the overall gaming experience at heart, but it still doesn't make these points any less valid speaking from a trophy hunters point of view.
These all combine to make for a series of fairly challenging obstacles to overcome as a trophy hunter, and it is really difficult to assess this list speaking individually about certain trophies when these game design issues are the true barriers to completion.
Is this a difficult list anyway? I would say so. It has some extremely challenging trophies I don't think I would have realistically achieved irrespective of spending half my entire time with this game sitting in queues wating to actually play it, and that does still count for something here amongst all of this, so it's important to not lose sight of that.
It's difficult to nail down an overall completion time because the varied spectrum of difficulty and luck-based circumstances you need to find yourself in, in order to unlock some of the trophies within this list, is vast. Not to mention the amount of time you will accumulate waiting in queues to get into games along the way. Even if it wasn't for the time constraints working against a game whose fate was unsure ahead of the release of Overwatch 2, I still believe boosting would be a necessary evil to get this game finished within reason, otherwise you could potentially be here for a very long time.
This is a great game purely as a gaming experience, but it isn't trophy hunter friendly at all, and the wide spectrum of difficulty between some of these trophies creates a wild sense of imbalance. When you factor the above game design choices, that work against you as a completionist, then you are massively up against it here, and I'm defaulting this to the maximum score because of my conclusion that the most effective way to get this game finished was through boosting, which is something I've never done before for any game.
NOTE: The trophy descriptions for the Notable trophies may have changed throughout the course of the game's lifespan and could also still be further subject to future change.
NOTE 2: The Additional Characters 1 DLC pack has an Overwatch 2 trophy attached to it, which would technically make it incomplete, but due to confidence in this being a development error, this has not been considered and the pack has been treated as completed.
Notable Trophies - Overwatch Main list -
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| Rapid Discord - Get 4 kills or assists with Zenyatta's Orb of Discord within 6 seconds in Quick or Competitive play. The Floor Is Lava - Get 3 killing blows while wall riding as Lucio without dying in Quick or Competitive play. It's High Noon - Get 4 killing blows with a single use of McCree's Deadeye in Quick or Competitive play. Slice and Dice - Kill 4 enemies with a single use of Genji's Dragonblade in Quick or Competitive play. Hog Wild - Knock 2 enemies to their deaths with one use of Roadhog's Whole Hog in Quick or Competitive play. |
Notable Trophies - Additional Characters 1 DLC -
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| Halt State - Pull enemies into 1000 damage with a single use of Orisa's Halt! in Quick or Competitive Play. Overclocked - Amplify 900 damage with a single use of Orisa's Supercharger in Quick or Competitive Play. Cratered - Hit 6 enemies with a single use of Doomfist's Meteor Strike in Quick or Competitive play. Antipode - Hit 7 targets simultaneously with Moira's Coalescence in Quick or Competitive play. |
Notable Trophies - Additional Characters 2 DLC -
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| Served Up - Get a killing blow as Ashe on an enemy knocked into the air by B.O.B in Quick or Competitive play. Window of Opportunity - Amplify 2500 combined damage and healing without dying as Baptise in Quick or Competitive play. Event Horizon - Get 3 killing blows with a single use of Sigma's Gravitic Flux in Quick or Competitive play. Focused - Earn 2 killing blows with a single use of Echo's Focusing Beam in Quick or Competitive play. |
Hardest Trophy -
