anyone played it yet? how is it compared to OW2 especially?
I play a lot of OW2. Rivals is a lot of fun. As a OW player it's a breath of fresh air. It's been easy for me to pick up but that might be my existing familiarity with TPS (Fortnite, Deadlock) and crazy fast shooters (OW/OW2, TF2).
There's been a handful of optimization problems. I run a pretty high end machine and sometimes the game crashes on startup. No real clue why. For the friends with lower-end computers they have a lot more issues, but I imagine it'll get better with time.
In terms of balance, it's fun because no one knows what the meta is yet. Everyone's just trying out heroes for funsies. The moment a meta develops is when all the balance problems will start rearing their ugly heads. I personally think Hawkeye and Mantis will be among the first ones to be labeled as "broken." That'll be the time I decide whether the game is actually enjoyable because that's when the dev team will actually do balance stuff (if they do).
My one major complaint is the amount of clutter on the screen. I have friends tell me they don't play OW2 because the sensory overload from all the colors and noises is a lot for them, but I feel like it's even more so in Rivals. There's never been a moment where a character isn't speaking so that's just constaint noise going off. There's also the destructible environments creating even more clutter sometimes. Idk, it might just be that I became desensitized to the OW2 clutter, but I doubt it's just that.