According to the devs PVP was never the main focus of the game, they truly and only wanted a PVE game. The PVP was a throw away to keep their dream alive, hard pill to swallow but this view effectively is what killed the game, the reason it seemed like they didn’t care about the game was they effectively didn’t care about it. PVE was really what they wanted to do, and now that PVE is dead, all that was accomplished is a dead golden goose.
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That’s not true. It sounds like their inability to deliver a PVE game is what ruined their dream. If they wanted to make a PVE game, making a game people want is a great way to work towards making the game you want. They did that with Overwatch’s PVP element.
So…where’s the PVE? If that was their main dream, why has literally everything been handled poorly?
Crawl walk run is an OK mantra but mantras aren’t meant to be dogma. When your crawl phase is a monumental success, you reevaluate.
That’s what Fortnite did. They noticed success in one of their minor game modes. They pivoted. Overwatch did not pivot in time. >_>
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I feel like they could have followed this “pvp for now while we work on pve, the true overwatch” if they just did most events as pve, and more of them. Like junkenstein was pretty much the same every year, we only got 3 archives events. For a team that wanted overwatch to be pve they have very little pve to show for it.
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Bobby Kotik. the end.
that’s actually a really good point. the “save the world” mode was originally gonna be the main game, but the BR that accompanied it to showcase the shooting ended up being the draw; They never looked back. Now, they even have a true ranked mode.
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I don’t know how Blizzard convinced so many people that they just couldn’t make a PvE game, but they did it. Small indie company.
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I genuinely don’t think they could have without an insane amount of work. They claimed they needed a new engine for the PvE mode, but switching to a new engine broke so many things. They won’t even be able to reimplement the On Fire system until their summer update in June.
Also don’t forget, it took them *a year *to make that stupid mythic Genji skin (keep being told I can’t include links in my post, so google “Overwatch 2 devs claim one new Mythic Skin takes Over a Year to Make”).
They are either painfully incompetent, or they have some of the worst work flow of any dev team. Or both. I’m not surprised they gave up on making PvE. They’re just trying to make as much money as possible in the short term by scamming idiots with their overpriced skins. The game’s gonna be dead in a year or two. I wouldn’t even care so much if they actually kept OW1 up, like they originally promised. But they forcibly upgraded us all to OW2, and I think we all know why.
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Destiny team is 800 devs.
Original OW team that released in 2016 was 100 devs.
OW team has never been bigger than 300 devs.
Call of Duty has 3,000 people working on it split across two studios.
Overwatch has been starved the entire time by management and the rank and file devs have done Herculean work getting it as far as they did.
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It’s really not that unreasonable. OW2 was insanely ambitious which is why so many people were so excited for it. Team 4 is both not very big (<200 employees even before RTO had people running each other over to resign) and is developing 2 games, along with Blizz’s many, many other issues at this time.
like there’s a reason Borderlands games, developed by a studio of over 800 people, only have 4-6 characters with 1 skill (at least in 2, the last I played myself), and Team 4 was trying to do more per character with many times more characters and giving all of them like 6 skills.
I’m not giving them a pass, Blizz is supposed to be held to a higher standard, but it really was a huge effort. it wasn’t just taking Junkenstein and pressing a Make Gooder button a bunch.
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Actually Diablo immortal killed the pve game. The upper management saw how easily they could rake in cash with F2P models, battle pass, shop, love service model, etc. Why would you put forth years of effort on a single use product like PVE when you can pull in millions of of battle passes, skins, random cosmetics which don’t require a huge team to pull together? They had almost 6 years to complete ow2 pve and once blizzard got a taste of the money from love service they canned PVE. Thwy even admitted to stopping work on PVE sometime mid last year which means they knew well before launch and just let people hang themselves with purchases and carrot and stick tactics until it was no longer sustainable.
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That’s exactly exactly what I’m getting at. The game was doomed, but not at all because Blizzard is somehow incapable of doing it. It was doomed because there was never an appropriate effort put into making an entire new game. The scope of their vision was also too grand, but that could have been narrowed easily enough.
The fact that the Overwatch team is so small is honestly embarrassing, and having the same small team working on both games is even worse. Everything Blizzard does seems to hemorrhage employees and very little has been done to actually remedy this despite repeated claims that they have.
I’d really like to hear a reason for why an IP the scale of Overwatch has such pitiful man power behind it. From my perspective it seems like corporate greed and mismanagement.
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Those are ridicilous numbers for a development team.
I can honestly not see why you need more than something like 4-6 programmers, the same amount of artists (or maybe slightly more) and some sound guys.
The numbers you quote must include the live service people as well.
With development teams that big, alot of effort will be lost in coordinating everyone.
As someone who works in software and has run into other similar technical hurdles, I suspect more likely this was a case of “We made a fundamental change which breaks part of this feature, but its a very minor feature so we’ll just put it on the backlog”
They probably just found other stuff more important to work on.
Now, I dont think that excuses the state the game is in. I think cases like this are examples of trying to ship something before it’s ready. But my point is that I dont think the issue is that they in some way struggled to fix it. It’s just a scheduling problem. You have a certain number of things in the backlog of varying priorities, and this one just didnt make the cut until now.
The “it took a year to make the mythic skin” is also liekly just a misunderstanding of workflows. When you hear things like this in software and game development, what they mean is that a year prior they started the first concept art, then there was probably one PM who put together a list of requirements, then it casually got reviewed and signed off a month later, they put a bunch of prerequisite work on the backlog and small bits and pieces were done over large gaps of time, and then finally once all the pieces came together someone finalized it and put it in game.
Taking a year to make doesnt mean that a bunch of devs came in to work every day for 365 days straight struggling to make it. There was just a very long pipeline of work sparsely scattered throughout a year’s time.
Things like this happen all the time. If a feature doesnt need to drop in a month, then the work is broken up across milestones until the expected release date. This is true for basically any software product. For example if you look at some of the features in huge software products like MacOS or Windows, even some of those smaller features were in development and planning a year or two (or more) in advance.
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nah it was the same thing as almost every other AAA game company, GREED!