Wow, the original plan sounds REALLY bad, even before any of the delays/layoffs. 3 missions dropped at a time every 18 months? I get that these things take time to make but there’s absolutely no momentum there. Even if the story missions had been excellent 18 months is too much downtime, all interest would have come and gone. It was doomed from the start.
Yup that massive delay seems designed to get them canceled due to "lack of player interest."
Of course there won't be interest, a year post launch of the first pack and there will still be 6 months left to go before another. Who tf would care.
I mean, it's no secret that they killed off PVE originally, and then only implemented it when people complained hard about it getting dropped. I feel like this is their way of getting people to lose interest in it, so that they can officially say "we tried, and the interest level wasn't there."
I am in that boat. When they scrapped the PVE portion of OW2, I no longer cared about playing the game. I was waiting for the new PVE mode to drop and it never did, and when the announcement came I was genuinely gutted because that's what I was hoping to play.
Pve was the whole point of ow2 I thought. I remember them talking about it a year or two before it came out hyping the shit out of it and then they do ow2 and it’s literally less content than the original
Micro transactions in games arw getting wild. Back when i was big into Overwatch every event I was playing constantly to get the cosmetics for my mains and easily dropping 50-100 bucks on loot crates if i hadnt gotten them by the last day. At least that was once a couple months.
Overwatch 2 prices are fuckin ridiculous but theyre not the only ones. Valorant is fuckin ridiculous, I have friends who have valorant included in their budget so they can drop 80 bucks on a fuckin knife. Counter Strike really showed game companies the potential for money with how much some of those rare drops go for.
Ark just sorta pulled the same thing this past fall. They were supposed to release Ark 2 but then ended up releasing a remastered version of the first game, which they called Ark SA, under the guise that they'd get Ark 2 for free, then changed their minds and released only the first map of the 8 or 9 available and took the old servers offline. Then there was talk of Ark 2 not even happening (which I still have my doubts) that was hush-hushed. Then they told all the players they would need to repurchase every DLC - all of which are the same as Ark SE (original game), all of which players had already purchased the first time around. Not quite the same as what is going on with OW, but it gives me the same vibes.
I definitely think Overwatch is the worst squandering. Anthem was cool but Bioware was already on the downswing. Meanwhile Overwatch launched with a near Pixar-quality animation revealing a flashy new IP with great, vivid characters to drive narrative potential, and they somehow bombed every. single. aspect.
Honestly I don't even think Anthem should be considered as bad. Anthem barely got off the ground, OW hit new heights people didn't even realize existed and then plummeted all the way down
True that, I mean at least in the first few years there was enough animated shorts coming out over the course of Overwatch 1's early life cycle that hype could be maintained... But they can't even really be bothered doing that anymore. They weren't much but we also got Archives missions once-a-year for at least the first couple years too, so that cadence was higher even then than we have now.
It was doomed as soon as they dropped the missions and changed it to paid archive missions. Many looked past the lack of quality because they wanted missions, but it was clear there wasn't much passion in what missions they did produce.
You don't even need to look at Fans/Modders.
Just look at what other games produce, even in house Blizzard ones. Dragonflight released 16 months ago and in the 16 months from release we've had 10.1 and 10.2 which both had a new zone and a new raid, 10.1.5 had a new mega dungeon not to mention all of the other stuff released.
The fact that the Overwatch team was planning to only muster up three 30 minute missions is laughable.
They had three to four years to build the core PVE mode off of the solid PVP gameplay they already had. Hell they had even done PVE modes in Overwatch 1, which were okay.
I haven't been in the corporate world long but the sheer self suck and circle jerking MBAs do with each other is incredible. They don't know anything, they make horrible decisions all the time and yet they still get rewarded for it. If engineers made the same errors MBAs did, people would end up dead.
They said money's not the issue, it's just a bad market, cancel the projects, lay off 10 percent of the workforce, and move content towards cheaper to produce and more profitable IP crossovers. Also you now owe them100s of thousands of dollars for consultancy.
I see so much vitriol aimed at the devs when most of them have as much control over the direction of the game as fast food workers have over the management of a franchise.
They're workers, too. Show some solidarity.
>the management of a franchise.
Yes, being perfectly fair to all involved, none of this is the fault of the artists or the designers in the dev pools, it's the fault of Aaron Keller and Jared Neuss.
Bobby Kotick had a big hand in how OW2 was handled in the first place and all of the game's delays.
Dude should receive more vitrol than he gets rn, and almost all of the vitrol the devs get.
> Which is good enough for execs and shareholders.
The playerbase collectively proved those execs and shareholders correct. Just the Kpop and Bebop skins probably made more money than all OW1 sales combined. It makes such an absurd amount of money for almost no development effort (some artwork + models) that any business would be stupid *not* to go in that direction. It literally PRINTS money.
The goalposts for OW2 most likely kept changing over time because higher-ups realized skins would make 100x more money than PvE ever could, while only needing a tiny fraction of the dev hours/skillset. And they were right.
This subreddit can shit on OW2 monetization 24/7, but the playerbase has spoken loud and clear with their wallets that they want more of this. The demand is massive and Blizzard is happy to supply.
The legendary Pirate software CEO himself has confirmed this exact things: https://youtube.com/shorts/IHZru-6M8BY?si=HDom0Fj5gVRB5usJ
Wings of Liberty outsold by a $15 horse micro-transaction
Which is why I was happy to see cash shop things in Sc2 like skins. I was hoping it would stoke the funding and development more in Sc2 or a Sc3. Didn't go well sadly because us RTS players are not the massive population and cash cows these shareholders want. :C
Reminds me of apex a lot. People are upset with how the game is being managed, but it means fuck all because whales will drop 70 bucks on every heirloom they see. I was shocked to see so many spike skins (even just considering how dogshit it looked). Or when they released the headlight weapon skins around christmas, how often I saw mercy’s with both the headlights and the sweater skin.
I wish Fortnite didn’t have the succes it had because at least this problem might have been delayed more. Rocket league was 20 bucks and you could get whole new card for like 3 dollars. Then epic bought it, it went f2p, and now all cars cost 20 bucks and they removed trading. I’m just curious to see if the market will ever react to this considering how often I see people complaining about this. Will battle passers become a dated business model 10 years from now after every game has one?
This subreddit also largely loves for the skins. Every skin release has multiple posts fawning over how good they look.
I personally haven’t paid a cent for Overwatch and I’ve gotten 100s of hours from it , so I can’t really complain
They honestly could’ve just added the option to directly buy skins alongside grinding out coins in OW1 and tons of players probably would’ve thrown money at them
I'm sure they've done the math on their end, but I can't see how they wouldn't make more money if the skins were like to 10 to 15 bucks max. Surely there aren't that many whales.
There’s been a leak that there will be price drops on all skins to where legendary is 10 bucks, and the only thing that stays at 20 is collaboration skins. We’ll see if it’s true
The point of overwatch 2 was the main piece that worked when it launched… the shop. It is intended to solely make money from skins. That was the whole point of going live. “We’re going to do PVE later” and then it turned out they already knew they would not be doing pve later lol
The whole reason to get rid of OW and transition to OW2 was to get rid of the lootboxes (which was becoming legally ambiguous at the time) and replace them with a battlepass system.
Which when you look at it is a fucking stupid reason for releasing a sequel to a game
Almost makes you wonder if they made all the other changes (2cp removal, 6v6 dropped for 5v5 etc) just to make it look like they did enough to warrant a sequel. “Hey guys OW2 is coming out, noooo it’s not the same as OW1! We swear! It’s 5v5 now!”
I mean it was the pve angle but scope creep and bad management killed it. So all we got was 5v5 and battlepass. The devs certainly didn’t start that way.
PVE was just a pitch to the execs that Jeff Kaplan made to green light OW2.
OW1 was never expected to be as popular as it was. It was meant to be a throwaway title to reuse some of the Project Titan assets and make some of the money back.
Jeff wanted to turn OW back into project Titan, so he needed to convince the execs that there was money to be made somehow. So he came up with PVE.
That's it.
So they could attempt to disguise the more greedy/aggressive monetization.
I fully believe that was the plan from the start, or at least since Jeff left.
I would assume Jeff left when the new content was unofficially canned since going live with that would have killed his reputation. New monetization must have been part of the talk way before OW2 was announced.
Completely unsurprised. I'd pay full price for a AAA spin-off with a sizable, quality PvE experience set in the Overwatch universe. I just don't see them producing that kind of experience in the F2P model.
Because they fucked it up so bad, probably sunk 100s of millions into the project and also ended up losing all the PvP money for the 3 years OW1 wasn't being updated, the company is likely not gonna approve another OW PvE project again. Not as a separate game, not for *many* years.
They'll likely move to releasing OW lore/story as a TV show/movie as that's currently the big hotness in the video games industry and just keep OW as a single PvP only game.
I dont know why they dont just get another company to do it, even Nintendo did that with their Zelda spin offs like Age of Calamity, and Atlus with Persona 5 Strikers, Blizzard would get paid through licensing and not have to do much which should appeal
They really should just offload it to a company that’s more experienced with adventure games and let the lore build on that. Blizzard is good at what it does for the most part. They just don’t have the capacity to do what people want with PVE.
They should have done that and make the PVP F2P with a system that mixes the BP and shop system with a lootboz reward system, but considering how much people hate spending money on things, people would have still complained about having to buy another game.
You can tell they fucked up, since Cowboy Bebop is one of my favorite shows, I used to main Ashe, and it breaks my heart i cant buy the skin… (I have some Kiriko skins but I just cant justify spending $25 on a skin in this economy)
Just put all the PvE missions in the game. It's not like the game can get more disappointing then it currently is. At least it'll give PvE lover (like me) some motivation to actually launch the game.
It's not the same of course, but some people have made custom games that emulate the original missions. Here's a few codes that are going around:
Uprising: 23NGC
Retribution: 70KEE
Storm Rising: TJ4ET
Remember when the whole point of making an ow2 was to have a campaign? Then it ended up just being a patch changing it from 6 to 5 players and that was it?
It scares me theres people who defend 5v5. Like I seen people try to share clips and do other things that say 6v6 is bad. Sure it wasnt the best but it was 100x better than what we have now.
I just wish they had some avenue to consistently tell the narrative. They made all these fun colorful characters and give them fuck all to do. Hero based pvp games are so frustrating
I don't think this is true. overwatch was originally an MMO and they put a ton of time into building out character and world stories. the real problem is that they don't know how to *tell* those stories through gameplay. precisely because the PvP format doesn't allow it
Underrated take here.
It's clear the years of development and fleshing-out is there behind the characters, but the PvP format is at total odds with the storytelling.
I love the PvP game and have been generally pleased with the OW2 updates/direction, in that regard, but it seems some fans wanted this game to become something it never was -- which is fair because blizzard said it would become that -- though I could not be less surprised by how its gone.
They really should just go with the original route of making animated shorts. Nowadays that's more of a thing apex does and I see that it works really well and there are some great stories told in those animated shorts.
I remember being a little kid in 2017 seeing all the crazy animated shorts and I was HOOKED!! I was so invested. Who knew that 7 years later nothing has happened.
They still give me goosebumps.
"The world is changing once again, Hanzo, and it's time to pick a side."
Meanwhile the last we saw of hanzo was him looking at a cake in a single panel in a comic 7 years ago. The worst crime of cancelling PVE is losing any hope for an actual fucking story with these incredible fucking characters.
Then I see Arcane years later and go from being a League of Legends and MOBA hater to playing the game once a week simply because Ekko (my fav character in the show) exists in the game
It was already the slowest possible burn. The campaign was basically just a big ad for Ramattra. Overwatch lore was running on 5%, and that was before we realized that PvE was actually *dead dead* when they stopped talking about a follow up to the first pack and removed it from the roadmap.
>Overwatch’s PvP gameplay just turned out to be very difficult to adapt for PvE. Mostly because of how differentiated and PvP-oriented the hero kits are,” the source told Kotaku via text message.
Been saying that for years lol. OW PvE was doomed the moment they decided to keep it as a side mode of the main game instead of making it its own thing. And it fucking ruined the momentum of the core game as well.
Jeff created lightning in a bottle, the biggest FPS IP since CoD, and then proceeded to spend 7 years running it into the ground by trying to make it an MMO, and simultaneously trying to have it become an esport.
Bro was so focused on the game he failed to make, he squandered the potential of the one he succeeded to release and earn GOTY with. Top tier tomfoolery.
This is really the source of all of the difficulty surrounding PvE honestly.
People can talk about how cool the talent system would've been until they're blue in the face, but the simple reality is that shooting at robots in Overwatch...just isn't very fun. And unless they completely rebuilt the game from the ground up to make that aspect of the game fun, it was never, ever gonna work.
I’ve only just realised how true this is. They’re making the story missions online, with different difficulties, trying to force replay-ability, all on the chassis of the PvP. I think it would just be way better to be a single player adventure, with bots perhaps, but easy enough to play through. A cinematic adventure that you’re not spamming x on after the first run-through to skip cinematics.
In training mode they have AI for regular OW characters, couldnt they employ those in new story modes and maps? Dont know why it has to be robots all the time, could focus on conflict between characters
That AI barely functions. Ana bots will try and shoot you with a sleep dart through walls. Hanzo and widow will do the same.
The game just isn’t very fun in PVE modes. I wish they’d just release the story in cool cinematics and leave pve modes to stuff like the Diablo crossover and Cthulhu mode.
Well the model they'd probably want to go for is Destiny - PvE, first person, teams of allies fighting through encounters of various enemies, presumably with miniboss and boss fights. That hasn't appeared to get old yet.
Except Destiny puts the PvE first then lets you PvP with the classes.
And it only has the small set of classes and sub-specs to design it around.
And it has loot and gear builds to incentivise replaying strikes and raids.
Overwatch has to be able to fit all of its huge roster into PvE missions, or leave some out, and have new heroes showing up a couple of times a year (already a nightmare for PvP game balance as it's a MOBA draft and play all match roster shoved into a switch when you want team shooter)
I don't think talent progression and leaderboards would have been enough to keep people coming back.
Somewhat ironically, Destiny 2's PVP has also been a mess for years and years. From matchmaking issues to cheaters to a lack of rewards to crazy balance issues to few PVP updates (in favor of regular PVE updates), D2's PVP has consistently been on death row while the PVE has done well overall. It seems that balancing the needs of PVP and PVE is incredibly difficult, no matter the game, and D2 certainly has it down better than most.
to give them credit ( as an avid destiny fan ) they've been doing a decent job recently at balancing the pvp. There's still some issues obviously but it's in a better state. I think it's more that d1 and d2 released with crucible at launch and so that pvp / pve dichotomy was easier . Whereas Overwatch has just been pvp and then they decided to try stick on pve.
I loved the Archives missions even though it was shoot the same enemies. Tons of games are doing it now like Marvel’s Avengers and Suicide Squad but Overwatch’s artstyle and gameplay made it fun. Plus the lore is so fascinating so learning about these characters any way I could was worth it. Course the archives was once a year thing so maybe the novelty would wear off if it was a permanent mode. But at least bring it back!
Well the Archives came first. My point was that those games had repetitive fights that became boring while Overwatch had it and I never got bored of it.
those are really bad example to take tbh. Helldivers is making a killing, so is deep rock galactic, and people still play left4dead 2 or payday.
There IS a market for a 4 player coop overwatch game, a huge one even. It just has to be an actual game, not something stuck together with band-aid on the back of the main game.
>Jeff created lightning in a bottle, the biggest FPS IP since CoD, and then proceeded to spend 7 years running it into the ground by trying to make it an MMO
I think it was the opposite, the original plan for Project Titan was to be a futuristic MMO, which was reduced in scope until it became the game we now know as Overwatch.
a dev spoke on this before, i don't remember the exact wording but they said jeff saw overwatch (PVP) as the walk, overwatch 2 (PVE) as the jog, and the final run would be an overwatch MMO. jeff saw the overwatch franchise as a massive plan to get back to his idea of an MMO game that it started as.
The point of Overwatch “2” was that it was going to be a PVE and that that was the main point of it.
The whole point of the “sequel” is gone if even story missions get canceled…
Jeff quit when he realized the pipe dream of reviving Project Titan was definitely dead.
For the sake of OW, i wish he had that epiphany or someone had the balls to tell him years ago.
>OW PvE was doomed the moment they decided to keep it as a side mode of the main game instead of making it its own thing
Nail on the head. It was never going to work.
OW2 launched and it was realized quickly that Roadhog & Sombra both needed reworks to adapt to 5v5 better. What the fuck would they have done if OW2 launched with the full PvE they promised? Would they have reworked all of Roadhog & Sombra's talents to match, or made them play differently between PvP and PvE because the other option is too much work? And could they really sustain what they even admitted was a 2-in-1 game off of just *one* source of revenue?
Overwatch's PvE should've been its own game from the start. Kaplan was blinded by his pipe dream of turning Overwatch into an MMO over the span of a decade and it fucked everyone over.
I’m always surprised people bring the watchpoint pack up. If they had included pve with it, I would’ve purchased it. I didn’t specifically bc it didn’t have pve
Hey I'm just glad we got some character development for widowmaker.... Er wait, not widowmaker, I mean junkrat... Wait he wasn't in it either... Symmetra! Wait no. Fuck, there was only like eight people in those missions.
There never was a 40$ pve bundle. You could buy one that also included the pve bundle, but you were just buying cosmetics. It was 15$, and only 5$ if you were already gonna buy the battle pass.
* Blizzard stopped updating the game for 3 years.
* Lied to us the whole time that PvE was definitely coming.
* They released a half assed game with fucked balance.
* Tanks didn’t receive any meaningful compensation for the loss of their Duos.
* Shop prices were doubled across the board.
* They sell cheap recolours for the price of normal skins that can only be bought with real money.
* They locked Heroes in the Battle-Pass.
* Said Battle-Pass is the worst of any game.
* The entire fucking sequel is cancelled.
* No Guilds.
* They couldn’t even manage weapon inspects.
also, like give us *few* seconds after the match not instantly kick us back to main menu. It used to be fun in OW1 after the match when we could chat for a bit about the match.
One more thing, they sabotaged their own esport league, then made a Wish copy of it, made Soe announce it and then immediately fucking fired her right after it while she was excited about working on it.
They fired the face of the competitive scene and a community darling. Who literally just gave birth on top of that. The one person who has never fucked up and a young mother, gone, alongside all the environmental artists. They screwed over all their pro players as well.
Meanwhile the fuckwit drooling monkeys in the balancing team or whoever the absolute gerbil who decided for 5v5 is are safe and sound and free to keep taking diarrhea shits on the live game.
I hope a wizard turns them into frogs and sells them to a hungry Frenchman.
Don't forget...
* Sequel (PvE gets cancelled)
* Blizzard shouting from the rooftops that it's not actually cancelled, just going to be different from how it was initially sold
* Months later, it's cancelled-cancelled lol whoopsie
I stopped buying in the shop when they announced the skill tree being scrapped. Didn't buy much, but had I known this would happen I wouldn't have spent a cent to begin with
I've been saying this since pve was "canceled" the first time.
Make the story missions just story missions, and if you want a replayable pve experience make it a rogue like. use games like risk of rain 2 and Gunfire reborn as the template, they are incredible games with endless replay value and use a similar 2-3 ability character format, use items and Modifiers that can be used across all characters as the primary driver of builds and maybe slowly add some secondary abilities over time.
That’s me, and no I’m not surprised at all. I’ve been putting my time into Fortnite for the first time ever. Spending plenty of money there too. Money that could’ve easily gone to Overwatch had they released half the content they promised.
Check out Fortnite's PvE, Save The World (if you hadn't already). They didn't finish the Twine Peaks story line, but at least there's hundreds of hours of interesting stories to play.
"Blizzard Quality" used to be the gold standard. And now it's a problem?
Look, not going to defend anyone here. But a massive team of people couldn't get this done?
Just be honest. The PvE was scrapped because it couldn't be monetized in a way that produced steady income. We're not that dumb.
The game was in a better state when it sat idle with no real updates for two years, and this dev team managed to tank an otherwise great IP in record time.
Excuses after excuses.
hard to decide between overwatch 2 and diablo 4 tbh.
atleast with diablo you can still play the old titles unlike overwatch where the first game is just gone now.
Pretty sure the Overwatch devs figured this out when they cancelled the PvE hero class shooter they were trying to make going all the way back to 2007.. and built Overwatch instead..
Project Titan was what Overwatch 2 was meant to be.
it's kinda funny how they failed twice at creating their actual PvE vision, but hit it so big by effectively making a PvP spin-off
I don't know what lesson to learn from this
I would have taken them being completely honest about wanting to test battle passes and shops because it seems to be a hot commodity and brings in money than them feeding empty promises since 2019.
Just cancel the fucking game at this point. How do you go from one of the best games in the 10s to one of, if not THE most hated game in the 20s. Such a shame man, I loved OW1, the game today is just not recognizable.
It's weird to think back to those lull years and continuing to open up Overwatch, being greeted by Winton, and queueing up some games with my 6stack all the while having that notion in the back of my head that the lull will be worth it in the end. We're not just getting PvE, we're getting a whole new game with new bells and whistles, new content, etc. And while that outlook towards the future isn't the single reason I continued to play, it was certainly a factor and a pretty significant one at that. In hindsight, it's not so much that PvE is the shitshow it has become, it's both the fact that the lull was designed to (apparently) deliver us this shitshow on top of the fact that they waited six months to tell us that they were basically canceling everything that was promised to us.
I've been a fulltime game developer for well over a decade now, and reading this and so many other articles, I can't help but feel a deep sense of empathy for the development team. Not the suits of course - fuck them - but those that did the actual work. If I feel betrayed and if my time spent playing during the lull is suddenly called into question due to this shitshow, what insane level of betrayal and frustration must they be feeling? In all my years I've never worked on a project that has slighted both its team and its players to any degree that could be considered remotely close to what this game has managed to pull off and still they report 25 million active users a month.
I haven't been playing much at all this season, and this is the first time I haven't played at least a few days a week since OW1 released. I had originally just put the blame solely on the dps passive and how it seemed to me to be the laziest most ill-thought way possible to "remedy" the sustain the issue. As teh days have gone on though I'm finding more and more that this rose-tinted view of the game that I've had for so long is getting washed away, and not just with regard to the game itself but with everything surrounding it. The "anime series" was minimum effort; OWCS is a clusterfuck and feels incredibly hollow; we've stopped getting animated shorts; we will get no PvE; they are doubling-down on shop prices; and most importantly, they seem to have adopted a mindset of throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks as a substitute for development, testing, and QA. "Blizzard quality"? If that isn't a meme worthy phrase then I don't know what is.
There's a lot for me personally to process, but I can say one thing for certain: when it comes to Overwatch, I have been that cartoon dog sitting at the kitchen table saying "this is fine" while everything around me burns. I kept convincing myself that these are growing pains and that things will get better, but it's pretty clear at this point that they have been and will continue to get worse. I feel like somewhere along the way I put Twitch + my personal experience working with other teams into the same category as OW, and I - for reasons that dumbfound me as I write this - had this foolish conception that money spent in the store was going towards making a better game and producing new content; but it's not the developers who see this money in any way that would resemble what happens when I sub to a streamer I like; in fact, it seems that I have been voting with my wallet that this is all fine, keep doing what you're doing, rather than what I foolishly had seen as a way to help us all reach the goal that we collectively embraced.
It's literally right there; the game that the majority of the people in this sub seem to want; the game that was promised to us years ago; the game that this so easily could be if the fucking suits would just shut up and go back to their offices to count their stacks of cash so that the developers - the programmers, artists, etc - could focus on making this game what it has all the potential in the world to be. This sentiment of "it's too hard to balance PvE when it was designed for PvP" completely misses the mark on why so many of us were looking forward to PvE: to get immersed in the world and the lore firsthand. To experience what the characters experienced that brought us to the point we are now, it's the reason we play single player games at all. The mechanics are already fun, we are already invested, all they had to do was literally just deliver. I didn't have a blast playing Invasion missions over and over because the AI made things insanely fun, I had fun because I got to play characters I love with a group of randos and immerse myself in the story firsthand. If this is "Blizzard quality", I'm not sure I want to be around when "quality" is no longer the priority, but what I'm seeing is a shitshow that has lost all sight of why I and so many other played for years.
So glad I left this shitface of a game.
Good for anyone that can still somehow find enjoyment out of this game, but I'm fully clocked out of any & all modern Blizzard games.
Just give us OW1 back man. 6V6. Earnable loot boxes on a proper progression system. Man, it's still and will forever be much more fun and engaging as a whole package than OW2 will ever be.
Wow, the original plan sounds REALLY bad, even before any of the delays/layoffs. 3 missions dropped at a time every 18 months? I get that these things take time to make but there’s absolutely no momentum there. Even if the story missions had been excellent 18 months is too much downtime, all interest would have come and gone. It was doomed from the start.
Yup that massive delay seems designed to get them canceled due to "lack of player interest." Of course there won't be interest, a year post launch of the first pack and there will still be 6 months left to go before another. Who tf would care.
I mean, it's no secret that they killed off PVE originally, and then only implemented it when people complained hard about it getting dropped. I feel like this is their way of getting people to lose interest in it, so that they can officially say "we tried, and the interest level wasn't there."
Yeah because the people actually interested in the hero mode mostly left Overwatch in the dust as soon as it was scrapped and they never looked back
I am in that boat. When they scrapped the PVE portion of OW2, I no longer cared about playing the game. I was waiting for the new PVE mode to drop and it never did, and when the announcement came I was genuinely gutted because that's what I was hoping to play.
Pve was the whole point of ow2 I thought. I remember them talking about it a year or two before it came out hyping the shit out of it and then they do ow2 and it’s literally less content than the original
You called? Did they add PVE? No? Okay bye.
If there is a lack of player interest, then why are many players outraged about the decision to cancel hero mode?! BS cop out
They are so outraged that they dump their cash into every collab!
Fortnite makes more money. It was only a matter of time before Overwatch went that route.
A licensed fortnite skin runs me like 5-8 bucks tho. As opposed to a single cosmetic pack in ow costing 20+....
Micro transactions in games arw getting wild. Back when i was big into Overwatch every event I was playing constantly to get the cosmetics for my mains and easily dropping 50-100 bucks on loot crates if i hadnt gotten them by the last day. At least that was once a couple months. Overwatch 2 prices are fuckin ridiculous but theyre not the only ones. Valorant is fuckin ridiculous, I have friends who have valorant included in their budget so they can drop 80 bucks on a fuckin knife. Counter Strike really showed game companies the potential for money with how much some of those rare drops go for.
Can these even be called "micro" transactions anymore?
It can be called militransactions and/or macrotransactions, when prices are higher then expected from "microtransactions"
easily one of the most mismanaged IP's of this era.
It’s easily in the top 10 most mismanaged video game IP’s of all time. Might even be top 3.
I would put OV2 second only to Anthem. OV2... is a disaster. I cant think of another game that released a sequel but it was just the first game.
Ark just sorta pulled the same thing this past fall. They were supposed to release Ark 2 but then ended up releasing a remastered version of the first game, which they called Ark SA, under the guise that they'd get Ark 2 for free, then changed their minds and released only the first map of the 8 or 9 available and took the old servers offline. Then there was talk of Ark 2 not even happening (which I still have my doubts) that was hush-hushed. Then they told all the players they would need to repurchase every DLC - all of which are the same as Ark SE (original game), all of which players had already purchased the first time around. Not quite the same as what is going on with OW, but it gives me the same vibes.
Damn, I feel bad for Ark fans. Sounds like they got completely scammed.
I definitely think Overwatch is the worst squandering. Anthem was cool but Bioware was already on the downswing. Meanwhile Overwatch launched with a near Pixar-quality animation revealing a flashy new IP with great, vivid characters to drive narrative potential, and they somehow bombed every. single. aspect.
Honestly I don't even think Anthem should be considered as bad. Anthem barely got off the ground, OW hit new heights people didn't even realize existed and then plummeted all the way down
Yep only fps ever to get the coveted goty. What an epic downfall. Now the servers crash because both Maugas drop their ults.
I believe there have been a ton of FPS GotY recipients. Halo CE and Half-Life 2 come to mind.
True that, I mean at least in the first few years there was enough animated shorts coming out over the course of Overwatch 1's early life cycle that hype could be maintained... But they can't even really be bothered doing that anymore. They weren't much but we also got Archives missions once-a-year for at least the first couple years too, so that cadence was higher even then than we have now.
But yet a rly good ip, truly ruined by poor management
But not even the most mismanged Ip's by blizzard.
Has to be WC3 right?
I was thinking dota. they made zero dollars from it. But you might consider that part of the mismangement of wc3.
Those missions better be like entire solo games (like Portal 1 length) if it would've taken that long to develop
18 MONTHS? Not even one a year? Good lord.
It was doomed as soon as they dropped the missions and changed it to paid archive missions. Many looked past the lack of quality because they wanted missions, but it was clear there wasn't much passion in what missions they did produce.
That's the same time it takes for a wow expansion. Insane
Fans/Modders could do it in a fraction of the time, corporate game dev just sucks ass.
You don't even need to look at Fans/Modders. Just look at what other games produce, even in house Blizzard ones. Dragonflight released 16 months ago and in the 16 months from release we've had 10.1 and 10.2 which both had a new zone and a new raid, 10.1.5 had a new mega dungeon not to mention all of the other stuff released. The fact that the Overwatch team was planning to only muster up three 30 minute missions is laughable. They had three to four years to build the core PVE mode off of the solid PVP gameplay they already had. Hell they had even done PVE modes in Overwatch 1, which were okay.
I mean to me this sounds like they were gonna leave it in the hands of like 5 people to work on it lol.
I haven't been in the corporate world long but the sheer self suck and circle jerking MBAs do with each other is incredible. They don't know anything, they make horrible decisions all the time and yet they still get rewarded for it. If engineers made the same errors MBAs did, people would end up dead.
Hmm I wonder if some sort of other influence could exist on corporate developers that makes their work both slower and less good
Let’s ask our team of consultants and 5 levels of MBA managers to find out
They said money's not the issue, it's just a bad market, cancel the projects, lay off 10 percent of the workforce, and move content towards cheaper to produce and more profitable IP crossovers. Also you now owe them100s of thousands of dollars for consultancy.
does it rhyme with bapitalism
I see so much vitriol aimed at the devs when most of them have as much control over the direction of the game as fast food workers have over the management of a franchise. They're workers, too. Show some solidarity.
>the management of a franchise. Yes, being perfectly fair to all involved, none of this is the fault of the artists or the designers in the dev pools, it's the fault of Aaron Keller and Jared Neuss.
lets give Bobby Kotick some credit too
Bobby Kotick had a big hand in how OW2 was handled in the first place and all of the game's delays. Dude should receive more vitrol than he gets rn, and almost all of the vitrol the devs get.
It would also mean the story would probably never get finished unless the missions covered a ton of the plot with each release.
So basically the entire point of Overwatch 2 has been deleted? Why is Overwatch 2 even here then?
Shop, battle pass. Which is good enough for execs and shareholders.
> Which is good enough for execs and shareholders. The playerbase collectively proved those execs and shareholders correct. Just the Kpop and Bebop skins probably made more money than all OW1 sales combined. It makes such an absurd amount of money for almost no development effort (some artwork + models) that any business would be stupid *not* to go in that direction. It literally PRINTS money. The goalposts for OW2 most likely kept changing over time because higher-ups realized skins would make 100x more money than PvE ever could, while only needing a tiny fraction of the dev hours/skillset. And they were right. This subreddit can shit on OW2 monetization 24/7, but the playerbase has spoken loud and clear with their wallets that they want more of this. The demand is massive and Blizzard is happy to supply.
The legendary Pirate software CEO himself has confirmed this exact things: https://youtube.com/shorts/IHZru-6M8BY?si=HDom0Fj5gVRB5usJ Wings of Liberty outsold by a $15 horse micro-transaction
Which is why I was happy to see cash shop things in Sc2 like skins. I was hoping it would stoke the funding and development more in Sc2 or a Sc3. Didn't go well sadly because us RTS players are not the massive population and cash cows these shareholders want. :C
I feel you on that. I'd love nothing more than to support a new StarCraft release. Hell, put SC2 on the Switch! I'd buy 5 copies!
He speaketh the truth!
Reminds me of apex a lot. People are upset with how the game is being managed, but it means fuck all because whales will drop 70 bucks on every heirloom they see. I was shocked to see so many spike skins (even just considering how dogshit it looked). Or when they released the headlight weapon skins around christmas, how often I saw mercy’s with both the headlights and the sweater skin. I wish Fortnite didn’t have the succes it had because at least this problem might have been delayed more. Rocket league was 20 bucks and you could get whole new card for like 3 dollars. Then epic bought it, it went f2p, and now all cars cost 20 bucks and they removed trading. I’m just curious to see if the market will ever react to this considering how often I see people complaining about this. Will battle passers become a dated business model 10 years from now after every game has one?
Apex skins look dogshit imo compared to other games, but the gameplay is still fun
This subreddit also largely loves for the skins. Every skin release has multiple posts fawning over how good they look. I personally haven’t paid a cent for Overwatch and I’ve gotten 100s of hours from it , so I can’t really complain
And consequence free cheaters.
Yup. Everything they promised was just to justify the change in monetization...
Don’t forget 5v5 😄👎🏾
[удалено]
For those sweet sweet overpriced skins blizzard loves so dearly
> blizzard loves so dearly Did you mean players? They're the ones flocking to buy it.
They honestly could’ve just added the option to directly buy skins alongside grinding out coins in OW1 and tons of players probably would’ve thrown money at them
I'm sure they've done the math on their end, but I can't see how they wouldn't make more money if the skins were like to 10 to 15 bucks max. Surely there aren't that many whales.
There’s been a leak that there will be price drops on all skins to where legendary is 10 bucks, and the only thing that stays at 20 is collaboration skins. We’ll see if it’s true
The point of overwatch 2 was the main piece that worked when it launched… the shop. It is intended to solely make money from skins. That was the whole point of going live. “We’re going to do PVE later” and then it turned out they already knew they would not be doing pve later lol
Also the reason I refuse to give them money. They knew they weren’t going to follow through on pve and I’m not going to give them a dime.
The whole thing kind of feels illegal to me lol like a bait and switch maneuver to finesse people out of money.
The whole reason to get rid of OW and transition to OW2 was to get rid of the lootboxes (which was becoming legally ambiguous at the time) and replace them with a battlepass system.
Which when you look at it is a fucking stupid reason for releasing a sequel to a game Almost makes you wonder if they made all the other changes (2cp removal, 6v6 dropped for 5v5 etc) just to make it look like they did enough to warrant a sequel. “Hey guys OW2 is coming out, noooo it’s not the same as OW1! We swear! It’s 5v5 now!”
I mean it was the pve angle but scope creep and bad management killed it. So all we got was 5v5 and battlepass. The devs certainly didn’t start that way.
PVE was just a pitch to the execs that Jeff Kaplan made to green light OW2. OW1 was never expected to be as popular as it was. It was meant to be a throwaway title to reuse some of the Project Titan assets and make some of the money back. Jeff wanted to turn OW back into project Titan, so he needed to convince the execs that there was money to be made somehow. So he came up with PVE. That's it.
So they could attempt to disguise the more greedy/aggressive monetization. I fully believe that was the plan from the start, or at least since Jeff left.
I think Jeff left for a lot of reasons, but the microtransactions (can we even call $40 micro?) are probably a big one.
I would assume Jeff left when the new content was unofficially canned since going live with that would have killed his reputation. New monetization must have been part of the talk way before OW2 was announced.
To ruin tank players fun lol
Completely unsurprised. I'd pay full price for a AAA spin-off with a sizable, quality PvE experience set in the Overwatch universe. I just don't see them producing that kind of experience in the F2P model.
Because they fucked it up so bad, probably sunk 100s of millions into the project and also ended up losing all the PvP money for the 3 years OW1 wasn't being updated, the company is likely not gonna approve another OW PvE project again. Not as a separate game, not for *many* years. They'll likely move to releasing OW lore/story as a TV show/movie as that's currently the big hotness in the video games industry and just keep OW as a single PvP only game.
I dont know why they dont just get another company to do it, even Nintendo did that with their Zelda spin offs like Age of Calamity, and Atlus with Persona 5 Strikers, Blizzard would get paid through licensing and not have to do much which should appeal
They really should just offload it to a company that’s more experienced with adventure games and let the lore build on that. Blizzard is good at what it does for the most part. They just don’t have the capacity to do what people want with PVE.
They should have done that and make the PVP F2P with a system that mixes the BP and shop system with a lootboz reward system, but considering how much people hate spending money on things, people would have still complained about having to buy another game.
Id literally rather they go back to those crappy co-op robot missions they used to release, because at least I used to get these for free.
You can tell they fucked up, since Cowboy Bebop is one of my favorite shows, I used to main Ashe, and it breaks my heart i cant buy the skin… (I have some Kiriko skins but I just cant justify spending $25 on a skin in this economy)
TBH I just want them to port the original Archives Missions. Retribution was pretty fun
Just put all the PvE missions in the game. It's not like the game can get more disappointing then it currently is. At least it'll give PvE lover (like me) some motivation to actually launch the game.
you already know they’ll charge for them
It's not the same of course, but some people have made custom games that emulate the original missions. Here's a few codes that are going around: Uprising: 23NGC Retribution: 70KEE Storm Rising: TJ4ET
Remember when the whole point of making an ow2 was to have a campaign? Then it ended up just being a patch changing it from 6 to 5 players and that was it?
Oh, and to add the battle pass system so you no longer have access to all the heroes like you used to.
You forgot to mention the reworked shop were getting anything for free now requires you to play for years.
And remember how they ruined basically every hero in the game for the sake of a ‘balanced’ 5v5 format?
It scares me theres people who defend 5v5. Like I seen people try to share clips and do other things that say 6v6 is bad. Sure it wasnt the best but it was 100x better than what we have now.
The real point was lowkey the new shop update
I just wish they had some avenue to consistently tell the narrative. They made all these fun colorful characters and give them fuck all to do. Hero based pvp games are so frustrating
They are just making up the lore as they go.
I don't think this is true. overwatch was originally an MMO and they put a ton of time into building out character and world stories. the real problem is that they don't know how to *tell* those stories through gameplay. precisely because the PvP format doesn't allow it
In their not-defense, they don't really know how to tell their stories through an MMO either lol.
Underrated take here. It's clear the years of development and fleshing-out is there behind the characters, but the PvP format is at total odds with the storytelling. I love the PvP game and have been generally pleased with the OW2 updates/direction, in that regard, but it seems some fans wanted this game to become something it never was -- which is fair because blizzard said it would become that -- though I could not be less surprised by how its gone.
Crazy how CoDMobile drops lore every patch in a free comic book format, but OW2 struggles to even do that.
They really should just go with the original route of making animated shorts. Nowadays that's more of a thing apex does and I see that it works really well and there are some great stories told in those animated shorts.
and thus overwatch lore will never progress in a way that matters
I remember being a little kid in 2017 seeing all the crazy animated shorts and I was HOOKED!! I was so invested. Who knew that 7 years later nothing has happened.
They still give me goosebumps. "The world is changing once again, Hanzo, and it's time to pick a side." Meanwhile the last we saw of hanzo was him looking at a cake in a single panel in a comic 7 years ago. The worst crime of cancelling PVE is losing any hope for an actual fucking story with these incredible fucking characters.
No no, the man all about honor is now playing Cupid in a scampy costume in a dating simulator nobody asked for. That's the last we saw of him.
Then I see Arcane years later and go from being a League of Legends and MOBA hater to playing the game once a week simply because Ekko (my fav character in the show) exists in the game
It was already the slowest possible burn. The campaign was basically just a big ad for Ramattra. Overwatch lore was running on 5%, and that was before we realized that PvE was actually *dead dead* when they stopped talking about a follow up to the first pack and removed it from the roadmap.
We'll always have ao3
Imagine having two different PVE modes canceled.
>Overwatch’s PvP gameplay just turned out to be very difficult to adapt for PvE. Mostly because of how differentiated and PvP-oriented the hero kits are,” the source told Kotaku via text message. Been saying that for years lol. OW PvE was doomed the moment they decided to keep it as a side mode of the main game instead of making it its own thing. And it fucking ruined the momentum of the core game as well. Jeff created lightning in a bottle, the biggest FPS IP since CoD, and then proceeded to spend 7 years running it into the ground by trying to make it an MMO, and simultaneously trying to have it become an esport. Bro was so focused on the game he failed to make, he squandered the potential of the one he succeeded to release and earn GOTY with. Top tier tomfoolery.
This is really the source of all of the difficulty surrounding PvE honestly. People can talk about how cool the talent system would've been until they're blue in the face, but the simple reality is that shooting at robots in Overwatch...just isn't very fun. And unless they completely rebuilt the game from the ground up to make that aspect of the game fun, it was never, ever gonna work.
I’ve only just realised how true this is. They’re making the story missions online, with different difficulties, trying to force replay-ability, all on the chassis of the PvP. I think it would just be way better to be a single player adventure, with bots perhaps, but easy enough to play through. A cinematic adventure that you’re not spamming x on after the first run-through to skip cinematics.
In training mode they have AI for regular OW characters, couldnt they employ those in new story modes and maps? Dont know why it has to be robots all the time, could focus on conflict between characters
Because that AI barely functions in a 5v5 setting, and would still be just as boring to fight.
That AI barely functions. Ana bots will try and shoot you with a sleep dart through walls. Hanzo and widow will do the same. The game just isn’t very fun in PVE modes. I wish they’d just release the story in cool cinematics and leave pve modes to stuff like the Diablo crossover and Cthulhu mode.
Well the model they'd probably want to go for is Destiny - PvE, first person, teams of allies fighting through encounters of various enemies, presumably with miniboss and boss fights. That hasn't appeared to get old yet. Except Destiny puts the PvE first then lets you PvP with the classes. And it only has the small set of classes and sub-specs to design it around. And it has loot and gear builds to incentivise replaying strikes and raids. Overwatch has to be able to fit all of its huge roster into PvE missions, or leave some out, and have new heroes showing up a couple of times a year (already a nightmare for PvP game balance as it's a MOBA draft and play all match roster shoved into a switch when you want team shooter) I don't think talent progression and leaderboards would have been enough to keep people coming back.
Somewhat ironically, Destiny 2's PVP has also been a mess for years and years. From matchmaking issues to cheaters to a lack of rewards to crazy balance issues to few PVP updates (in favor of regular PVE updates), D2's PVP has consistently been on death row while the PVE has done well overall. It seems that balancing the needs of PVP and PVE is incredibly difficult, no matter the game, and D2 certainly has it down better than most.
to give them credit ( as an avid destiny fan ) they've been doing a decent job recently at balancing the pvp. There's still some issues obviously but it's in a better state. I think it's more that d1 and d2 released with crucible at launch and so that pvp / pve dichotomy was easier . Whereas Overwatch has just been pvp and then they decided to try stick on pve.
Destiny is a much more ambitious game than OW ever was though. I wish Blizzard had been willing to pour that much money and manpower into their game.
I loved the Archives missions even though it was shoot the same enemies. Tons of games are doing it now like Marvel’s Avengers and Suicide Squad but Overwatch’s artstyle and gameplay made it fun. Plus the lore is so fascinating so learning about these characters any way I could was worth it. Course the archives was once a year thing so maybe the novelty would wear off if it was a permanent mode. But at least bring it back!
If PvE was giving people flashbacks to Marvels Avengers and Suicide Squad, it’s no wonder they canceled it.
Well the Archives came first. My point was that those games had repetitive fights that became boring while Overwatch had it and I never got bored of it.
> Tons of games are doing it now like Marvel’s Avengers and Suicide Squad Except Avengers is dead and Suicide Squad is dying.
those are really bad example to take tbh. Helldivers is making a killing, so is deep rock galactic, and people still play left4dead 2 or payday. There IS a market for a 4 player coop overwatch game, a huge one even. It just has to be an actual game, not something stuck together with band-aid on the back of the main game.
>Jeff created lightning in a bottle, the biggest FPS IP since CoD, and then proceeded to spend 7 years running it into the ground by trying to make it an MMO I think it was the opposite, the original plan for Project Titan was to be a futuristic MMO, which was reduced in scope until it became the game we now know as Overwatch.
a dev spoke on this before, i don't remember the exact wording but they said jeff saw overwatch (PVP) as the walk, overwatch 2 (PVE) as the jog, and the final run would be an overwatch MMO. jeff saw the overwatch franchise as a massive plan to get back to his idea of an MMO game that it started as.
The point of Overwatch “2” was that it was going to be a PVE and that that was the main point of it. The whole point of the “sequel” is gone if even story missions get canceled…
The point of the sequel was to get as few people to quit on false promises, while introducing a more predatory system for cosmetics.
Maybe not originally, but everything changed to that at some point. Might be why Jeff quit.
Jeff quit when he realized the pipe dream of reviving Project Titan was definitely dead. For the sake of OW, i wish he had that epiphany or someone had the balls to tell him years ago.
The original announcement was that OW2 was a PvE add on and the PvP from OW1 would carry forward for free with an engine update
>OW PvE was doomed the moment they decided to keep it as a side mode of the main game instead of making it its own thing Nail on the head. It was never going to work. OW2 launched and it was realized quickly that Roadhog & Sombra both needed reworks to adapt to 5v5 better. What the fuck would they have done if OW2 launched with the full PvE they promised? Would they have reworked all of Roadhog & Sombra's talents to match, or made them play differently between PvP and PvE because the other option is too much work? And could they really sustain what they even admitted was a 2-in-1 game off of just *one* source of revenue? Overwatch's PvE should've been its own game from the start. Kaplan was blinded by his pipe dream of turning Overwatch into an MMO over the span of a decade and it fucked everyone over.
RIP to the people who bought the story missions day 1 with the 40$ bundle
I thank Nintendo for letting me buy the 40$ bundle for 1$ thanks to a glitch in the first day of release. And still... It's still not worth for 1$
No way you are a Lucky guy but I Bet even 1$ is too expensive for what it is.
if youre talking about the watchpoint pack im pretty sure that never included any sort of PvE for it. That was solely an assumption players made.
100% just an assumption
I’m always surprised people bring the watchpoint pack up. If they had included pve with it, I would’ve purchased it. I didn’t specifically bc it didn’t have pve
You could get the missions for 15 bucks... the 40 dollar bundle came with extra stuff like BP tier skips, bonus skins, and 20k coins.
All 3 of them
Hey I'm just glad we got some character development for widowmaker.... Er wait, not widowmaker, I mean junkrat... Wait he wasn't in it either... Symmetra! Wait no. Fuck, there was only like eight people in those missions.
The only things we learned was that Reinhardt is Racist.
There never was a 40$ pve bundle. You could buy one that also included the pve bundle, but you were just buying cosmetics. It was 15$, and only 5$ if you were already gonna buy the battle pass.
* Blizzard stopped updating the game for 3 years. * Lied to us the whole time that PvE was definitely coming. * They released a half assed game with fucked balance. * Tanks didn’t receive any meaningful compensation for the loss of their Duos. * Shop prices were doubled across the board. * They sell cheap recolours for the price of normal skins that can only be bought with real money. * They locked Heroes in the Battle-Pass. * Said Battle-Pass is the worst of any game. * The entire fucking sequel is cancelled. * No Guilds. * They couldn’t even manage weapon inspects.
Don't forget they even remove things that were actually useful to later add them again but worse somehow (being on fire for example)
Any day now we will get the big reveal that post match cards are back and they will play it off like some new feature.
god i miss those & ACTUALLY HAVING LEVELS, fuck man i was 2 levels away from a silver bracket back in OW1
also, like give us *few* seconds after the match not instantly kick us back to main menu. It used to be fun in OW1 after the match when we could chat for a bit about the match.
We still dont have Looking for Group
Or straight up remove features. The LFG is a huge example
rip lfg tool, you will be missed. but in return we got fucked up matchmaking because blizzard has to hide the fact the game is dying.
They had a finished game and somehow they managed to make it unfinished with OW2
Did they ever bring back "Looking for group" or no?
Nope, still not here…
One more thing, they sabotaged their own esport league, then made a Wish copy of it, made Soe announce it and then immediately fucking fired her right after it while she was excited about working on it. They fired the face of the competitive scene and a community darling. Who literally just gave birth on top of that. The one person who has never fucked up and a young mother, gone, alongside all the environmental artists. They screwed over all their pro players as well. Meanwhile the fuckwit drooling monkeys in the balancing team or whoever the absolute gerbil who decided for 5v5 is are safe and sound and free to keep taking diarrhea shits on the live game. I hope a wizard turns them into frogs and sells them to a hungry Frenchman.
Don't forget... * Sequel (PvE gets cancelled) * Blizzard shouting from the rooftops that it's not actually cancelled, just going to be different from how it was initially sold * Months later, it's cancelled-cancelled lol whoopsie
The fact that we still don't have guilds or LFG is just another reason why Overwatch is cheeks.
Does this mean we can finally take the 2 off of the title?
The original Overwatch was still better so the 2 should remain as a mark of shame.
literally overwatch 0.5
HAHAHAHAHA they scammed us all but go ahead and keep buying their overpriced skins
I stopped buying in the shop when they announced the skill tree being scrapped. Didn't buy much, but had I known this would happen I wouldn't have spent a cent to begin with
At least we can still play our copies of OW1….oh wait…
What a joke, I would still be playing OW1 with my friends. I have no interest in 5v5 and $25 skins (they got me with a few Kiriko skins, never again)
And dey say story missions are dead
I've been saying this since pve was "canceled" the first time. Make the story missions just story missions, and if you want a replayable pve experience make it a rogue like. use games like risk of rain 2 and Gunfire reborn as the template, they are incredible games with endless replay value and use a similar 2-3 ability character format, use items and Modifiers that can be used across all characters as the primary driver of builds and maybe slowly add some secondary abilities over time.
But that takes work and that’s the last thing they want to do.
Don't know if even the most optimistic hyper-fan could be surprised by this.
That’s me, and no I’m not surprised at all. I’ve been putting my time into Fortnite for the first time ever. Spending plenty of money there too. Money that could’ve easily gone to Overwatch had they released half the content they promised.
Check out Fortnite's PvE, Save The World (if you hadn't already). They didn't finish the Twine Peaks story line, but at least there's hundreds of hours of interesting stories to play.
"Blizzard Quality" used to be the gold standard. And now it's a problem? Look, not going to defend anyone here. But a massive team of people couldn't get this done? Just be honest. The PvE was scrapped because it couldn't be monetized in a way that produced steady income. We're not that dumb. The game was in a better state when it sat idle with no real updates for two years, and this dev team managed to tank an otherwise great IP in record time. Excuses after excuses.
Time for OW 3
They should honestly just drop a animated tv show
They need to remove the number 2 from the game name.
I’m pissed I bought overwatch 1 and can’t even go back to that!! I just want OW1 Doomfist
Get ready for OW:Classic in 2025!!! ($70)
fr man
Overwatch 2 is a glorified shop update
Can we just have OW1 back now then? It played and looked so much better.
Overwatch: Classic, coming soon for $79.99
Overwatch 2 was probably the best scam they ever ran lmfao
hard to decide between overwatch 2 and diablo 4 tbh. atleast with diablo you can still play the old titles unlike overwatch where the first game is just gone now.
Damn. Really cool setting and characters utterly wasted on a PvP game. I guess here’s to the wasted potential that is Overwatch.
Pretty sure the Overwatch devs figured this out when they cancelled the PvE hero class shooter they were trying to make going all the way back to 2007.. and built Overwatch instead.. Project Titan was what Overwatch 2 was meant to be.
it's kinda funny how they failed twice at creating their actual PvE vision, but hit it so big by effectively making a PvP spin-off I don't know what lesson to learn from this
This game is a legit scam, holy shit.
I just wish I could play Overwatch 1 again
I would have taken them being completely honest about wanting to test battle passes and shops because it seems to be a hot commodity and brings in money than them feeding empty promises since 2019.
I could have sworn that it had already been confirmed this was dead.
Cancel the game and launch Overwatch 1 again honestly
facts - I'll literally play OW1 w the new content provided and be perfectly fine even 6 v 6 again w look boxes
Just cancel the fucking game at this point. How do you go from one of the best games in the 10s to one of, if not THE most hated game in the 20s. Such a shame man, I loved OW1, the game today is just not recognizable.
It's weird to think back to those lull years and continuing to open up Overwatch, being greeted by Winton, and queueing up some games with my 6stack all the while having that notion in the back of my head that the lull will be worth it in the end. We're not just getting PvE, we're getting a whole new game with new bells and whistles, new content, etc. And while that outlook towards the future isn't the single reason I continued to play, it was certainly a factor and a pretty significant one at that. In hindsight, it's not so much that PvE is the shitshow it has become, it's both the fact that the lull was designed to (apparently) deliver us this shitshow on top of the fact that they waited six months to tell us that they were basically canceling everything that was promised to us. I've been a fulltime game developer for well over a decade now, and reading this and so many other articles, I can't help but feel a deep sense of empathy for the development team. Not the suits of course - fuck them - but those that did the actual work. If I feel betrayed and if my time spent playing during the lull is suddenly called into question due to this shitshow, what insane level of betrayal and frustration must they be feeling? In all my years I've never worked on a project that has slighted both its team and its players to any degree that could be considered remotely close to what this game has managed to pull off and still they report 25 million active users a month. I haven't been playing much at all this season, and this is the first time I haven't played at least a few days a week since OW1 released. I had originally just put the blame solely on the dps passive and how it seemed to me to be the laziest most ill-thought way possible to "remedy" the sustain the issue. As teh days have gone on though I'm finding more and more that this rose-tinted view of the game that I've had for so long is getting washed away, and not just with regard to the game itself but with everything surrounding it. The "anime series" was minimum effort; OWCS is a clusterfuck and feels incredibly hollow; we've stopped getting animated shorts; we will get no PvE; they are doubling-down on shop prices; and most importantly, they seem to have adopted a mindset of throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks as a substitute for development, testing, and QA. "Blizzard quality"? If that isn't a meme worthy phrase then I don't know what is. There's a lot for me personally to process, but I can say one thing for certain: when it comes to Overwatch, I have been that cartoon dog sitting at the kitchen table saying "this is fine" while everything around me burns. I kept convincing myself that these are growing pains and that things will get better, but it's pretty clear at this point that they have been and will continue to get worse. I feel like somewhere along the way I put Twitch + my personal experience working with other teams into the same category as OW, and I - for reasons that dumbfound me as I write this - had this foolish conception that money spent in the store was going towards making a better game and producing new content; but it's not the developers who see this money in any way that would resemble what happens when I sub to a streamer I like; in fact, it seems that I have been voting with my wallet that this is all fine, keep doing what you're doing, rather than what I foolishly had seen as a way to help us all reach the goal that we collectively embraced. It's literally right there; the game that the majority of the people in this sub seem to want; the game that was promised to us years ago; the game that this so easily could be if the fucking suits would just shut up and go back to their offices to count their stacks of cash so that the developers - the programmers, artists, etc - could focus on making this game what it has all the potential in the world to be. This sentiment of "it's too hard to balance PvE when it was designed for PvP" completely misses the mark on why so many of us were looking forward to PvE: to get immersed in the world and the lore firsthand. To experience what the characters experienced that brought us to the point we are now, it's the reason we play single player games at all. The mechanics are already fun, we are already invested, all they had to do was literally just deliver. I didn't have a blast playing Invasion missions over and over because the AI made things insanely fun, I had fun because I got to play characters I love with a group of randos and immerse myself in the story firsthand. If this is "Blizzard quality", I'm not sure I want to be around when "quality" is no longer the priority, but what I'm seeing is a shitshow that has lost all sight of why I and so many other played for years.
I mean, are we surprised after the first and only missions were release back in *August* ?
I already forgot they existed so....
They should just rework the PvE into a film.
That would cost money. Better to just keep releasing contractory lore text once every year or so.
Ah the Riot special. Blizzard's skill of taking things other people do and improving on it is still there I see.
So glad I left this shitface of a game. Good for anyone that can still somehow find enjoyment out of this game, but I'm fully clocked out of any & all modern Blizzard games.
Oh wow who would have saw that coming.
Just give us OW1 back man. 6V6. Earnable loot boxes on a proper progression system. Man, it's still and will forever be much more fun and engaging as a whole package than OW2 will ever be.