Comparison of OW2 Dev Time to HFW (as an example)

General Discussion
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It’s honestly pretty dang pathetic that Blizzard has spent from end of 2017 - June 30th, 2022 (if the news from today’s articles is correct) working on OW2.

How could a company as massively large, successful, and long standing as Blizzard (+Activision) spend 4.5 years (minimum) on OW2 and its related content when a company much smaller such as Guerilla Games can make Horizon Forbidden West in essentially the SAME amount of time that OW2 has taken???

OW2 is not a game built from the ground up. It is not a game from scratch.

It’s a game that is taking an existing game and engine and adding some upgrades to the engine and then adding more of the same types of PVP content we have already. The only genuinely new element of OW2 is the PVE side of things with the need for PVE mode types, real/better AI systems, an item system, and the talent system (I am not counting the story line and lore in this as we used to get that kind of stuff).

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Let’s compare this to HFW:

A game that has to essentially start from the ground up. Yes some of the systems and characters exist from Horizon Zero Dawn BUT the big difference here is that the rest is essentially having to be made from scratch.

The large majority if not the entirety of the game (likely around 90%) will take place in completely new parts of the HZD world meaning that an entire new world and map has to be forged from scratch. Sure some textures and assets may be reused/carried forward, but the extent of that will likely be minimal seeing as the environments will be in a different locale altogether in a world that has had havoc wreaked upon it and therefore is very different everywhere you go. A great example of this is that HFW will have a much larger focus on water biomes and exploration (including diving down which HZD did not have).

Another major thing is that, other than building off of the story line and character developments of the first game, the story line is brand new entirely, And this game’s story will require way more effort and be way more expansive and much longer and in way more depth than OW2’s will ever be due to the nature of HFW being a story-based 1-player game, while OW2’s PVE will only have a focus on story for SOME (story missions only which will obviously be way fewer in number compared to the total # of modes) of the overall content that will comprise the PVE portion of OW2.

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So HOW POSSIBLY has Blizzard taken as long as they have other than out of pure laziness and utterly slow beyond belief development time and usage of employee work hours to put out a much less in depth set of content compared to Guerilla Games will have done with HFW? And the worst part is that on top of this, they abandoned the live game largely content and attention wise for 2 of those 4.5+ years. So pathetic.

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Bad take.

Guerilla has 4x the amount of developers than Blizzard Team 4 and has been in development for just as much time if not more than OW2. New heroes take so much dev power just for the fact they put so much care into them. Horizon only has a handful of “important characters”, which don’t have a unique playstyle to them cause you can’t play them.

OW2 has a brand new story, probably more in-depth than HFW. HFW has one skill tree compared to over a hundred in OW2. C’mon.

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The heck is HFW

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This is infinitely easier to balance. In single player we can overlook some things being overpowered, or the gameplay not being 100% perfect, and story alone can hard carry some otherwise terrible games. Team games don’t have that luxury.

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It’s honestly pathetic OW2 is possibly coming out next year and not in 2032

Just look at Duke Nukem Forever which took 15 years in development, smh my head

/s

Horizon Forbidden West

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I literally said they have both taken about the same amount of time ASSUMING today’s “news” is accurate. Also, Guerilla games is infinitely smaller than Blizzard is as a whole so Blizzard much more easily could have increased their team size.

This is a bad take. 2/3 of the battle with new heroes is balancing them and their kit into the existing game. The other 1/3 is giving them a design and giving them 20 seconds of half-thought out “lore” for the release trailers. We literally get next to nothing otherwise for new heroes that came out past launch. Almost every cinematic and comic has been about launch heroes (Mercy, Sym, Soldier, McCree, Winston, Tracer, etc etc).

This is a joke right? Horizon takes 50+ hours to play through. Some story, some collectibles and exploration. OW2 at best is going to have 10 MAYBE 15 story missions which is where ALL the new story/lore is coming from. The other 80%+ of the PVE side of OW@ is replayable and daily-shuffling selections of non-story based PVE modes that have certain conditions and win conditions.

There is only so much story they can come up with for 10 story modes that are each 7-10 min long with a 1-2 min intro and outro cinematic.

Why even respond and feed into an attention seeking person who didn’t even read the post clearly? I literally said what HFW was in the first few lines and only abbreviated in the title for Title Length restrictions.

??? The whole premise behind Blizzard implementing the balance trees, out of their own mouths, has been “AI’s wont care how overpowered something is!”

This is not a valid counterpoint. Sorry. The talent trees wont and dont have to be balanced since you arent competing with the 3 people on your team. You are competing with AI’s.

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It’s because blizzard wasted a bunch of time prototyping various progression systems for PvE without settling on anything. They kept making stuff and scrapping it.

Development hell, in other words.

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Some people skim over paragraphs-long posts and probably miss stuff

I don’t think complaining a game is taking longer than another studio’s game, in a different genre even, is very useful tbh

Like my post said, you have Duke Nukem Forever taking 15 years to launch and it’s a complete financial failure

Then you can get a Call of Duty game or assassin’s creed game made in 1.5 years and it’s a gigantic success commercial-wise

Team Fortress 2 took 9 years and is cemented in the gaming hall of fame forever

My point is that a game’s development time is no indication of their quality,

and Overwatch 2 will take longer than people would initially guess, yes, but it will come out when it comes out

There’s no doubt that departure of the director, a global pandemic, shifting to working from home, and the various Blizzard scandals that have happened/happening all affect the development but there’s really nothing our words on a forum can do to change the outcome

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You think people won’t tryhard on the score leaderboard? You think your team won’t complain that you’re running off meta builds? We know from MMOs that this is something people get upset over.

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Who cares though? That has nothing to do with whether or not Blizzard has to take infinite time balancing the skill trees. You are not playing against other human players so it ultimately doesnt matter at all.

The “point” you are trying to make here literally makes zero sense. Who cares if some builds are better than others? Every team will be able to take advantage of the “best builds” for the leaderboards if they care enough to do so.

It’s not like they have to worry about how crappy it will feel if I pick OP Hanzo and you pick average Sym build (for examples) since you don’t have to worry about being at a hero strength disadvantage AGAINST me.

The skill trees can be as dumb and unbalanced as they want especially with how every story mission (at the very least) will have multiple difficulties to make up for the trees being potentially stupid and strong.

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Your teammates. Again, we already know this happens in MMOs. We even see it in OW, some people will quit archives legendary in hero select if they don’t get the comp they want.

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OK AND??? You are just making up a completely irrelevant and pointless argument point…like I don’t get you at all.

Again…who cares?? Whether the trees are all relatively tame or Blizzard says screw it and makes them crazy and strong, it doesnt change the fact that the leaderboard chasers will use the 4 heroes+kits that are best, even if they are 0.01% better.

You have no point…at least not in response to anything I have said.

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You originally said that single player games like HFW have the luxury of not having to worry too much about balance and are infinitely easier to balance. And then you immediately tried to say that PVE OW won’t/doesn’t have the same luxury since it’s multiplayer.

But that is just factually wrong since this instance of multiplayer (OW2) will be against AI and Blizzard even said it themselves that AI’s wont care or complain if you/your heroes are OP.

Hence, what you said in efforts to compare and make it seem like OW2 PVE balancing is a lot harder than a single player game’s balancing is null and irrelevant. They don’t have to scrutinize every number and detail of the talent trees and heroes as if it was the PVP side of the game. Cause it doesn’t matter.

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It does. This is a team game, even in PvE. It doesn’t have to be as perfect as PvP but you think a lack of viable builds will stop people from carrying over their mains and repeatedly onetricking them into a teamwipe? And do you think teammates are going to simply accept that without incident?

People can, will, and have gotten super toxic over this sorta thing. It’s not an unknown, we know this happens.

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I’m done with you frankly. Nothing you are saying even remotely makes any sense at all. Bye.