I really had to fight my way to Friday's answer. Each new row was technically filled with new clues, the only problem was the yellow letters I did find insisted on staying yellow, and I couldn't see an obvious route through the letter-soup until the very end. Even then, it was a close call.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, October 25

You're looking for the name of a facial expression today. You'd pull this face if you were concentrating on a tough problem, or disapproved of something. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's Wordle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you've got the basics, it's much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

One win, right here. The answer to the October 25 (1224) Wordle is FROWN.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• October 24: BOSSY
• October 23: GOOFY
• October 22: SHOUT
• October 21: SPOON
• October 20: DICEY
• October 19: FIBER
• October 18: STINT
• October 17: HALVE
• October 16: GRANT
• October 15: CORER

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you'll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You'll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you're wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which ones you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

These NPC routines typically aren't all that deep but still do a lot to make the world feel like it's not there just to cater to your needs. That's been one of the big complaints about Starfield: it just doesn't feel alive the way Oblivion and Skyrim do, and part of that is because minor NPCs have no routines, no schedules, and no hint of inner lives.

As always, it's up to modders to pick up the slack. Modder FlippingEggs has created a mod called NPCs Have Routines and Stores Have Schedules which gives 40 NPCs things to do besides simply waiting for you to enter their shops. Now they'll actually close their stores at night and go do other stuff like real people. You can even snoop around in these NPC's lives a bit: in their shops or their homes, you can find datapads with information about them and their new schedules. 

You may see the downside to shopkeepers not being in their stores 24/7, especially since you're dropping in from space and aren't really paying attention to the local clock. No worries: the mod knows this is the sci-fi future and if you want to do some buying and selling in the middle of the night, helpful robots will be manning the front desk instead of human clerks. 

Here's a quick rundown of what the mod does:

• 40 named characters now have daily schedules
• 4 unnamed but unique characters now have daily schedules
• 12 new robots work in various stores, so you can buy stuff when the store owner isn't there (Styx included)
• 61 data slates added to various store countertops and NPCs' personal spaces. Some of these slates are simple notifications of business hours, while others offer you a window into the lives of characters and where you can find them when they aren't working.

FlippingEggs has also taken pains not to screw you over, by the way:

"I have been very careful not to interfere with vanilla quest progression. Before adding a schedule to an NPC, I looked up every single dialogue scene they were involved in. If someone was required to be in an exact location for a scene, I have either not touched them, or added conditions to ensure their custom packages will not run until the scene is done."

You'll find the mod here at Nexus Mods, and hopefully it's just the beginning of more NPC overhauls dedicated to giving more minor characters stuff to do with their lives besides ringing up your order of Chunks. 

In the post, McAlpine says the doctors estimate that he only has seven to 12 months to live, and that even if his chemotherapy treatments work, he would still have less than two years. "Is there anyone who knows how to get in touch with Gearbox to see if there is a way to play the game early?" he asked. "Long shot, but thought I would try."

Several hours later, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford wrote on X that he was sent McAlpine's post. "Caleb and I are now chatting via email and we're going to do whatever we can to make something happen," he said.

McAlpine is currently raising funds on GoFundMe to help pay for his medical expenses, the gas to drive an hour to the nearest cancer center, and for food that fits his strict liquid diet. At the time of writing, over $3,500 has been donated toward his $9,000 goal. "Anything you could possibly help with would be greatly appreciated and mean more than words can describe," he says.

Even though very little is known about Borderlands 4—it was announced earlier this year with a short trailer that was more of a wink to eager fans than a suggestion of what to expect—Gearbox is known for pulling strings to honor fans like McAlpine.

In 2019, the studio gifted a 26-year-old fan with terminal cancer an early copy of Borderlands 3 and let him name his own gun in the game, the Trevonator. And before that, in 2011, a Borderlands fan asked Gearbox for a eulogy by their late friend's favorite character, Claptrap. The studio delivered a touching tribute from the robot and named the Michael Mamaril NPC in Borderlands 2 after him.

I remember stumbling into the Shrine of the Fallen Warrior around the time I started playing World of Warcraft and learning that it was a memorial for Michel Koiter, a Blizzard employee who passed away during the MMO's development. I've always appreciated the effort Blizzard puts into remembering its developers and community members with in-game monuments. McAlpine may not get an NPC or a gun named after him, but the fact that Gearbox is trying to honor his wish to see Borderlands 4 early is heartwarming to see.

It only makes sense, then, that the studio has now opened its in-house playtesting program to gamers in North America—specifically Boston. If you live there, or are willing to travel (on your own dime), you can now sign up for a shot at an early glimpse of what CD Projekt has cooking.

There are caveats, of course: You have to be at least 16 years old, have a CD Projekt account, and "love videogames [and] contemporary pop culture." You'll also need to sign some paperwork promising not to spill the beans.

"If your gamer profile aligns with what we’re looking for, we’ll reach out to you either through email or by phone to ask about your upcoming availability," the playtesting program FAQ states. "All playtests will be scheduled at least a few days in advance."

It's not clear what exactly CD Projekt is looking for in a "gamer profile," but the signup questionnaire digs fairly deep into factoids like age, occupation, whether you're a pro gamer or streamer, if you can attend test sessions in person (which seems pretty important for an in-person testing program), and your various gaming habits: How many games you play, preferred genre and platform, how much you read or watch game-related content, and all that sort of thing. As noted in the post on X, it's also a requirement that you not be involved in game development on a professional level.

CD Projekt's on-site playtesting program is also continuing in Poland, if you happen to be there instead of here (although for me, Boston is also a "there"), and it's possible that similar playtest opportunities will eventually come to Canada: This announcement refers specifically to Boston but the playtest FAQ says sessions are held "occasionally in Boston and Vancouver."

Even if you're not from Boston and don't plan on going there, the call for testers is exciting because it's a concrete sign that the next Cyberpunk game is approaching the point where at least parts of it are testable. That doesn't mean we're going to have our hot little hands on it anytime soon—a more detailed breakdown of the program says testing will involve "elements of our games and services at various stages of development or other related resources (e.g. drafts of promotional materials)," so you could theoretically be called in to eyeball some concept art—but it does mean that wheels have turned, and are continuing to turn. So who knows? If they're calling for testers in 2024, maybe 2025 will be the year we all get to see something.

I'd write that out for you, but I don't think the website would appreciate having to display its more than 41 million digits. Don't worry, though: I downloaded the 18.3 MB .txt file recording Durant's discovery and everything seems to be in order, as I'm sure you'll agree:

If you want to pore over all those digits yourself, 2^136,279,841-1 is available for download in its entirety from The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a 28-year-old website that looks exactly like you would imagine. GIMPS provides free software that attempts to calculate numbers in a rare category of prime numbers called Mersenne primes.

If it's been too long since the relevant math class: A prime number is any number that's only divisible by 1 and itself. Mersenne primes, meanwhile, are even more unique, being prime numbers that are one less than a power of 2.

If you're wondering how you even discover a prime number in the first place, it's a matter of verification. Sure, if you just mash a bunch of digits out on your keyboard, there's a chance it might be a prime number—but you'd have to calculate whether it's divisible by any smaller number to prove it. Unsurprisingly, the amount of necessary calculation skyrockets as the number of digits in the potential prime number increases.

And Durant's newly-discovered Mersenne prime, which according to GIMPS is over 16 million digits larger than the previous prime number record, took a hell of a lot of computing. While using "thousands of server GPUs, spanning 24 datacenter regions over 17 countries" to identify potential primes with GIMPS, an Nvidia A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland scored big when it identified 2^136,279,841-1 as a potential candidate.

Of course, then it had to be verified, which required further calculations through a battery of primality tests on different hardware platforms. But the results are clear—to some mathematicians somewhere, I'm sure. I'll take their word for it.

Durant's discovery marks the first time GIMPS cloud computing has been used for the discovery of a Mersenne prime. Durant's network of number-crunching GPUs, GIMPS says, "ends the 28-year reign of ordinary personal computers finding these huge prime numbers."

According to GIMPS, Durant decided to undertake the Mersenne prime search as a "demonstration that GPUs can be used for more than AI." While I'm sure prime numbers aren't quite the investor buzzword that AI's been the last couple years, I admire the motivation regardless.

With just one week to go before the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Electronic Arts has dropped the official Dragon Age: The Veilguard launch trailer, an action-packed extravaganza of sound and fury signifying that a videogame will definitely be arriving soon.

Also arriving soon, as seen in the trailer, is a pair of elven gods, and that's bad news all around. They were "horrific tyrants," so the story goes, and "the worst is still coming. Unless we stop them."

I'm not fully up to speed on my Dragon Age lore, but last time I looked, elves had pretty much got the short end of the stick in Thedas, reduced to poverty, enslavement, and abuse at the hands of humans following the loss of their homeland in a war with the Tevinter Imperium. In that light, I can't shake the feeling that maybe payback in the form of a little elven tyranny is only fair. To paraphrase the great Michael Madsen, they deserve their revenge, and we deserve to die.

(Yes, I chose Iorveth's path in The Witcher 3, and no, it wasn't a hard decision.)

But the obvious implication here is that this pair of pointy-eared overlords will be bad for everyone, and so it is that we're putting together a team to pump the brakes on the whole thing. It's all very dramatic and grim, with a "summer blockbuster" cinematic approach that's 100% focused on generating hype rather than saying anything of substance. I suppose that's to be expected given that by now, everyone's already made up their minds on whether The Veilguard is something they care about, but even so I was tempted to give it a bit of a hard time for that high-volume superficiality. But then I wondered: Is it really all that unusual?

Flashing back to the 1998 E3 trailer for the original Baldur's Gate rather strongly suggests that no, it is not. (Forgive the video quality—it was a long time ago.)

They're really not all that different, are they? Cinematics, dramatic music, bits of gameplay here and there, and a flash to the title card.

Comments on the Dragon Age: The Veilguard launch trailer on YouTube seem largely positive. Several people say Electronic Arts should've led with this in the first place, rather than the widely disliked reveal trailer we got, which is a sentiment we've shared previously too.

Even so, there may be some ground to make up. The launch trailer currently holds 12,000 likes on YouTube, but also 5,000 dislikes, and while that doesn't mean a whole lot on its own—it's easy to click the "dislike" button just for the hell of it—it's not an especially encouraging ratio. The Baldur's Gate 3 launch trailer, by way of comparison, has 50,000 likes and just 517 dislikes, and that's arguably as much a commentary on the benefits of early access as anything else, but the bottom line is that as expressions of goodwill go, racking up 4,400 dislikes immediately after the release of your launch trailer is a pretty sure sign you still have some convincing to do.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard comes out on October 31. A preload period on PC will not be available because of our unfortunate tendency to pirate videogames: You can start downloading when the game goes live on launch day at 9 am PT/12 pm ET.

Revealed yesterday alongside the Oilwell Basin region it calls home, the Rompopolo is Monster Hunter's latest bipedal brute wyvern. However, where most other brute wyverns like the Deviljho and Anjanath have fairly traditional tyrannosaurid features, Rompopolo is, well, horrible. It's like a dinosaur-sized midpoint between a kiwi bird, a mosquito, and a thrombosed hemorrhoid.

It's purple. It's engorged. Lobes of distended, fleshy sacs pocked with lip-like apertures flank its head and trail down to the end of its tail, which terminates in a hellish barb. It's got nasty little gecko feet.

Rompopolo's design is masterfully vile, but don't worry: The sacs aren't just for show. As Capcom describes in a tweet from the official Monster Hunter X account, Rompopolo can "inject gas from the tip of its tail into the surrounding oilsilt for explosive results!" Great!

The reactions to Rompopolo's reveal have been, let's say, "enthusiastic." For many hunters, the instinctive revulsion Rompopolo evokes is the perfect call to arms. "I must be the first to slay 1,000 Rompopolo," user Palodromy declared on Reddit, "because it is an affront to God and I am His strongest soldier." Another fan on X echoed the sentiment, saying "I am going to Bully this Monster, mark my words."

For others celebrating the wretched creature and its god-awful shapes, that revulsion is a source of glee. "This guy is disgusting looking. 10/10 no notes," says one reply on X, while another says "This mf ugly asf (great design)."

I'll admit: I'm pretty eager to bring my hammer down on a few of Rompopolo's poison-filled sacs—particularly after seeing the back-breaking outcome of its turf war with fellow Oilwell Basin resident Ajarakan. As upsetting as Rompopolo is to perceive, however, it's still a design I'm glad to see. Monster Hunter: World's designs for its new monsters, while excellent, played it fairly safe—possibly in an attempt to avoid scaring off the wider audience it was trying to attract. With Rompopolo, it seems like Monster Hunter's designers are still more than willing to get weird in Wilds, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Unfortunately, while the Monster Hunter Wilds open beta arrives next week, I'll have to wait until the full release in February to meet Rompopolo face to face. Somehow, I think I'll manage.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is quite good. PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor felt it was dragged down by a very slow start, calling it "a slow burn to a fault" in an overall positive review, and it holds an enviable 86 aggregate score on Metacritic. Despite that, Ubisoft recently confirmed that the development team has been scattered to the four winds to work on "other projects that will benefit from their expertise."

This, Douse feels, is at least partially the outcome of Ubisoft's focus on subscriptions over conventional game sales—the whole "feeling comfortable with not owning your game" thing espoused by Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay earlier this year—and the decision to stop releasing games on Steam, which is far and away the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming.

"The last notable game on their platform was arguably Far Cry 6 in 2021," Douse posted on X (via GamesRadar). "The Crew, Mirage and Avatar came in 2023 and didn’t perform, so you can assume subscriptions were at a lull when PoP released by 2024. Which means people wouldn’t be launching their store all too much.

"If it had released on Steam not only would it have been a market success, but there would likely be a sequel because the team are so strong. It’s such a broken strategy. The hardest thing is to make a 85+ game—it is much, much easier to release one. It just shouldn’t be done as it was."

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown did eventually come to Steam, but not until August 8, seven months after its initial release. It's been as well received there as elsewhere, holding a very positive user rating, but that far down the road the proverbial wind was out of its sails, and decisions about a sequel (and the fate of the dev team) were presumably already locked in.

"If the statement 'gamers should get used to not owning their games' is true because of a specific release strategy (sub above sales), then the statement 'developers must get used to not having jobs if they make a critically acclaimed game' (platform strategy above title sales) is also true, and that just isn’t sensible—even from a business perspective," Douse wrote.

Ubisoft has arguably seen the error of its ways to some extent. After years of keeping PC releases to its own storefront and the Epic Games Store, Ubisoft's games began trickling back to Steam in 2022. It announced a wholesale return to the storefront in September, saying that all future releases, including the delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows, will launch on Steam on day one.

It's worth remembering that even when you purchase games on Steam, you don't really "own" them in the traditional sense: You are paying for a license to use them, and that can be taken away from you at any time, for any number of reasons. But, with all due respect to GOG, Steam is where most PC gamers buy their stuff, and in the digital marketplace that now dominates PC gaming, that license agreement is de facto ownership. Publishers avoid the storefront at their peril.

Which isn't to say a Steam release would've ensured a long, bright future of togetherness and sequels for The Lost Crown dev team: It's also available on PlayStation 4 and PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch, which seemingly didn't add up to stellar sales. But Douse said it was an ideal fit for the Steam storefront and Steam Deck, and being there would've given it a better chance at finding an audience than not being there: "It can’t resonate with an audience it doesn’t reach because it isn’t on a platform at the right moment."

"For premium games Steam on PC is about 90%+ of your total sales on that platform, probably slightly lower if you own your own platform," he wrote. "If you remove the Steam platform at peak of relevance you’re removing 90% average of your potential audience. Quite substantial."

Douse isn't the only Larian stalwart to feel this way: In January, Larian founder Swen Vincke said "it's going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model" because that will leave subscription service owners as the final arbiter of which games do and don't get made. That's maybe a debatable point, but the bottom line, Vincke said, is this: "You won't find our games on a subscription service."

As Morgan observed last year after being executed by Diablo 4's Lilith in Call of Duty, every successful multiplayer shooter these days eventually compromises its style and theme for the sake of wacky crossover cosmetics. The process took longer than usual for Hunt: Showdown, but to my eye it began this week with the Ghost Face Rampage DLC, which adds the iconic mask from 1996 slasher flick Scream to the supernatural, historical extraction shooter.

We like a lot about Hunt: Showdown 1896, which is the new title Hunt: Showdown adopted after a huge recent update which introduced a new map, but some players have been dissatisfied with elements of the refresh, and so were perhaps primed to react especially harshly to Ghost Face. One player declared that "Hunt's identity died" when the DLC was announced, as we reported earlier this week.

I wouldn't go that far myself, and I'm not a regular player of the game so I don't have any personal investment here, but I do find it hard to agree that the bad guy from Scream is a natural fit for the Colorado mountains of 128 years ago.

"We believe the latest Ghost Face Rampage DLC fits into the dark, supernatural atmosphere as an ageless, almost mythological figure that transcends eras," Crytek said in a statement on X today. "In the 1890s, a madman took up the mask, driven into a bloody frenzy by its foul whispers on a hunting trip in Louisiana—and the rest is history."

I'll give Crytek one thing: the mask's design does resemble Edvard Munch's The Scream, which was painted in 1893. But I don't think anyone who sees the mask from Scream thinks, 'Ah, just like that period-appropriate painting.' Crytek is coming at the issue from an in-fiction perspective—Could there be a Ghost Face in the past? Sure.—but I just see the Halloween mask from the '90s.

Some players are livid about the DLC, but not everyone thinks Ghost Face is such a big deal. One response to Crytek's tweet notes that at least he's wearing an appropriate hat: "It's not turning into Fortnite. Calm down."

It doesn't sound like this'll be the last cosmetic collab in Hunt, as Crytek laid out its philosophy around brand team-ups in its statement, saying that its goal is to blend external "IPs and personalities" with Hunt's setting seamlessly.

"The aim for us is to enrich the narrative and weave new threads into the ever-evolving mythos of Hunt in a whole new way," Crytek said. "Not to simply drop new characters into the game, but to write compelling new narratives involving these crossovers to create a richer experience for established players and invite new players into our world with a few familiar faces."

If you want the Ghost Face mask yourself, it launched today and can be had for $10.

In a blog post today, game director Aaron Keller said there will be “two different 6v6 tests” in Overwatch 2’s next season, season 14. The first of these tests will be a variation of the flexible Open Queue ruleset, where each team of six must have at least one of each role and no more than three. So you can make a team that's comprised of three supports, one DPS, and two tanks, or any variation on that format.

The next 6v6 test will take place mid-season 14 and will force the original 2-2-2 team composition (two tanks, two healers, and two damage dealers), but it will still retain Overwatch 2 changes, such as less crowd control and the reworked heroes. But in both of these cases, the tanks won't be as strong as they currently are. "The power and survivability of tanks will go down in these 6v6 formats, and we'll be taking a look at whether we need many of the passives that we've added in Overwatch 2," Keller says.

Season 13 will also see some new modes added, but these will be for 5v5 and will be aimed at "testing the flexibility within this format," according to Keller. A new Quick Play: Hacked event, named "Limit 2," will be like Open Queue, except the maximum in each role will be limited to two. "This includes Tanks, but they will be tuned to Open Queue balance, meaning they will have less health," Keller says. "You can freely switch heroes and roles as long as the new role doesn’t already have two players."

The next 5v5 test is codenamed "Kingmaker" and will be like "Limit 2," except this time, the role that just has one player will get some bonuses. "Quick Play: Hacked, “Limit 2”, and “Kingmaker” will provide an excellent benchmark and framework for us going into the 6v6 tests," Keller says. "We’re looking forward to seeing what statistics we can gather as you dive into these modes, alongside your feedback, which is one of our strongest data points!"

"Part of this series of tests is to not only judge our player's appetite for larger team sizes, but for us to explore different ways that we might implement a change without running into the same problems we had previously," Keller says. One of the biggest issues that Keller previously mentioned in the first 6v6 blog post was that this format negatively affected queue times. Very few players queue for tank compared to other roles, meaning that it was harder to fill this role, and most DPS and support players would have disproportionately long wait times between matches.

It will be interesting to see if these tests fall into the same pitfalls or even if they negatively affect queue times for regular Role and Open Queues, as it'll effectively split the playerbase in half. With that in mind, it's important to understand that when these tests are taking place, you're effectively a guinea pig for Blizzard to experiment on, and any number of things you do in them, or say online, could shape what these potential new modes might look like.

"In a world where a surge of players is in this mode and continuously play it, then we have the signal we need to do more with it," Keller says. "I think what that 'more' is depends on the level of excitement. Is there a world where both 5v5 and 6v6 exist permanently in Overwatch 2? If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have said no. As we've discussed Overwatch 2's future in light of making the game that our players want to play, we know our players can want more than one experience, and it would be something we'd need to consider moving forward."

Try out the different modes so you can form an opinion on what you prefer, and once you come to that decision, try to make that known, either by spreading the word or just playing more of that specific mode. It sounds like Blizzard will make an informed decision based on popularity, player count, and whatever other analytics it tracks internally for balance and player behaviour.

I'm excited to see what both of these tests will be like, although that does mean digging out my team's second tank and sixth member, who we sent into exile back in 2022. But Overwatch 2 can only have so many different versions of the game running at one time, and I was really hoping that Junkenstein's Lab would stick around because that's the closest thing we'll probably ever get to the intended PvE experience.

That being said, I'd love the 6v6 tests to work out if they're genuinely good and benefit the community, but I'm not convinced that enough players actually want 6v6 for this to benefit anyone. I could just be living under a 5v5 rock, but over the last couple of years, it's increasingly felt like most of the 6v6 discourse exists as a way to focus everyone's frustration at Overwatch 2's failings and disappointments.

At Overwatch 2's release, it felt like there was too much to be angry about for everyone to rally around one war cry—players were frustrated with increased shop prices, no loot boxes, a new battle pass, no PvE, and the change to 5v5 just to name a few. Players were on so many different crusades that none of them ended up amounting to anything, and the anger just kind of fizzled out as fans settled for the new reality of Overwatch 2, except for the 6v6 vs. 5v5 debate.

This has managed to live on well past any of the other grievances and is often brought up as the frontrunner when players are asked what's so wrong with Overwatch 2. It sticks out like a sore thumb and is something simple enough for a lot of people to rally around. So it'll be interesting to see how much of the community ends up playing the upcoming 6v6 tests and if this is something that players genuinely want and not just an easy punching bag.