Nothing beats getting that one legendary Overwatch skin you’ve been eyeing for days. Most of the time, though? God do loot box drops suck.
Blizzard are a devilish bunch. I can only imagine how long was spent on designing the loot box, its animation, and what it sounds like when you expand one. Just the act of opening a box feels good: a loot box unlatches, depressurizes, and then bam! Everything flies into the air, and hits the ground with a good thud. It’s like a high-tech version of a Kinder egg.
You know what the first thing I did after opening my first loot box was? I bought five more. Then later that night I bought another five. Then I felt the shame sinking in and I told myself I needed a shred of dignity. I lasted maybe a day or two before I bought another $5 worth of boxes. At current, I’ve spent $20 dollars total on loot boxes, and given the slow pace at which you level up after hitting level 20, it’s been an ongoing struggle not to drop more money on some god damn loot boxes. Blizzard has my number, and I’m too weak to be like new phone who dis?
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I should have never even looked at the microtransactions page, not after Hearthstone. That’s another Blizzard game where opening a pack is designed to feel oh-so-gratifying; I recall buying some packs just to look at this:
I didn’t even really care what was in them, because I wasn’t super into Hearthsone in the first place! This entire thing feels like madness.
The best part about all of this, though? 99% of what I get when I open an Overwatch loot box is awful. Who actually wants a voice line of Hanzo going “Hmm”? Does anyone even use voice lines? I swear, in the dozens of hours I’ve played this game, I’ve never once heard anyone use a custom voice line during battle.
And how many effin’ times is a loot box going to award me a duplicate of this Toa skin? Nobody wants this Roadhog skin—the Mako is so much cooler—and yet Overwatch won’t stop taunting me with Toa over and over again:
It just feels like much of what a loot box can contain is underwhelming: I don’t like most of the player icons, the sprays, or the voice lines. Then again, the boxes can’t just give you exactly what you want all the time, right? There would be no point; you’d stop caring about loot box drops. Rare drops are rare for a reason—after all the bad drops, you’ll feel ecstatic when you finally get, say, firefighter Mei.
At least, that’s what I’ll tell myself. I’ve seen friends open a loot box for the first time, only to get some multiple good legendary skins in one go. This video by Taceo nails the feeling well:
Damn you, Overwatch loot boxes. You’re the best and the worst, all at once.