Regardless of whether you consider it a success or a failure, this PVE is here to stay, and in my opinion some improvements are needed:
Searching for a game prevents any navigation in the game, including the gallery or user options. in my opinion it is instead necessary to apply a “while you wait” mode, it is terribly boring and frustrating when one of the (current) 12 queues is longer than the others due to the absence of players;
When we finish a game, the time frame to make a meeting with the other users is terribly short, and we don’t have time to agree to reunite until someone has already left and is trying to start a new game by joining. queue alone. In archives there was a long period of time to be able to get together and agree on the agreement that was positively created;
It’s terrible to see game footage distorted in quality depending on the connection type. they should be 100% functional as happened in archives rather than acting for streaming;
Create a new Daily/Weekly challenge based on PVE. obviously OPTIONAL for the maximum collection of weekly coins of the competitive modes (not mandatory), so that those who do not appreciate the arcade modes still have another alternative method to do what they prefer by practicing with the heroes… with the PVE bots . Junkenstein and Archives were counted as “arcade challenges”, why shouldn’t this PVE?;
In the PVE information tabs, enable a navigation bar to view videos. some of them are terribly long!
A fairly obvious balance issue: help the heroes of the various PVE missions have optimal performance in their options. The Toronto mission in particular, having too large a roster of heroes, has multiple trash picks that make the mission literally impossible to win in higher modes because they don’t have any kind of CC or knockback abilities to safeguard the omnics from mind control. Or maybe you’ll find gadgets that help players ward off robots/save themselves from the persecutor in the station (the excessively difficult part to monitor if you have the wrong heroes), just like the turrets in Gothenburg;
The PVe dialogues are beautiful… but they are too long (especially Toronto, too many pauses and dialogues) and greatly unbalance the tension and stress our waiting time. Could you create timeskip moments that, if agreed upon by ALL players, go directly to the checkpoint where the action against enemies restarts? it’s very easy to pick out the most inappropriate moments, especially when Claire and Reggie are slow to move/talk.
Make the bots that replace players more variable. in my desire to complete the dialogues on my own, I hated the obsessive spam of bots with the same characters that impede any kind of discovery of new dialogues between the various heroes during the missions. ok for gotheborg which has 4 mandatory heroes, but the other missions obsessively spam mercy, genji, winston and tracer;
For PVE’s future plans:
for the next missions try to avoid rosters of varieties with too wide a choice (as well as trash) like Toronto. Rio is already a vaguely optimal solution, but personally I think the old “just the four of them and no one else” formula is the best in terms of gameplay experience.
if you plan to announce the next set of PVE chapters at blizzcon 2023… DO NOT use the wording “coming soon”, rather give a specific date. people are really too discouraged by the future of this project and would like certainties, not vague promises.
we should create new PVE modes like underworld as soon as possible. don’t limit yourself to doing one per season or for when there are PVE missions, ALWAYS make them available… but on a weekly/monthly basis. I’m sorry that Underworld has disappeared and we don’t have a precise coming soon of its return.
archives MUST come back and create real new updates on the lore that has rewritten some info.
there is only two changes the pve needs, make it free, give better rewards, and relase one mission every season, minimum. but nothing of this will happen so death mode
the mode needs a lot of changes to be fun, the gameplay of ow is bad for a pve mode, nothing will fix this mode
the mode will not stay, is more likely they will cancel the thing before anything meaningfull happens, or rush and ending
this is perhaps the only point that is not really worth asking. PVe is a purely artistic department (cinematics, NPCS, dubbing) that developers would not invest without an actual income. so you might as well treat it like selling a novel: are you interested in the lore? pay and read it. and the qualitative difference with underworld is huge on info on the lore (good or bad). also because I’m sure that PVE will be the one that will very soon suffer the discounts as we have the next chapters (or even included in the gamepass, but that’s my speculation).
what I believe is more appropriate is to talk about “a guaranteed frequency” of this content. We don’t want anonymous coming soons, and it must be a project that continues to make this purchase interesting, just as happens with WoW’s expansions. This game is already monetized poorly, you might as well monetize it in the departments that deserve that $15 instead of that $20 for ONE skin.
we are not here to be defeatist, but to point out things it can be improved for what it has now.
it’s not a question of few options… but of less dispersion of the utility that the mission is asking of gamers. Toronto is a perfect example, it is IMPOSSIBLE to win on high difficulty if you don’t have at least one character with a CC to apply on the stalker or repel mind-controlling omnics. I’m talking about cases like "sojourn + zarya, mercy and genji: none of them with a realistically useful ability to stop enemies and nothing that compensates for this need. they are… trash picks made for fun, but they are not useful and they are even harmful at high difficulties. However, it would be different if there were gadgets that support the needs of the mission, as happens in Gotheborg: even if we were to hypothetically think that there was no Brigitte to repel the enemies, those turrets are an excellent useful support upon completing the mission at high difficulty levels. But otherwise… perhaps fewer selectable characters is much more manageable to have matches with realistic chances of victory.
oh jeez, if only overwatch have some sort of store with overpriced skins, more expensive than the actual pve that get a lot of income for blizzard that could be invested on improving the godamn game
is the only reason i keep playing this stupid game and im still so angry for cancelling the campaign and realsing 20 minutes of cutscenes after 4 years with no promise of more content in 2024
JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJJJJAJAJAJSOIFJAODOASIJO no
there is no guarantee of anything with overwatch developers, they cant even promise more hero mastery maps for the next season, the executive produced and the stupid game director said on twitter they can promise a relase fate “becuase they want to relase more content at the same time” so in 8 months we will get 3 more characters and the pve will take another 4 years
im being realistic kid, so far blizzard havent done anything in the last 4 years to make me have hope, they have cancelled everything and the few things they relase are crap
the live service and the lore are two different investments that blizzard has long highlighted that it is not interested in maintaining in parallel as happened with archives as an “event”. the time commitment required to develop a story mode was often discussed (although in reality it would have been a better trianing mode for new players, another missed opportunity for OW2). So yes, there is investment in PVP (skins, battle passes) and there is investment in lore (novels, PVE).
and… the cases in which Blizzard narrative expansions that have become part of a discount / bundle or even of the base game there are far too many for works even more enormous than the simple “mission DLC”: Starcraft 2 (the base game) , the entire Nova saga, the WOW episodes. obviously we don’t have a crystal ball, but I don’t think they will EVER sell out missions that will only have alms to have more gamers to survive. As was also the case with OW1 in its final years.
the lore was relativelly fine in ow1, comics, animated shorts once in a while, novels, of course we wanted more, ow2 was going to be that and… nothing, we stopped getting expanded universe things, who is on charge of that, why nobody is doing their job? the story mode will die, give us f*** story in any form
whe this happened, in 2006? when blizzard was a complete different company, when they relased actual expansions worth the price? they know nobody will buy the first missions, they are crap, no worth the disscount, blizzard preffers to sell one bundle for $15 than three for $5
I just mentioned Starcraft 2, that the base game (as well as the first part its story) has become F2P while the rest of the expansions during sales are always so discounted that they cost less overall than the base game on day one. Nova ops was literally a chapter game like today the PVE of OW2 now sold and sold only once (its only advantage is that at least it had dates on the chapters when one finished). I could also say Starcraft 1, whose old version (not remastered) is free but works on the new operating systems. And Diablo 3 is so discounted that even with its expansion it costs very little during the sales.oh, and Wow that when an expansion becomes obsolete it is automatically added to the monthly subscription by only selling the newest expansion separately.
I mean, I think it is physiological that PVe, as a narrative and limited product, will be increasingly “belittled” in price. but as I said before, I don’t have a crystal ball and we can’t even rely on the current Blizzard, now that Microsoft will be the boss from next year.
you know all those games are very old and practically abandoned, the servers may still going (i dont know, never cared for blizzard games i dont know how they work) but the games stopped getting updates right? they are not live services games, is not the same model, those games are from another era, the comparisson makes no sense, specially because the modern blizzard is crap
Lack of replayability on top of it being money gated are the main issues of current PvE model. They make player pool for this mode vanish week after missions are released.
I tried playing it yesterday to get “play each mission as 3 heroes” achievement so nothing extreme. All “queues” were 2 minutes till timeout was reached and I had to play alone with 3 bots.
And Toronto was unnecessarily difficult because AI is dumb and only follows you so I had issues in plaza where you have to defend two omnics kneeling apart since bots just wouldn’t split up.
You are wasting your breath. Blizzard had years to perfect the pve and they have learned nothing from the archives feedback and just copy-pasted most of the mistakes.
I’ve played retribution so many times on so many heroes (along with the other archive missions) and had fun. I did this paid for PVE twice on two different difficulties and haven’t touched it since. The replayability isn’t there and their silence on our complaints show they knew it was a flop.
If not for curiosity, I wouldn’t have even bothered with the BP this season since I’m bored of them being stuck on the Omnic Crisis. Like please move past chapter 1 in your lore already… Give us something that’s actually interesting like Sigma’s backstory etc.
so, we can simply go back to talking about the functional aspect of the topic suggestion for how the game is now rather than the economic aspect?
do you mean something like underworld and archives modifiers? I don’t know, in the end they are just “extra queues” that don’t necessarily help the frequency of users when they finish their challenges / achievements.
A shame such a well-intended thread looking towards the future of a gamemode got derailed so thoroughly by people choking on the past. In the interest of staying on-topic, I greatly agree with a bulk of this. Namely, the overly-wide roster for Toronto was simply too much, especially considering it could put you in compositions where you’re underequipped for certain enemies at high difficulties, not to mention having that many heroes available in one mission probably means a lot of bloat in the workload when it comes to writing/recording all the possible character interactions.
I don’t think narrowing the available hero pool down to just the minimum is the greatest call, personally when grinding Gothenburg for the achievements with randos I got pretty bored of playing all of the heroes after a while, so a little variety whenever it’s possible is a nice balance.
Here is my take. Since the playerbase is really spread thin, just as you can queue for “all roles”, it should let you queue for a “random mission”. You just select the difficulty level you want to play.
This way, if you really want to play Toronto-Hard, you can que for that and be matched with 3 other players that have chosen “random mission-Hard”
