As much as I dislike modern Blizzard, sadly OW2 is still the best PvP FPS for me.
The work from the original Kaplan's team is still super amazing and nothing current even comes close to hitting that spot.
I wish another dev could make a better game in that genre. Maybe one of the new studios created by ex-Blizzard staff can tackle this.
I finally played OW2 for the first time. I can't say anything that hasn't already been said by now, but...wow.
First I have to say I REALLY am shocked by how much it's just OW1, but worse. I played 5 or 6 games. All of them were on maps I played on old Overwatch 100 times, except once I got a new map. All my favorite heroes were the same. It was both a pleasing familiarity and a disbelief that this game was "2". Yeah I already know it was the same game but I expected new moves or something...like anything to make it different from 1. Oh wait, there were differences.
The maps had different lighting. I slightly preferred the old version. The music was tweaked to make it "new". I slightly preferred the old version. 5v5 also sucks, ETC...I like the core of 1 that is still there and will probably fire it up once in a while because that core of 1 is still good. But it really is just the first game with 1000 bad tweaks made by incompetent people and turned into a MTX title.
It's so similar, it's hard to believe we will get "Overwatch Classic". This is already the same game. They would need to do what they didn't want, split the live service into two parts and fragment everything. It seems like a nightmare. They would have to un-update Overwatch 2 to make it 1, and have Classic run parallel to 2. Even though 2 is just your old OW account with all your skins and everything already in there. If it did happen, everyone would flock to Classic. Then what? Leave Classic the way it was, and only add new modes and updates to 2? Or be in hell figuring out which updates are appropriate for which "version"?
I think this is just the current state of Overwatch, whether you want to call it 2 or not.
Edit: Having played it a bit more the past week. Despite my initial impression of being OW1 with a ton of tiny tweaks that make it worse plus MTX. The magnitude of one big change that breaks the game set in, 5v5. It upsets the whole game balance in a shattering, unfixable way. The core game takes a massive hit from this change, becoming a shell of itself, the entire game balance was based on 6v6, leading them to an entirely broken game where they have no idea what to do but try more random shit and add more gay characters. With the main essence of OW so tarnished, plus the lack of content/lies about pve, plus the switch to mtx scam while overwriting OW1, yeah no wonder about player engagement lol. They completely ruined it. If they bring back 6v6 though, it'll be like, WTF is the difference? Only meaningful change left from 1 other than the store???
