Let me start with saying that I’m not talking about the country and its people.
I noticed that
Changes are added with new bugs:
Mei can’t be targeted by teammates in iceblock anymore.
The Christmas hat in the snowman iceblock of the Mei-rry skin flies away.
(It’s pretty funny btw.)
Ashe can look through her gun.
Skins are added with bugs:
Ashe T-posing after using the sitting emote.
Mercy’s wing color of the dragoon skin revert to yellow during gameplay.
New characters are added with bugs and weird interactions:
Echo’s ultimate prevent players from switching. (If this is an engine limitation, then why not wait with Echo till OW2 with its improved engine?)
Look, I get it.
It’s a videogame.
It’s normal to have bugs and issues, and these bugs and issues are usually solved over time. Especially with new heroes.
But I get the feeling these things could’ve been easily discovered during its development.
Is this not what the QA (quality assurance) is for?
To find bugs and issues and prevent them?
Look, I’m not here to take a jab at them. I bet they have it tough. I just remember when “Blizzard polish” was a highly praised thing.
my best guess is covid 19 and also developing 2 games at the same time. but yeah, for the past few days my lootbox screen has been so glitched that it’s always zoomed in, and any skin displayed has hammond’s submarine gun sticking through their sternum.
The company as a whole burned out a lot of its original talent and is mostly replacements. OW is one of the better functioning teams, believe it or not.
OW2 might have pulled a lot of resources, time and manpower from the main game, maybe even from QA.
But still, I do find it weird that some of these changes where released with bugs. I can imagine these changes would be thoroughly tested internally first, even with less manpower, right?
Blizzard fired 200 people, mostly from customer service and quality assurance , so yea, you will see more bugs in their games… wow is riddled with them, warcraft 3 reforged was total disaster
I could be entirely wrong, but it’s why I’ve been doing my best to help things along.
I did the same thing for PlanetSide 1, when it was relegated to skeleton crew status.
So that’s kinda my mental framework on how things are going over at Team 4.
To be fair, their lore has always been their only redeemable factor.
Their PvP and also attention to detail, publicly promising stuff and then ignoring it for literal years, this has always been a problem in WoW even when Kaplan and Goodman were on it.
I remember in they said moonkin skins were outdated and three years went by without updates. They released a new game with new races able to be druids and they were still using a model from 2004.
Favoritism among certain classes (like balance druids being garbage for a very long time while paladins dominated both pve and PvP) and certain heroes like Symmetra has been an issue they’ve always had in their pipeline. Balancing issues with PvP, too. Both the systems they use (which are improving) and the classes/heroes themselves (which in some ways are improving, in other ways they’re being homogenized) have always been poorly maintained.
Honestly I hope that OW2 gives the team their passion and inspiration back and they can give new life into this game. But I doubt it. They always start their games super passionately and then post release they have no clue what they’re doing. With some exceptions like Diablo, Warcraft, etc which are story driven.
Nah, some games had truly amazing and addictive gameplay. Diablo II is probably the best game of its kind ever made. Starcraft might arguably be the best game of its kind. OW is the best hero shooter IMO, better than TF2 ever was. They made some incredible things.
I think companies have a life cycle mostly tied to the talent of the founders, and they’re probably nearing the end of theirs as the founders have all or nearly all left and many of the most talented latest-gen have left too. Eventually all of the magic goes and you get, well, Bioware. I don’t know how you’d avoid or prevent it, really.
Same happened with EA holding back Criterion ans Black Box (Burnout and NFS)
Both of those were awesome indie companies that made some games that caught the eye of EA, so they were brought out.
Then due to time pressures and budget cuts, NFS Carbon, which is my favorite racing game to date, was half baked, some features unfinished or never got seen.
On the Criterion side, simular issue woth Burnout Paradise, Issue being that the Alpha Map, shown at E3 was at least double what it is today. Hell, they had some hardware issues, but that couldve been resolved.
Unfortunately, smaller companies always get brought by bigger companies. Then the big companies strangle the little companies to do more for less money. Ultimately, killing the company
