I really feel like it’s going to mark the beginning of the end if it doesn’t do well, which I think the basic expectation is disaster.
Even the most diehard fans I know are just…over this game. Everyone knows the problem: laughably incompetent balancing and matchmaking. I think the community is split on 5v5 vs 6v6 but I would honestly be shocked if it was halfway, I feel like most of the player base misses 6v6, but I don’t have a whole lot to go on other than anecdotal stuff like internet polls or the guy who took a “5v5 or 6v6” board to BilzzCon and let people vote. Either way, though, the myriad of issues has led to admitted player retention issues, and this is the team that lies as hard as they can about as much as they can to keep appearances going. Overwatch 2 is failing, and the cracks are showing. I know the response is going to be “lol 50 million players lol $225 million dollars!” ignoring the part where A: How many players were actually kept? B: That’s $4.50 per player. C: When you look at the battlepass, bundle, and shop prices, that’s just not very great mathematically for the first year of this “big new” game. D: Overwatch 1 did about 5 times as much in its first year.
Wide scale change like season 9 is needed. This game is beyond stale, but even if the balance changes are good, it won’t fix the underlying issues. Of course, on paper most people are expecting the worst. I don’t hate the concept of them too much, and I think it’ll do some good for the game, but given Blizzard’s track record I can’t help but feel that these are barely tested changes in the most recent episode of “throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.”
Some of it will work, some of it won’t. I’m going to reserve final judgment until the actual patch is out, but man oh man is it concerning. And with the layoffs who knows if they even have the staff to pivot if it’s as bad as everyone’s fearing. If it’s even half as bad as everyone expects it to be, I feel like Overwatch has no reputation left to save.
I dunno. This really, really feels like a watershed moment, and I don’t think we’re going to come out of it on top.
There’s another thread going around saying that this feels like a Hail Mary moment for Blizzard. I kinda agree. They’re just throwing something huge out there and hoping it works.
Will it? No idea. TBF I do think they’ve walked back some of the really bad stuff in the past year to keep OW2 from absolutely nose-diving into the dirt, but you can only ride on the “hey we fixed that bad change we made” train for so long before you have to actually start making substantive good changes. PvE was going to be that opportunity, but we know how that went, and Blizzard’s going to be operating in that shadow for a while.
And yeah the layoffs aren’t exactly a good omen. Maybe they won’t actually end up being that impactful, but it’s certainly not a good note to kick off what many people were hoping would be a fresh start with Microsoft.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I think Blizzard knows they can’t just keep doing what they’ve been doing. It’s a losing strategy, and it’s clear they understand that even if they don’t necessarily understand where they should go from there. It’s like I said way back early on in OW2—if they don’t turn it around, they will faceplant this franchise. They’ve made some half-hearted attempts to do so and it’s definitely slowed the descent to something that I think is stable in the short term, but only the most delusional of Blizzard fanboys look at that model and say “yeah this is going to lead to a long & bright future for the franchise.”
I never said it would be shut down after season 9. When I said the beginning of the end I implied more of the beginning of the game really struggling with player retention that they may never recover from. It would be a slow, drawn out process, but a final server shut down isn’t really the moment a game “dies” to most players from my experience.
The way PvE has been handled and the implications it has for both the end of OW1 and the existence of OW2 is kind of the linchpin of “OW2 is a colossal failure” to most veteran players, tbqh.
It’s called player churn and is a normal part of gaming. I still have my Call of Duty friends on my list from years ago on an account. None of them play anymore, but that is ancedotal.
Call of Duty still sells more than any other game on the market so this is totally meaningless.
Those “diehard fans” prolly played for thousands of hours. You are bound to get tired of any game after all that time. Flaws that you ignored when you are a noob get magnified after that time. Other games come to the market too.
People also grow out of games. Call of Duty was appealing when I was 24 or 25, but at 38 I look at that like a baby game for noobs, which it is and isnt even trying to act like it’s not.
COD was the first FPS I ever played. That’s why the training wheels of sitting in a corner with a claymore and shotgun was appealing. Eventually I figured out that the type of gameplay COD had to offer wasn’t fun anymore. You can only sit in a corner with a claymore or fight other kids sitting in a corner with a claymore so long before you get bored.
Congrats. You’ve grown up. Friends that you used to know IRL even prolly got distant from you over moving away or having kids or a job that they work a lot of hours in, etc.
Ok. You are going to go through friends online in these games in the same way maybe for the IRL things I just stated.
That’s part of why some people are moving on, I guess, but they still have admitted player retention problems. People will point to the 50 million player count as a success, but given it was on some dude’s linkedin page as far as I know I’d love to see the actual retention stats.
I’m glad you’re still having un with it. At least, I’m assuming you are. Either way, I get what you’re saying but I genuinely think the problem run deeper than “it’s just you.”
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see matchmaking complaints, because this game has the best matchmaker on the market, especially considering how complicated it is to build two teams with three different roles AND mixed-rank/skill groups.
There’s just so much that can’t be quantified when trying to match two teams, and my games are still close matches almost all the time, even when I (GM) am playing with silver-plat friends. It’s pretty amazing when actually analyzing it. So many people think a one-sided game means a bad matchmaker, but it so rarely has anything to do with that.
I mean yeah, not to retread worn paths but that was the entire reason OW1 content grounded to a halt, the entire reason why there was even supposed to be an OW2, the reason that PvP “wasn’t being focused on.”
So now that we don’t have PvE, what do we have? The honest answer is not much. A divisive-at-best rework to the core format, generally unpopular monetization, and resuming regular content flow that we would’ve gotten had they not gone for the PvE. Sure, there are other things here and there—some anti-toxicity stuff & matchmaking changes—but the meat and potatoes?
Blizzard needed that kind of huge gamechanger that PvE was going to be, and we don’t have that. That’s partly why I think they’re going for broke with this patch, so that they can deliver on something sorta big to try to actually justify that “2”
Which is true, but there’s also a difference between “I don’t want to play this game anymore” and “I want to play this game, but the developers are actively sabotaging it”.
I didn’t stop playing Overwatch because I wanted to stop playing Overwatch. I stopped playing Overwatch because Team 4 is allergic to putting actual work into their game and refuse to address issues with how core game systems function. Matchmaking is terrible, hero balance is terrible, the overly aggressive monetization and lack of substantial in game rewards is terrible.
I don’t feel like I’ve grown out of Overwatch so much as Team 4 just doesn’t care whether or not I continue to play if I’m not willing to be a human wallet.
See: SBMM in Call of Duty. OW community sounds more and more like COD community by the passing day which makes me think this all may be an inevitable evolution of these type of games.
The company prolly made the calculation that rather than appeal to a shrinking audience of boomers who sort of want to exist in a fps game but not do anything fps like they decided to reach into a wider pool of players elsewhere.
The “non-fps players” Overwatch originally attracted are mald because the game shifted more towards the shooter end and less away from the moba end of the spectrum.
But truth its not even radically different than what it used to be.
I point out games in 6v6 tended to bunch up in chokepoints and team fights tended to conclude with ult fiesta rather than getting picks with primaries and abilities. The response I get is “that happens in 5v5 too!”.
Ok. Well, if it isnt that much different what is all the complaining about?
I recently paid 70 bucks for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. A game that, while I already love it, and will probably play through a couple times, will eventually see much less playtime than Overwatch 2, a game that would take longer than I have left to live to get that much out of me.
medium com/pip-writes-stuff/why-overwatch-is-perfect-for-the-non-fps-player-63abbc0e753a
The FPS community has gotten sweatier overtime leaving guys like this who wanted a low pressure game they could just AFK behind a wall with Mercy and feel good about “contributing” don’t like the changes.
This is due to the skill required increasing not decreasing like you’d like to believe.
I know at least one person who somehow isn’t over this game.
In all seriousness, I am convinced Micro$oft is planning to pack this game up for good in about a year. They basically have 1 more year to prove that it’s worth keeping around and I am going to take a wild guess that due to their ego and inability to admit being wrong, we will probably be losing OW for good soon.
I want to be wrong about this but all signs point to it. They do not retain players, and their egregious fomo based F2P garbage monetization is only a deterrent, it isn’t making comparable money to other F2P PVP titles, this is bad, it’s the signs of failure. They won’t make the right balance changes and just go back to 6v6 instead of wasting more time on horrifically bad reworks and homogenization of the roster.
I’d love to believe that things will end up getting better but it doesn’t take much to see that it will not be improving and we’re just too likely to lose it for good. That’s the simple reality and truth of it all.
(I thought I replied to this yesterday, maybe I did mentally).
