I hear your frustrations. Personally, I would settle for no hero releases whatsoever, but only if they were balanced within reason.
Look. Super Smash Bros Ultimate launched with 75 characters… each character in that game is infiently more complex than any single OW hero. The director, Sakurai came out and said the game was the most balanced Smash has ever been… each character’s win/loss statistics was between 40-60%. That’s a pretty good range. Within 20% of each other.
In OW, some characters are so bad, they’re less than 1%.
The lack of tank and support characters was only highly noticible at two points in this game’s lifetime:
1- At launch. We had literally 4 supports (and yes, I am counting Symm). It was a joke.
2- Right now. While we do have 32 heroes, it makes no difference if a great chunk of it is not selectable in most cases(non role que modes are the exception). You can’t pick 15 heroes (tanks and supports) if you are playing DPS. Likewise, you can’t pick 24 out of those 32 if you are playing support. And when you look at the DPS select screen with 17 characters, comparing to your humble 7 or 8… You do feel like you’ve gotten the worse and smallest part of the pie. (They could improve it by launching OW 2 with 10 tanks and 10 supports, but we all know they won’t)
Yeah following release, they can stop at any moment if they feel like it is just dragging down on resources. All games have their hype die eventually, Overwatch isn’t any different.
And is still one of Valve’s biggest games, There is a statistics log that showed TF2 is still the top 10 most played game that Valve has according to Steam. The reason TF2 servers don’t go down is because they still have over 50k players on the game.
Sure, they’ll do this the moment it’s a live service game.
But right now it’s not, it’s a pay-once boxed release. As a result it has a single-shot paid-once dev team that gets assigned another project after release while a very small ongoing maintenance team takes over to keep the doors open.
Tanking and healing in basicly every single game has a smaller playerbase, thats a fact yes.
But at the same time if i take FFXIV as an example, the most forgiving and least team reliant class is the tank. Playing a tank is just the safest way to solo stuff as well.
Every single tank is a powerhouse that can stay alive against most stuff for a reasonable time, add a single healer to the combo and they can keep the tank alive against basicly anything.
All you have to do is know the majority of the bosses mechanics and you are done (You dont even have to know all of them, since if you mess up,you get a small defense debuff for a while and thats that, you just make your healers life harder a little) One shots are pretty rare.
In Overwatch, it dosnt work like that. A single mistake can cost you your life, or your entire team wiping.
Its the least unforgiving role and even tho you know that you are probably the most important piece of the puzzle, you sure as hell dont feel powerful enough for it.
And thats a huge problem in OW.
The problem keeps getting worse if you count the hero distribution among roles as well.
Or the state of the tanks where 80-90% of them are just not working as traditional tanks.
And just as you said, D.mon would be a great addition to the tank role,because lets face it…tank role have 2 animal, 2 crazy old man, a robot centaur, a thicc dude, a bodybuilder and 1 waifu. Where is the cool stuff ? At least with D.mon we would get another waifu. But still, where are the non crazy, relatively normal guys and girls with some interesting twists and gimmicks.
Having a slower release schedule would make sense if we already had 60+ heroes.
Right now, the roster isn’t rich or diverse enough to justify a slower release schedule. Then again, I believe that this is not the actual devs intent, but that’s the direction given by their higher ups, and Jeff and the rest have to play along.
Sad, but that’s not how a game grows, especially if it aims to be the best in it’s genre.
Gotta love these ''if they release heroes quicker they will have extreme balance issues" responses
People at which point in 4 years of OW existence was it balanced?
We have double jump, dash 50 dmg and CD reset, wall climbing, no damage falloff flanker that if its NOT SPECIFICALY countered makes mockery of 1/2 of the supports AND CAN SEND BACK EVEN ULTS (and his winrate doesnt matter, he is either super weak with his numbers or straight up broken with so much free poopoo in his kit (the other poopoo word is blocked jesus is this kindergarden?)
We have a support (i love her tho) with a AOE ability that deals 60dmg 100heal INCREASES healing by 50% and best part STOPS ENEMY HEALING FOR 4 seconds - nono NOT BLOCKS X amnout of healing (lets say 350-400) its a ability that says zenyatta and his ult isnt in this game
We have a flanker that oneshots everything short of a tank if the character he hits with 1 ability plays correctly and is hugging a wall (not to mention this said character is rewarded with yeeting over the enemy tanks straight into the backline WITH A SHIELD)
We have a character that essentially is a better tank with ONE frozen wall ability, not to mention the freeze should by default BE STRONGER on genjis, tracers, hammonds AND WEAKER on hogs/reins etc but its reversed since THE HIGH MOBILITY its supposed to counter will get away and the no mobility will get frozen 10/10 design
WE have a healer that on 10 second CD creates a AoE heling better mercy / Or creates a AOE 200 dmg barrier ignoring 50 dmg PER SECOND (thats 1/4 of your hp just by a random driveby) OH did I mention it also BOUNCES :D. Or that this healer has 6 cd 0.8 sec duration invul movement (and that she is a MUST PICK if you are facing flankers? cuz other healers that require skill but lack mobility are just melted)
We have a character that shouldnt exist in the lore of this game since his species dont posses thumbs but whatever, this character says - unless you pick 2+ stuns and 4+ people FOCUS ME you WONT ever take this point - E V E R
OR the guy with a medieval weapon that kills you when he wasnt even looking at you / knowing you are there he just shot arrows into a corner at the correct hight and was doing oneshots. HE also wallclimbs
Oooor the character that FLIES (indefinitely if not contested) and shoots 120dmg ROCKETS that if is pocketed by another flying character creates a situation = if your dpses dont TRAIN their hitscan heroes you lost gg there is NOTHING you as tank or suport (even ana good luck trying to kil pharamacy alone) can do.
Every single hero can be dealth with, the problem is the frustration do so PLUS the skill disparity between this hero doing something and you contering it. Flashbang is a gr8 example - against no mobility heroes its a free kill BUT against tracers and genjis? You either use it PERFECTLY or you die what a brilliant COUNTER that is. Doing EXACTLY THE OPOSITE of WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO DO
Overwatch wasnt balanced, IS NOT balanced and NEVER WILL BE balanced. Blizards obsession with OWL and a DREAM of ‘‘hyperbalance’’ is what is killing this game from the getgo. What WE NEED is VARIETY - we NEED more pickups in maps - ulti boosters / dmg boosters. Side objectives that give SOMETHING to play around other than ''here comes doomfist, hope you didnt want to play that ana loool". Hell TALENT SYSTEM and specialisations (airbursting fragmentation for junkrat? giving him flak co SLIGHTLY pressure pharah?)
While tanks in FFXIV is the easiest class for soloing, it still had the issue of being the leadership role, and in dungeons they were the ones that set the pace. In harder dungeons there were 1-shots everywhere, and bosses had a lot of tank busters that required a defensive skill or else you would just die. Tanks were also vitally important because they were the only ones that could barely survive the bosses hits, and if one went down it was often a wipe because the resurrection sickness meant they would not survive the next tank buster even with cooldowns. But, the point was that releasing a new class there didn’t cause a significant shift in player demographics.
As far as the relatively non-crazy guys, I think Mauga would fit that bill, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was one of the OW2 release heroes.
3 heroes a year is fine. If they released them at a faster rate, it would quickly become overwhelming. You want the release of a new hero to be something you notice and that matters. Right now a new hero releases and players have a chance to figure it out and the balance of the game has plenty of time to settle. I’d rather they not release heroes just for the sake of releasing a new hero. It’s much better to have a small cast of distinct heroes anyway. Even going over 50 heroes is something I personally wouldn’t want for Overwatch. So taking 4 years to break 30 is not an issue.
Skins, events and even lore are fun little things, but shouldn’t be the primary focus of the dev team. What matters is the actual game, which btw is exactly what you paid for.
Its not totally the fault of there not being enough tanks and supports. Its that they aren’t very fun. Arguably support are funner than tanks because you can feel like you really help your team for the most part. Unless you only dps. Looking at you Moria.
Tanks are way to easy to kill which defeats the whole point of playing a TANK. So who wants to play respawn simulator all day? Not I.
I think there’s clearly a disconnect between the devs themselves too - There is a video on youtube with one of them (I don’t THINK it was Jeff…) talking about how … the plan was to have a ton (he said hundred @ least) of heroes so that there would be plenty of viable comps/counter comps.
He said they don’t want hundreds of heroes in this game. Which is also funny because when this game was about a year old they said they did want like a hundred heroes eventually
(not to mention this said character is rewarded with yeeting over the enemy tanks straight into the backline WITH A SHIELD)
what a brilliant COUNTER that is. Doing EXACTLY THE OPOSITE of WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO DO