Overwatch League All Access Pass: is it worth it?

Overwatch League season two has begun and all the new features of the All Access Pass are available — but is it worth it this year?

First of all, the entire pass is cheaper than it was last year and includes a few more benefits — you can also try it with a free trial running for the first two days of the season. This time, you get 200 Overwatch League tokens to purchase team skins in the game itself. You also get a coupon code for 20 percent off official merchandise. The usual ad-free viewing, Q&A access, exclusive chat channel, and chat badges come too.

The real meat of this year’s pass is the player point-of-view streams. The whole Command Center interface takes up your entire browser, and it only works on desktop and mobile for now — something to consider if you watch on another platform. There are buttons for each player’s POV as well as a customizable section that lets you slot in a whole variety of streams. Those streams can be something elaborate like a player’s POV plus all the stats as well as a top-down view of the map, or some other combination of those. It’s easy to switch between all the views, but being able to track all of those things at once is tough.

You’ll get the most out of the player POV streams alone. The problem is that they’re wonky, at least for now. It seems like they had some trouble getting those to work cleanly on the first day of the season. Audio was bad and the streams were running like a slideshow for a while. The taste of something really compelling to watch was there though. Being able to see the D.Va’s perspective as they made a push onto the objective is really informative, or to be able to finally see what a support player is actually doing during all of the chaos is welcome. It just would be nice if the technical issues were worked out and stayed that way.

If you’re looking to learn about a specific hero or watch your favorite player, the All Access Pass is totally worth it. If you’re like me and watch OWL more casually, it might not be for you, especially if you watch VODs a lot. Give the free trial a shot, and remember that you can activate it at any point in the season if you’re not feeling it quite yet.