What do you need to know?
A single/multiplayer game is too much of a broad term of it’s own. I’m just trying to figure out if the game I envisioned would be what players are missing.
Pretty much my thoughts too.
There was enough work done to add these talents in for this event, and for us to get 3 story missions before, but we’re supposed to believe they couldn’t reasonably have finished and released the full PvE we were supposed to get? Or even a mostly complete version that could be finished with us basically being free testers/QA, like we usually are in Blizzard’s games?
Heck, you could probably get a combination of high ranked players, streamers (high and low rank), and regular players with a lot of playtime on a given hero to do most of the work brainstorming and designing 3 full unique talent trees for their main, for free.
But no, they just claim it’s “too much” and throw most of it in the trash after all the time and money they spent getting it mostly complete.
It’s been said by the devs that they have several missions in a “ready to ship” state. The pushback and lack of a “go ahead” from hifgher up delayed the missions for a long time and finally it was shut down.
It’s really disappointing since archive esque missions with a few talents per hero and map items was what i expected to get.
Give each hero’s abilities 2 alternate versions and it would have been enough for most pve enjoyers.
What i saw at that blizzcon where the rio mission was playable, was all i wanted.
The devs hyped it up too much, tried to go too big and got their time wasted by no communication from higher up. Time wasted is money wasted so more than likely the plug has been pulled permanently…
I would have been happy with 1 mission per year as a release speed as well…
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For me it’s not much, doesn’t have to be like borderlands it can be borderlands lite.
But for a single play Overwatch would benefit from open zones, gear that changes the way their weapons operate, they don’t need a borderlands size skill tree, Skylanders gave their characters a small skill tree, and does it have to be a first person shooter? It can a third person and the skins you gain in the PVP when the games are linked those skins would carry over, there for you’ll get more bang for you buck and the skills will some true worth especially if you have a photo mode, throw in the sprays and the voice lines and emotes and then grinding that battle pass would way more worth as you now have a game you can keep them in, that would draw them more money.
When we look at the pacing of Archives missions, it starts to make more sense that this is all they’ve had.
2017 - Uprising
2018 - Retribution
2019 - Storm Rising
“2020” - Resistance (Rio)
“2021” - Liberation (Toronto)
“2022” - Ironclad (Gothenburg)
As we know, the 3 latest Story missions were released in Season 6 of OW2 (Aug 2023). Devs working on those Story missions that were laid off later revealed that the expected cadence of future Story missions was 3 for every 18 months; meaning we wouldn’t see the India map feat. Zen, Genji, Widow, and Sombra (the 2023 mission, along with the 2024 and 2025 missions) until Season 15 (Feb 2025). It is only then that we would see the Story missions catch up to the original cadence of OW1’s Archives missions.
In other words, after making 3 Archives missions at 1 per year, they were eventually ramping up to releasing 3 every 1.5 years, or twice as fast as before.
As for the talents, they only had like 4 heroes drafted with the 50-point talent tree system when they presented it at BlizzConline 2021, all of which are present in this new mode (Rein, Mercy, Genji, Soldier: 76).
One thing that was made pretty clear in that new Jason Schreier book was that Jeff Kaplan and others were reluctant to add more people to their team to build that content out faster - they were afraid of too many cooks in the kitchen. Not to mention when Jeff left in April 2021, they made a hard pivot to focusing on PvP and announced the switch to 5v5 in May 2021.
With all of those factors, it makes more sense as to why they were so delayed on releasing the PvE content, and why it wasn’t anywhere near finished when they decided to cut it.
I still have my theory another team work on a story mode and make a separate game that can link to the PVP and not all the characters can be used at once have the characters who are part of the main conflict be playable and leave the newer as NPC cameos until there’s time to add their story as DLC.
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