The lawsuit changed a lot of things and you can clearly see the impact it has had
For instance, Malevento was meant to be released much earlier
I’m not justifying them by any means but lawsuits generally do slow down progress a lot, as there’s a lot of things to go through, so no I don’t think whoever that is was right, and anyone with half a brain will realise that OW2 is not going to be balanced on release because that would be incredibly difficult to do
I knew at the time that he was probably right. This happened the last time he was “wrong” too. The devs debunked his hero bans leak, only to introduce hero pools, which is essentially the same thing functioning slightly different than expected.
Here, I don’t but that a simple change in leadership is setting them back so much, not in this case. They still have Aaron, who was the assistant director before replacing Jeff. They have Geoff Goodman on balance. They have the new lead writer, who’s been there for some time now. The guy that left was a producer. If that’s an impactful reason, then it’s probably only the straw that broke the camel’s back.
For me it’s less about denial and more about it being apparent in the first place. We saw where they were with OW2 PvP in the livestreams; Rein and Winston looking like the only tanks who had been worked on at all, and they were still pretty much in a draft state. Existing characters that were kept behind closed doors like Orisa and Moira. Acknowledgement that snipers/flankers/etc. were going to be a problem but they “were keeping a close eye on them” - i.e. they haven’t done anything about them yet.
Metro “leaking” that OW2 is in a rough state is like me “leaking” that the Pope is Catholic.
So they need another year to balance 5vs5?..
They didn’t even do a re-balance for 2/2/2; just pretended that adding some limits would magically fix a game designed to be played a completely different way.
The only explanations for this game’s balance have been “incompetence” and “low effort.”