Nah, OWL didn’t kill Overwatch. There are multiple reasons that Overwatch has the playerbase it does today.
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Yeee for context, Team Fortress 2 is probably the best comparison for a truly chaotic casual shooter.
Minus the bots lol.
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Jeff also didn’t want the game to be an e-sport so quickly. He said this in an interview during the beta.
Then somehow it became an e-sport because…money, I guess?
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Poor decision making is what killed overwatch, and OWL was certainly part of that.
The biggest killer of games is merely the passing of time, people get bored, go for something else.
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The only thing that OWL killed was the independent tournament scene.
To their own detriment, I might add. A burgeoning tournament scene would have fed OWL future stars and helped keep engagement higher for OW as a whole.
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2-2-2 literally happened because of an OWL meta that never really touched the actual game. An OWL meta caused by Widowmaker in the first place.
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If he did say that, well owl didn’t happen for a couple years, so it wasn’t so quick.
Tho there were plenty or pro teams even in the beta with the likes of cloud 9 and other organizations. It was quite clear from the start there would be an esport.
Watch “Death of a Game: Overwatch”. While technically not about Overwatch “dying” and more about it falling from the golden age, it goes into every aspect of where Overwatch failed. Jeff originally wanted the community to handle eSports before anything official. Somebody higher up clearly had different ideas and forced an e-sport anyways before the game was ready.
Edit: You know what? I gotchu fam. Here’s the video.
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They literally reworked heroes like Symmetra to appeal to the pissing contest of ‘‘competitive OWL’’, and failing with many in the process. They have nerfed and nerfed and nerfed the tank and support roles’ main tools for the sake of speeding up the game to make it a watchable ever hitscan meta.
OWL has very much destroyed much of the enjoyment that many people of all kinds had in the game.
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They did tho. There were tournaments for a couple years before owl existed.
Yeeeee and then Blizz prematurely started up their eSports league before the game was truly ready for anything official. It needed at least a few more years before they even considered something like that.
A lot of early issues with the game we’re because they never had the chance to properly form a solid balance philosophy before the eSports rolled out, so they essentially were suddenly forced to rush out a flawed balance philosophy that is designed to “shake up the meta” instead of balancing proper heroes because they never had the chance to learn how the different heroes should be balanced.
To be fair, some very questionable balance decisions have appeared for the sake of OWL watchability. No argument there.
But OW is in the state its in from poor management decisions. OWL balance decisions are only part of the problem. Much larger management issues were the driving factors.
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A few more years for what? 2 years after the game came out seems like plenty of time. And how would tournaments by other ppl like say Apex have changed much? It’s still overwatch as an esports.
Game balance was a factor too though
The difference between Apex and Overwatch are the dev teams. Before Overwatch, Blizzard has never balanced a competitive shooter before. Apex, however, had two different Titanfall games to balance, allowing them to formulate a balance philosophy beforehand. Granted, Titanfall was more casual than Apex, but because they are both shooters, it at least gives them an idea of how things should be balanced.
Hell, Widow could one-shot Zen on a bodyshot. That was clearly not balanced, but Blizz never knew that because this was their first shooter they had ever worked on.
With a game with 20+ heroes, figuring out how all the heroes work together and should be balanced can take years to get down. Hell, the more the community improves at the game, the more we are still finding different techs and ways to play different heroes.
However, the dev team was never given the time needed to figure out how to balance the game, so they were forced to come up with a slapdash method of balancing, and they are barely able to update it because they constantly need to pump out updates to “keep the meta fresh”, which completely wrecks all semblance of balance.
This is where the original Team Fortress 2 balance team succeeded (not the new one behind the MyM update and the Jungle Inferno updates. They were garbage). They didn’t have eSports demand balance changes to shake up the meta, so they had the time to be able to polish their game to near perfection…then the new balance team came in and wrecked it lol.
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The funny part is that OWL killed OW’s own esport scene.
I can confirm that. The behavior of the community changed completely in matter of days after comp was released. Form the friendliest one to the most toxic one.
I was talking about the apex tournaments in Korea that took place before owl existed. Overwatch tournament called apex.
As far as balance goes we all know the game will never be perfectly balanced. It’s just not possible. They make some good and bad changes, just like every other game.
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They cant even balance the game they have been working 15 years on. Literally one of the few good balance/design decisions taken in OW was to not give Sombra insane assassin-like damage because then it could be WoW Rogues in PvP all over again.
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They needed to embrace 3rd party tourneys instead of screwing them over
Ohhhh that’s interesting. I had no idea those tournaments existed lol.
And honestly, you’re right, but I do think that the dev team was pressed too much to balance the game before they knew what they were doing, which is what caused us to have mistakes like creating Brig instead of nerfing Tracer, Sigma, Anti, and Immo.
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