There can’t be an OW1 campaign.
Overwatch 2 is on an entirely different engine.
To our knowledge, it is not backwards-compatible.
If they cancel Overwatch 2, Overwatch 1 won’t suddenly get a huge revival.
It’ll just be more of the same heroes, maps, and balance changes.
Furthermore; if they scrap Overwatch 2, they won’t have balance updates to give us for a while because the Overwatch 2 balancing was done with 5v5 in mind.
That means the Bastion and Sombra reworks will go bye-bye.
The maps were also designed around Overwatch 2’s 5v5, so they’d have to be renovated if not remade entirely because the entire design philosophy of the gameplay is different.
The reason Overwatch had a content drought in the first place is because Kotick made workers try projects, put hours, days, weeks into those projects, and then cancel them so that they had nothing to offer us and nothing to show for all that time spent working. Not because the devs are lazy or hate us.
That is correct 100%, because Jeff Kaplan forced employees to make the campaign (PvE) Mode but not PvP mode, they don’t want to replace or everything dumbs on PvP, but they wanted to make PvE can continue story mode more. I believe he said that back in 2019…
And charging headlong into a sunk cost fallacy isn’t smart either. Look, I’m not saying they should “cancel” OW2, but it’s not as simple as, “We’ve made a decision and that decision is beyond reproach”. Circumstances change. Data changes. The market changes. Smart people tend to keep an ear towards things and make course corrections as the facts dictate. If the data shows something is wrong with their approach, they should do a course correction and change that.
Tanks are the least popular role in any game that has them. I’m so tired of this idea that Blizzard is somehow uniquely bad at game design just because there is an issue in OW that also exists in every other game with a tank role. Feel free to point out literally any other game with tanks where they are not the least popular role. I’m sure there are many, if it’s such an easy thing to design.
they suck at balance though. we have 2-2-2. all off tanks should be relatively viable and we should have metas pop up where double off tank is a thing. Jeff said they always balanced around 2-2-2, but guess what, having it be optional meant only 1 main tank and 1 SOMETIMES 2 off tanks could be viable. shall we talk about the “we dont like how you play roadhog” rework. a tank so popular, he would have a 2-4% pickrate in gm with a sub 50% winrate. or maybe dva rework, followed by a year of nerfs. zarya being meta for the first time in two years? eats a nerf because HANZO is crazy OP.
your defending the team that made brig ball and doom, in a conversation about a lack of tanks. the tank drought in this game has always been manufactured.
I’m defending every game developer on the planet that has yet to figure out a way to make tanks exactly as fun as DPS. No one, anywhere, has done that yet. Make any other complaint you want, but this one is not unique to OW. It just isn’t.
We have a clue. Nerfing tanks that are already performing the worst they have historically while buffing dps… And then reducing the tank count to one. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to see this direction is pretty sus. However, I still firmly believe they will shift gears and/or change a lot. Based on our current information though, the conclusion makes sense.
Overwatch 2 isn’t an entirely different engine - it’s an upgraded version of the current engine with better lighting, sound and, presumably designed to support larger maps and more NPCs (for PvE). It’s intended for this engine to be the common game engine for other future Blizzard games too.
Parts of Overwatch 2 have already been backported to Overwatch 1 - the environmental sound system being a prime example.
Which is exactly why I need people need to jump off the “5v5 will be the death of blah blah” wagon. Wait till it’s out and playable before making a judgement call. I mean, it honestly can’t get any worse than the game already is right?
I personally believe any non-shield tank will be complete trash but I’m willing to wait till it’s out to make a final call. I just don’t see how they could make a tank like Roadhog viable in any way at all.
What many people not understands is that it would be worthless to cancel OW2 now. Too much time elapsed and the developers are also on the final stages of production of the game.
Yeah, OW2 was managed very bad and since we know it got manipulated and slowed down by a person, things changed a lot.
In my opinion OW2 needs some more cooking time while the Devs gather as much feedback as possible from all players (low & high rank players).
I would suggest that they should turn the PTR into a Public OW2 Build in there the Devs could hold monthly playtests on a weekend to gather as many feedback from the players on certain new things they have worked on. I think that the Devs are being very careful how they could hold an OW2 Beta while not letting OW die, cause many players would rather play the OW2 Beta than old OW1.
Even the argument about “just push the content you have to live” will probably not happen due technical reasons. It would cost them more time and resources to make the new content playable on the older engine of the game + make it working with the old outdated systems. They probably will never do this, cause this would increase the development time of OW2 even more.
