I highly doubt that and sadly there’s no way we can prove one way or the other, the game needs both a casual scene and a competitive one, focusing on just one would be a big mistake
Game doesn’t need competitive one, as it’s inherently not very competitive-friendly. Pushing in that direction is what caused it’s downfall.
As much as I want this statement to be true, Blizzard didn’t kill Overwatch by themselves.
Part of the community helped.
Well, they did listen to that part. They could listen to someone else, but they chose to listen to that category.
Which resulted in game, that can be fun to watch, but atrocious to play. Because they listened to people, for who’s income “fun to watch” is top priority.
I disagree, if there would be no grounds for competitiveness a lot of streamers and pro players wouldn’t have made it their job even when there was no league, they saw the potential for it and stuck around
you can theorize and speculate as much as you want but we gotta look at events as they happened and nothing points towards OW not being competitive initially, specially considering that the first hero created was Tracer, the most mechanical intense gameplay that had ever graced an fps videogame
Good, game is better without them.
your opinion, with which I disagree
Feel free to. Personally I wouldn’t listen to players, which have “fun to watch” as priority.
It’s why you listen to engineers first, when it comes to designing tools - otherwise you end up with elegant, but non-functional, tools.
To be fair, I do feel like listening to their community is a bad thing concerning Blizzard. Starting with Burning Crusade.
Goes on with Starcraft II with it’s horrendous story and unbalanced races, going through Diablo III being similar to World of Warcraft and now…Overwatch goes through it too.
I guess the original Blizzard team is just…gone. To other companies.
It’s good thing, as long as you do not create “private club” of people you listen to. Which is basically what Blizzard did - priority to chosen few, everyone else have to scream really loud for developers to hear from pedestal they put themselves on.
When all “community” you listen to is “by accident” consists entirely of pro players and streamers, you really failed at collecting feedback.
Halo infinite is not a dead game my friend.
As for competitive, I never understood it.
Warcraft III was not a competitive game per say.
Or wether it was ONLY competitive and every matches was in ladder.
That made for a good recipe. It was still a game and people were playing to win, sure, but also for fun. It allowed you the space to create and test out new strategies without anyone being bothered by it.
Nowadays, if we don’t follow the popular streamers strategies, we’re being yelled upon.
I remember a Starcraft game I did against a pro in a LAN environment.
I thought I would lose in less than five minutes so I just went full vultures and put mines everywhere.
He was utterly confused because noone had used this strategy against him.
I managed to win in the end. It was a really fun game.
Anything can be made into competitive game, usually losing fun in the process.
I think Splatoon found a good standing? Most of the game is just fun, but once you get to A Rank, there is a “meta” for weapons.
And moment you start rebalancing whole game for it, meta spreads and whole game becomes competitive.
It’s my personal opinion, but I find “competitive mode” to be cancer of any game it appears at. Slowly, but surely, it drains out all the fun that game has, if allowed to spread.
Thankfully, Splatoon rarely does drastic changes to weapons, and the general playerbase is casual up until the upper echelons.
Most people like many games.
The games don’t have to be the same to compete, you can only play 1 game at a time and thats what they are fighting for, your time of day.
like sooXfar and janks left OW for apex and their YT and twitch’s blew up. mendo went from benched in OWL to a Valorant pro-player. LuLu went from gold OW player to Apex pred.
All of their viewers had a moment of “i wanna do that” and played other games.
It’s not just the 1 game ponies that are their competition. Believe it or not lots of people like lots of games.
That’s what they did for Starcraft II.
Starcraft was a slow-paced RTS game with many variables involved. It was not released as a competitive game, it became so because people liked to play it on LAN.
Then when Starcraft II released, they started to implement changes for the competitive scene. One of the most hilarious one being accelerating the game pace.
The normal speed on Starcraft II is two times the fastest speed on Starcraft.
And of course, competitive games are played on fastest, so it’s even quicker.
How are you supposed to play strategically and micromanage units like the sapper, queen or corsairs if everything is so fast?
But apparently, that’s what people like to watch.
I do believe Blizzard is extremely bitter about losing the E-sport scene. They dont have a game that truly dominates the scene when they pretty much pioneered it on Starcraft 1, way before the term e-sport was even talked about. The idea of people treating games to be as competitive as an sport was always ridicule at the time that SC:Broodwars was pretty much the major sport on Korea.
Now, fast-forward to these days, they just let Dota slip through their fingers and is trying desperately to have a flagship title with a big e-sport scene. They tried to force it upon Overwatch and… uhh… it doesnt seem to have worked so well so far.
Blizzard does seem rather impatient to let things grow, they want everything NOW NOW and NOW. They didnt have the patience to let OW organically form its own competitive scene. But I wouldnt assign all OW’s failures on the competitive/e-sport scene, This was blizzard most badly handle game in terms of balance changes. Glaring issues would linger months, horrible design decisions (like making a single hero, Brig, counter an entire lineup), Goats situation was badly handled (why not try some diminishing returns on AoE healing?) and so on.
Overwatch’s downfall was a perfect storm, of many factors that threw it from 10 million players, best game of 2016, to whatever shell/lumbering corpse it is now, but all those factors were Blizzard’s fault, be it the greediness of the higher-ups to have an E-sport scene ASAP or the design team which was clueless and lethargic to the game´s issues.
About their balance changes: When in beta they said that “Symmetra was an statiscally overperforming hero” I had lost all hope, they care more about their spreadsheets and stats than the whole picture, their spreadsheets probably also showed Launch brig to be completely fine and thats why they took so long to tune her down… Their bureaucratic approach to game design will never save OW, which needs looks of big shake-ups to be fun again.
2 Likes
Too much CC… Too many Flankers
Too much Shields… One shots are a thing
I agree that the OWL was started to early
Right now the biggest issue is 2-2-2… putting everyone into a role with no way to change it up till next match…
It’s like what we all saw from the end of the GOATS era… the 3-0-3 was beat by 1-3-2
Plus the OWL shows that the only flexibility is DPS and Some Support