It’s none of those things, it’s purely greed and profit motive.
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While it’s fair to not want to attribute every problem to the devs, at some point they do wind up making some stuff.
It reminds me of Steve Krenzel from Twitter. Back in 2015-2017, they asked him to program up a way for telecommunications company to be able to see where and when Twitter users were physically shopping. They specifically wanted to know when people were going into their competitor’s stores.
“I wound up meeting with a director who came in huffing and puffing,” Krenzel said. “The director said, 'We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.”
And Krenzel, despite essentially just being a developer, said no and didn’t make it. He quit, and didn’t go back when Twitter offered to (quote) “fill[ed] a dump truck with money and dump[ed] it on [him].”
It’s true that developers can really only work on what they’re allowed to: they generally can’t make something that they weren’t told to. But they’re not mindless robots: if they get told to make something they don’t want to make, they don’t have to. I know in this particular instance it probably wasn’t the developers who made the call to cut the 2019 PvE. But I guess to me it’s important to remember that while it’s not always the developer’s fault something has gone wrong, it also doesn’t mean they are completely detached from whatever problem came up.
I’m still upset about plenty of other stuff the developers did do. The swap to 5v5. The monetization changes. The bad and slow balance patching. The removal of player progression. All things that might have been mandated from above, but could only happen with the developers approval.
Yup. There’s a big commotion about it (at least from what I overheard in my Discord prior to the cancellation news) saying Blizzard, “finally understands,” or “we can now be seen.”
The blame should not be completely on the developers, it should be on the executives, the higher ups, and the people behind decision making and management too who decided to starve overwatch 2 pve development of its resources. Of course the development team isnt going to be able to deliver content if they are not given the proper resources- what is all the money from the battlepass, skins, etc. going to? Obviously not towards growing the development team and towards pve development. Horrible management and leadership, that is not a dev problem. They starved their development team of resources and drove away any talent in the process. Years of hard work from the development team, scrapped and all gone to waste for the sake of prioritizing profit rather than delivering good content. Low tier management and decision making.
I appreciate the honesty, and have to agree, slightly.
NDAs (I think that’s the right term here?) exist and are kinda oofy in circumstances like this when people know a project is either doomed or going to be reduced, but can’t say anything to soften the blow when the news actually goes public.
It was definitely manipulation, since they stated they knew before the release of OW “2” they wouldn’t be doing the PvE they’d shown off.
I’m not mad they cancelled the in-depth PvE planned, I’m disappointed, but not mad. What I AM mad about is them not informing people when they first made that decision. Instead, they let it go and gaslit us about it, just in case they might have lost some BP sales or skin sales to people who wanted the PvE more than anything.
I’m not mad about PVE. I don’t even care about PVE. I’m mad at the devs for ruining the PVP with role queue and now 5v5. Those are decisions that were made by the development team to implement. They clearly don’t playtest their own game.
Lead developers know about what happens because they are the liaison between “corporate” and the developers. So yes, I think an element of this is Jared’s and Aaron’s fault. They knew, they participated in the gaslighting, the manipulation, and the concealing of what was happening.
I agree that the actual devs (artists, programmers, designers, etc.) are not at fault. I actually feel sorry for them, and would even go as far as to say they are just as much victims of this as the playerbase. In differing ways, but still victims.
The upper management people at Blizzard are the true villains, and honestly I know it wasn’t directly Keller’s fault even, as the higher ups were probably pressuring him, but a huge percentage of the fault is still his.
He was probably between a rock and a hard place, but he was still (at least partially) responsible for the deception that the PVE dream was still coming. So for that I’m angry.
But I am vastly more angry at the mostly-nameless higher ups who are entirely consumed by greed and solely concerned with bigger profit numbers. Those types of people are responsible for the current state of gaming, and the downfall of the glory days.
But to recap, yes, the dozens if not hundreds of people who put their souls into the collective creative effort of Overwatch 2, only for it to be trashed … those guys get my sympathy rather than my ire.
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Also, you forget that the OW team was paying less attention to PvP under the guise of “working on PvE”. Their excuse for not updating/balancing/releasing new content was “we’re working on the PvE content”. Now that we know they’ve made the decision to scrap PvE for the past 7 months now, what was their excuse for not working on PvP as much as they could have? It’s all BS.
I mean, they haven’t scrapped PvE entirely, they are still developing it, just without the hero mode and skill trees.
I just read in “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels,” regarding the launch of Diablo 3, that the game became what it was because Blizzard listened to feedback from millions of fans.
The exact quote is this, “It was the result of millions of players giving feedback, and Blizzard reacting directly to that feedback.”
Based on this and how OW had been handled, it’s safe to say this game will never be great. The OW devs don’t listen to or care about the fans.
Players don’t care about the internal politics of the office environment. They care about the game. Blizzard is to blame, developers and upper management alike.
Well if they werent so focused on the rainbow to stuff to cover for them id give it a second thought.
But no.
still doesn’t explain what they been doing since 2019 when season 1 is so barebone and we lost more feature than getting new one
where all those focus to PVP ?
PvE was still in production, they weren’t just tossing it off the whole time
cancelled =/= never existed
You’re right I should totally let this slide and let myself be a damn doormat for horrible devs who make false promises, lies and makes crappy downgraded sequels than proceed to delete the orignal so I can never go back.
Given people keep saying “they knew stuff at this date and the lied” it is pretty obvious that they want to make stuff up about what was going on behind the scenes, so yeah, it is obvious important to them.
My brother in Christ, understanding what goes on in game development isn’t saying for you to let it slide, it is giving you context so you know how it happened.
If your situation is “I don’t want to know, because if I did, I may find I would be different in who I was angry at, and what I was angry about, and I don’t want that” then you have a problem.
Things have no chance of changing without anger. People don’t get angry enough at companies like Blizzard screwing them over. This will all die down to nothing in a couple months and they’ll get away with it, like all game companies doing trash like this, because people don’t get mad enough. Some “Blizzard, I’m mad at you” posts on Twitter and some forums and that’s it.
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Innocent? Why are you acting like they personally attacked your or something? or committed some awful crime here?
They over promised on PvE and arent delivering it. Thats it. you people are so dramatic, you didnt even pay anything lmao.
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