10 Video Games That Punish You For Being Curious
3. Overwatch - Any Attempt To Experiment With Characters
When Overwatch was released back in 2016, the idea of the hero shooter had reached maximum popularity - Paladins, Battleborn, Rainbow Six Siege, Paragon... the list went on and on. And yet, Overwatch stood head and shoulders above the rest, due to the sheer quality of its presentation, and took the lion's share of the potential player base.
With a mechanically diverse cast of characters and four distinct classes - support, tank, defence and offence, players got to experience that one-time-only joy of cycling through every hero, discovering their unique abilities, and deciding on which one suited their playstyle.
Whether it was the stalwart, immovable defence of Reinhardt, the explosive tricks of Junkrat, the debuffing monk Zenyatta or the twitchy assassinations of Genji, there was a style of play for everyone.
And yet... as the game progressed, the cast appeared to shrink as the community got progressively less tolerant of particular character picks (god forbid you choose Torbjorn in a ranked match).
If players were new to the game during this period of "settled meta", they'd miss out on getting to try out all the characters as they were shepherded towards choosing the meta-only picks - something totally contrary to the spirit of the game.
Arguably, Activision-Blizzard have continued this limitation themselves with Overwatch 2, locking original characters behind first-time familiarisation periods and new characters behind battle passes - whereas before, curiosity was limited only by toxic teammates, now it's locked behind a paywall.