this first year of ow2 gave me the impression of having puzzle pieces where optimal. or at least ideas that made narrative immersion excellent, but always with a damned flaw that ruined something:
- wrath of the bride: optimal stylistic immersion, but with strong problems of repetitive dialogue and recycled AI from junkenstein without real reflections on the gameplay;
- battle for olympus: enormous creativity on the hero skills in question, but no narrative creativity and total mismanagement of the idea of community rankings for a statue of ilios to be changed for each new champion;
- starwarch: a very promising first two-team PVE concept (imagine ow team vs talon team), but ignored balance and very poorly managed narrative, even in the idea of team rankings.
- demon lord workshop mode: an idea for a boss fight with a very promising Overwatch hero, but really rough polishing and a total absence of repetitiveness (not even a dedicated announcer or skins for heroes).
- PvE: it is almost perfect in its narrative (especially the audio variety), but it is visibly damaged by the change in development ideas, resulting in little replayability and with too little curiosity to complete it using all the heroes. between the three missions there are obvious imbalances in narrative philosophy to follow, between Rio completely weakened by Blizzcon 2019 up until today (almost boring, to be honest), a Toronto that is very well written in the development of the story but dispersive on the roster and in the narrative too large and… Gotheborg that follows a 1:1 archives formula with real small ideas of strategic aid (the different types of turrets that can be used by everyone in the same place)
- underworld: plays well on the non-self-imposing difficulty modifiers of the “easy, hard, legendary” modes and has little lore details in its announcer (iggi). however, it completely lacks the same immersion as archives (no dialogue or skins on the topic) and tends to be too little studied in the respawn of the waves, making it more frustrating than necessary.
- sanctuary: very good theme immersion, and a fast hero upgrade system that is very tempting when wanting to test all the heroes. even junkenstein’s AI is better and reasonable. but there is little involvement on the part of the protagonists of the adventure (silent) and there can be strong confusion in understanding the upgrades in the frenzy of the moment.and a huge visual clutter on enemy techniques, especually for orisa and moria
what I mean is that each of these modalities has always experimented in an interesting way in one department… but they have failed overall. and in my opinion this contributes to the feeling of “failure” that we see in ow2 who took the luxury of almost 3 years off to focus on pve. but honestly we don’t know much different from where we were with archives. and yes, even ow1 archives were not without flaws and were equally experimental to grow for the better. but the problem is precisely this in ow2: we are in a continuous experimentation which has made the whole pause they asked for by stopping ow1 completely USELESS. even the fact of saying “for now we’re releasing pve in episodes, we want to analyze the community’s reaction, we won’t give release dates for the next pve missions” is a huge problem that contributes to the sense of uselessness of that almost 3 year pause.
I hope that the developers are taking a good look at these experiments that they will be doing, what I’m sorry about is that the official PVE has theoretically already been launched. I dare say more for “we are late” rather than for a project with clear ideas. Unfortunately.