Its amazing how easily either do not know what is coming out, as you falsely claimed “most PvE cancelled”, or so easily fall for corporate double speak. Jeff Kaplan gave the most corporate answer to that question I ever heard. I have read EA interviews where they give the same answer and yet everytime there is a sucker born who eats it up.
Its the same thing when they proposed the secondary PvE mode, Hero Mode, and talked about “infinite replayability”. Anyone who played any games ever should have seen that for the corporate double speak that it is. Furthermore when they talked about using WoW World Quests as their inspiration that SHOULD have further nailed it down that what they were talking about was never going to happen as they said but was simply going to be at best Spartan Ops without the story, or Zombies in CoD, or Hode Mode in Gears. Fun yes, but not “infinitely replayable”. Basically not “hundreds” of missions but about 6-7 5 minute missions just changing random elements so that they feel unique by using enemies from the campaign on maps that already exist, with sometimes them throwing in a new area, using assets that already exist,
Meanwhile the main PvE we are getting tomorrow in the campaign. The only change to this being that it is being released episodically instead of all at once. How you feel about episodic gameplay will determine how you feel about this decision. Personally I do not care about episodic vs bulk but I know some people have their preference one way or the other.
Regardless though the main OW2 PvE mode has chapter 1 out tomorrow. It will contain first chapter of missions of the campaign we were promised.
Hero Missions get changed to Event Missions. The primary changes are instead of getting 200 missions at once and that being our lot to grind for 2 years (imagine how much grinding you would do for every new hero release), now we get one at a time which will be slightly more narrative with weekly changes.
The other big change is that we will not have talent trees to grind. I like to think that someone finally explain basic game design to whoever conceived of the talent trees as there were 2 big problems: you have added an RPG element to a game with random matchmaking and because your difficulty levels are what they are once you grind the talent trees the difficulty becomes nonexistent killing any replay value immediately. Game Design 101 is that as the player gets stronger the challenges must get tougher but with the random matchmaking element, meaning that you have to account for someone having 0 talents and a full tree, you cant actually give them a true challenge again killing replay value.
Basically we lost the thing that was sold to us via corporate double speak and got basically the same thing but without the repetitive grind.
This was, I think, the only thing people were really looking forward to with the PvE. I know I was. I was ready to buy PvE because of the talent trees. Now, I’m not so sure.
I mean, you could have ranks…duh? lol. Or difficulty levels. There are quite a number of options to solve that problem…
All other live service games require you to either use money to unlock the character or commit a certain amount of time to playing the game to unlock them for free. Overwatch 2 isn’t any different. You can get every single new hero by just playing the game. Or spend a small token amount and unlock them instantly.
People just seem to forget this very point all the time and it’s tiring seeing this stupid argument.
It’s free to play, which naturally they have to make money in other ways. But you still have the free way of unlocking the hero. The prices of skins etc are a different argument.
i thought you gonna insta buy the ultimate invasion bundle cuz everybody did buy MW2023 despite fully knowing it’s glorified DLC but hey they put capt price on the game cover that will sells billions
I assure you it’s more tiring to see white knights try to defend a garbage model that shouldn’t exist.
Also, nobody forgets that you can do a long grind for free, it’s just entirely irrelevant. This game didn’t launch with this model, it launched with all players always having access to the entire roster and it was an important basic tenet of the game. It doesn’t matter that it’s now F2P, it was an important core aspect of the game.
What is odd is that I NEVER heard anyone talk about the Hero Mode, and the talent system, until it was cancelled. Every single post I was reading was people talking about wanting to play the story and see what would happen, and it was all about the campaign missions. A lot of people had to even be reminded that Hero Mode was a thing.
A ladder, which presumably would have harder difficulty as you climb, would come with its own problems. Lets assume the best case scenario for this mode that it reaches the popularity of Mystery Heroes. That is probably very ambitious to assume a mode of 200 very similar 5 minute missions reaches that but we can work with it.
Given that popularity we now introduce effectively a ladder mode. Now lets also not have the ladder require a completed talent tree because that would just kill the population of said ladder out of the gate. How high until the ladder is realistically dead? We know it dies around high Diamond in Mystery Heroes so presumably whatever the PvE equivalent of that would be. Maybe it can go a little higher because less people are required to build a game.
Then we get back to issue I kind of just assumed we would not do early in that paragraph: people queueing up to play heroes they do not have talents for. Now either these talents actually matter or they do not. If they do not matter then grinding them is pointless but if they do then you are going to get very angry people if you queue up for a ranked and play a hero without a full tree. Comp is toxic enough when everyone is on the same footing. Comp when you know you have a teammate kneecapping you would cause some very angry people which does not really contribute to game health. There is also the secondary problem that the only real difficulty that can be provided is just boosting the health and damage of the enemy which is going to make high level play feel very “bullet spongey” which is not really going to be fun.
It just is not a functionable idea. The games that try it are almost always single player and often have a very narrative focus, ala Hades, so that the grind feels like you are gaining something more than making a number go up.
The context of this was how to make Hero Mode actually replayable because at its core, without some form of ladder as Redkite suggested, you have a situation where the game will just throw you into a team of 4 and you will get stronger as you unlock talents but the game will not get harder. Therefore you have the games getting easier and duller. However if there is more challenge you have toxicity if you get someone without them and there probably would not be enough people to support a “talent unlocked only” ladder that you could grind up. The other downside to that being their way of adding difficulty would be making enemies tankier which is just not fun.
Consider that tomorrow we are getting the first chapter of the campaign along with the first Event Mission which is very similar to what we got in Wrath of the Bride, I would say that post aged perfectly. Wrath is a good taste of what we are getting in Event Missions and the first chapter of the campaign launches tomorrow.
We had nothing to talk about in the campaign for 3 years and yet people would still talk about it on these forums but yet the Hero Mode was just never discussed. Nobody talked about it, nobody mentioned looking forward to it, and even when we got close to release people never mentioned it and only talked about being annoyed that the campaign was not shipping with OW2.
The core PvE mode was the campaign. The Hero Mode was the secondary mode. Horde Mode is not the core mode of Gears. Spartan Ops was not the core mode of Halo 4. Hero Mode was not the core mode of OW2, the campaign was and still is. I cant think of a single PvE game made where you would argue the campaign was not the core mode.