For anyone that is hating on Geoff Goodman, keep in mind he is responsible for the creation of your favorite hero. For the amazing abilities, the plays they can make, and the interactions they had with other heroes. He was there from the start, and designed OW to what it was on release to what it is now.
In a game that is infinitely more complex then other shooters on the market. As unlike Cod/Halo/Titanfall. Where everyone has the same mobility tools, and almost equal access to every gun or tool in the game.
Were the only balance point is either make guns/tools as roughly equal to each other as possiple, or make such hard to reach yet still equally accessible to all players to counterbalance it’s power.
OW every hero is nearly as complex as a fighting game character, often holding tools on they themselves can use. That have to balanced not only with how they can use it, but how that tool can be used with other heroes. (The primary issue with tank balance in 6v6, and why 5v5 is a thing)
In a game that had to be playable at all ranks of play, not just pro tiers. But the mid and bottom ranks as well.
He did a dam good job in my opinion. And honestly, I wouldn’t expect someone to easily fill his shoes any time soon. And one that did would most likely be keeping to the Philosophy as the previous designer, as to not clash with the hundreds of systems/interactions/and gameplay flow that already exists.
We will be seeing his influence for quite a while it seems, as they announced they were already working on season’s 8 hero. So at the very least we got a year’s plus of goodman’s content to come.
They often were just too slow with balancing the game,there’s no reason why Brig and Mercy should’ve been allowed to dominate the game as long as they did.
That is fair criticism, be it that they make multiple nerfs over time. slowly depowering the heroes, before pulling them back completely with one big change. Then slowly adding back to them when needed.
Also player perception had a lot to do with it to, and brig’s changes had an issue with the open format. As back in the day Ana also created a Tripple tank comp, before her nade healing bonus/ and damage output was nerfed.
Keep in mind a lot of that was due to the format of the game, more so then many heroes themselves. As tanks were designed originally around their own playstyle, and how well they could handle taking space by themselves.
Were as when people realized they could stack multiple tanks, and layer their utilities. Is when many of those heroes had to be balanced around their pairs/comps more so then themselves. Like the moment their was a support that could well support such a comp, we see tripple tanks comps pop up making dps kind of pointless. (this happened with both ana and brig, be it that latter is more famous.)
i do wonder who his successor will be. usually its always inhouse and someone who was beneath him or an apprentice but if they get someone from out of house who has no experience whatsoever with overwatch that may be a bad thing lol…
Their was an open job listing for his role for a while now, these are required to be open for the most part. But 9/10 it will be someone in house, with people from other games filling in beneath him.
Even an opinion can be proven to be objectively false.
Did you know the two largest player exoduses followed the release of Brig in 2018, and then the release of Sigma and the subsequent implemention of Role Queue in 2019?
In fact, since 2018 and Brig, almost every hero implemented into the game resulted in a long term net loss of players?
How is it that new content is driving players away from a franchise?
I don’t have quite the completely positive view you have, but you are right that he contributed a lot to the game, particularly the early game when the game was still really good.
This is what I’m worried about- I don’t see this happening and he could have easily been moved out of the way so that he could be replaced by someone who prefers catering to the lowest common denominator to maximize BP sales. I fully expect some degree of experimentation to see how much P2W they can get away with.
I do disagree with this balance approach aswell,I think releasing heroes with safe numbers and slowly buffing them to a good point is a better approach than releasing disgustingly OP heroes and nerfing them 20 times.
Brig’s design was just flawed from the beginning,since she was created to hard counter dive heroes,instead of y’know just nerfing the dive heroes themselves.
From what source M8? Blizz doesn’t publically release their player counts. And sites like overbuff can’t track that either do to locked accounts hiding a large part of users, especially the casual players that didn’t know that was an option that automatically applied to them.
That and most of the people making their public departures on the forums came back a few weeks down the line. usually around the next patch. Minus of course the fresh, zero post accounts that obviously weren’t leaving OW.
Yes we did lose players over time, all games do. Especially over 6 years. with many new releases.
But their isn’t much in the way to prove people left at any given point.
And anecdotally, I’ve seen 3/5ths (like, 30ish?) of my ingame friends list straight up stop playing during Brig, and they never came back. Many were IRL friends that told me that the game just stopped being fun.