Cosmetic customization in gaming has only grown more and more robust through the years, but one unfortunate trend has stuck through most of them, including newer releases like Overwatch 2. Namely, in multiplayer shooters but present in other genres, players may be rewarded for dedicated or exemplary performance with colors, camos, and various other aesthetic additions for their characters. These cosmetics are used both for visual customization and displaying a player's progression and dedication to the game to other players. These skins, paid or otherwise, are often very diverse, from simple color schemes to entire model and animation overhauls, aside from one far too often held tradition.
Golden weapons, usually recognized as a sign of high skill, monetary investment, or extreme luck, are often inferior and bland compared to contemporary color schemes and skins. Golden guns from GoldenEye to Rainbow Six Siege rarely have much effort put into their design and are instead soaked in metallic gold all over. Gold is usually at its best when paired with other colors as an accent, but these golden guns often clash with any cosmetics that aren't the same color or chromatic texture. While gold isn't an automatically ugly or unfitting color for any and all games, it's the developer's lack of creativity that often makes these skins unimpressive at best and truly egregious at worst.
Golden Guns Are Overused And Low Effort
Developers often use flat and excessive gold instead of any creative implementation of pattern or design. From some of the earliest multiplayer shooters to Overwatch 2's own golden guns, the standard is to simply take a weapon and soak the main body of it in bright shiny gold, and sometimes tweak secondary colors if players are lucky. Gold can often have a regal and striking look when paired with more subdued and monochromatic colors, and even more so when it's used in stylish engravings and the like, but far too often are modern game developers content to dip a gun in gold and call it a day.
With the kind of message that golden guns send, even if their look is undesirable many players choose to use them just to display their status to others. Due to this, not only will the most prestigious weapon skin look bland and excessive, it's also the weapon players are most likely to see around after a game's been out long enough. Team Fortress 2 has some amazing cosmetics for both weapons and classes, but getting matched against or playing with a group of experienced players, one's likely to see a lot of Australium weapons despite some truly breathtaking (and much cheaper) weapon skins being readily available. Players will see an excess of these skins due to other player's desires to display their skill with their cosmetic loadout.
Despite their lack of aesthetic cohesion or appeal, players continue to grind and/or pay for these cosmetics. Even in single player games, players may find themselves using golden weapons just to prove they've completed the game entirely, if not for anybody else just for themselves (or to prove they've shelled out the cash in cases like Overwatch 2's absurdly expensive cosmetics). Player's desires for achieving high status and displaying such a feat in games like Overwatch 2 and Modern Warfare 2 seems to outweigh the original point of cosmetics, that being to dress their favorite character or gun in their favorite colors or patterns.
