I believe you might be misremembering. Ana was considered weak when she released (something I didn’t agree with at the time but I digress), and she ended up getting multiple buffs (including to her grenade) after her release. Her nade didn’t get nerfed until 6 months after she was added to the game.
Not to detract from the rest of your post. I just enjoy going back through patch history as it’s fascinating how old patches can still be related back to the current game.
It doesn’t really matter if it was just Kaplan’s mismanagement. I’m not going to deny that everyone’s friend Bobby Kotick had a hand in screwing up Overwatch. But let’s not pretend that Kaplan was able to deliver then, and that he would be able to deliver now.
I can’t find the Tweet right now where somebody from OWL confirmed that it was Kaplan who pulled resources from the live game to PvE, but this article helps shed some light:
The Overwatch team, especially at its inception, considered itself an MMO development team. As we transitioned away from that original concept and started creating Overwatch, we included plans to one day return to that scope. We had a crawl, walk, run plan. Overwatch was the crawl, a dedicated version of PvE was the walk, and an MMO was the run. It was built into the DNA of the team early on, and some of us considered that final game a true realization of the original vision of Project Titan.
When we launched Overwatch in 2016, we quickly started talking about what that next iteration could be. Looking back at that moment, it’s now obvious that we weren’t as focused as we should have been on a game that was a runaway hit. Instead, we stayed focused on a plan that was years old. Work began on the PvE portion of the game and we steadily continued shifting more and more of the team to work on those features.
Things rarely go as planned in game development. We struggled to find our footing with the Hero Mission experience early on. Scope grew. We were trying to do too many things at once and we lost focus. The team built some really great things, including hero talents, new enemy units and early versions of missions, but we were never able to bring together all of the elements needed to ship a polished, cohesive experience.
We had an exciting but gargantuan vision and we were continuously pulling resources away from the live game in an attempt to realize it. I can’t help but look back on our original ambitions for Overwatch and feel like we used the slogan of “crawl, walk, run” to continue to march forward with a strategy that just wasn’t working.
Emphasis mine.
Kaplan helped lead Overwatch to where it is today. He left others to make the hard choices. Aaron and co. are the fall guys.
That doesn’t even make sense.
Didn’t PVE die under Kaplan?
Kaplan jumped ship before it ploughed into the city killing hundreds, so to anyone who doesn’t care to keep track, he doesn’t look responsible.
Sounds like he screwed it up to me.
Don’t quote me out of context - reread the whole sentence.
That’s just flat-out wrong.
Absolute balls - we saw where OW2 ended up - Kaplan wasn’t on board with that and should be commended for rejecting it.
So tell us what faulty reasoning led you to being wrong.
Brig release.
I knew it - I’d accept P2W Sojourn but no, Brig release annoyed people, stopping them playing their solo fantasy in a team game.
you actually believe that ? thats naive
It’s not about annoyance. You talked about balance, so I’m talking about balance.
i do bobby to me looks like a person who would do such a thing
Jeff cared about his team, so it’s not naive at all.
I do not feel that way with Brig but I do feel that way with the tanks that were released with everything and the kitchen sink packages.
Kaplan was the only one with a vision… but the things only remained as just a vision.
Outside of the initial release, the game never got beyond what was on launch (and even regressed in many aspects)
Were you there for launch Brig? Ugh. Imo the worst meta OW has ever or will ever have. Easily worse than Mauga’s release or anything else recent.
Edit: There’s a thread going about Doom having stun on a 4 sec cd, and it being unfair. That was essentially Brig at launch. So imagine that on a support, plus the cc from another two tanks in every lobby. It was the worst.
He was lead director. He was definitely on board with it, in the hopes of finally delivering Project Titan. Read the article I linked.