Im not game developer, but did skill trees have to be removed? Like they could give up skills like faster fire rate, speed boost, more ammo, more hp, faster regen at least? Whos gonna want to play the same mission multiple times?
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It was probably too expensive to implement.
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I speculate it would limit future hero releases.
Some ability modifications, while cool and welcomed, would likely be better if they were on another hero.
Take the now dead Support Symmetra as an example. Everyone wanted healing Turrets in her kit for some reason. Sure, but now there wonât be another support that can use healing Turrets like the new one thatâs just around the corner (at the time of this post)
So itâs likely they realized doing this would limit their options for new heroes in the future. I still wish they made a seperate, full release for the story game but alas, they want to make sure we spend more than 100 USD (equivalent) for the full story.
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The original plan was very ambitious. I think it called for something like 2-3 dozen talents and multiply that by 30+ characters 2430 or 3630 720-1080 abilities. Thatâs a lot. You have games like Borderlands that have like 4 characters and three 3 skill trees each for an entire PvE game.
Heroes should have gone like Destiny-lite with some minor alterations to various abilities the characters have. Possibly even just a second set of options would have been more than enough.
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Overwatch has the goal to keep the cheapest possible game development and game support possible while trying to get the most income
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^^This 100%.
Plus we live in a world with AI now. AI that even writes passable code in different programming languages. For a company hellbent on saving every last cent and pushing minimum-effort development and programming, they can now employ ChatGPT to come up with:
Is that an impressive-sounding number? I mean it used to be a lot if you cared to make a highly polished product and relied on a sprawling team of even adequately paid developers. But if your primary intention is making a cash shop experience bundled with a free, passably playable game, then even a free-use robot can come up with everything for you and program it all. The end result might work; or not. But thatâs not really the point, is it? Heck, if youâre feeling greedy, youâll even go ahead and charge money for your 5 minutes of time spent on that copy+paste hack job.
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Indie Company Blizzard doesnât have the talent to implement such things found in most basic mobile games. Youâre better off looking at games like Dark Tide, Deep Rock Galactic, Remnant 2, or Space Marine 2 if you want meaningful PvE.
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Itâs a talent tree. Lord knows a bunch of those skill nodes are filled with filler like HP+, Damage+, Reload Speed+, etc.
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Not a single mobile game has the dept and complexity and gameplay of overwatch. Not a single one. There are many OW clones there and none of them is even close.
Probably not harder than anything else in the game, just extremely time consuming with little return in sight. At the end of the day, this is still a PvP game, why spend 2 more years developing a niche mode that they know isnât going to make a whole lot of money, when they could just tank the PR hit and release the bare minimum and focus most of their resources on PvP from now on.
Then you have the PvP vs PvE issue, even though the Overwatch team has grown a lot in the last few years, itâs still only 300 people. Every developer working on PvE is a developer not working on PvP. Of course they could have created a new team to work exclusively on PvE, but then we are back at the issue of whether or not the cost will be worth it.
No. Even an incompetent coder can get something passable made in a couple of weeks. They just donât care.
Skill trees werenât going to be in the story missions at all. They werenât removed, they just werenât going to be in that mode - ever. They only reason the Talents were in the 2019 demo is because it was the only PVE demo at Blizzcon that year and they wanted people to be able to see them.
Talents were going to be in an entirely separate mode that basically generated entire missions on-the-fly using random objectives and randomly placed enemies on existing PVP maps.
Thatâs what âHero Modeâ was. It didnât have a story, it was just âpick talents and shoot robotsâ. Basically just Vs. AI Mode on steroids with PVE-enemies.
The Kingâs Row event mission thatâs included in Season 6 is using some of the tech from Hero Mode to keep refreshing that mission with new challenges/conditions, so weâll see more of what they were working on.
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Nah, I say the true reason is that the higher ups decided that return of investment isnât good enough. Requires a lot of effort to make (in comparison to what they have actually been doing) but the profits arenât what those higher ups want⌠and they always want more. Especially when they can just focus on vomiting out low effort overpriced microtransactions crap that people still buy. So keep the development as cheap as possible, reap the rewards.
Watch them implement it for a fee in the future.
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As far as we could tell, there were 50 fairly unique abilities. Letâs discount half and say theyâre easier things like adding pierce, making more projectiles, changing numbers etc.
That leaves about 1000 unique abilities to make. Which is difficult.
Not me, but people like Nega5 will have fun with it and thatâs fine. Just probably not as big an audience as Blizzard wants with how the playercount decline has gone.
If we get more Life Grip like things, quite frankly Iâd rather them never come.
Iâve seen a lot of people suggesting this. But at the same time ChatGPT really, really sucks at developing complex pieces of media. Itâs good for a sounding bound that you can bounce ideas off of, but Iâve yet to see it implemented in a capacity in a proper production pipeline.
One of the places I did work experience at tried to get us to use chatgpt to speed up the idea generation phase of development and it honestly made us slower. And with worse ideas.
Name them so I can try any that donât have Life Grip thanks.
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david brevik diablo and diablo 2 dev implemented unique talent tree to 63 marvel heroes characters.
he could added more if the game is still up and running
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Donât care how hard it is, they had almost 4 years to do it and couldnât achieve anything. This company is an utter joke and a disaster.
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Honestly itâs fun seeing streamers play randomized heroes. Granted, theyâre using already made assets to make it workâŚ
I meanâŚwe wouldnât really need all the fillers, just the shiny variant abilities.
The filler stuff is for actual PvE RPG games, in my opinion.
Itâs not that it was hard, itâs that Activision gutted Kaplanâs team and were not providing the proper dev cost & staffing for it to be feasible. What they wanted was a full Single Player Campaign + Gameplay loop that would last a long time akin to their sibling title Diablo or Warcraft.
Itâs not that it was ambitious, Blizzard have done it before, itâs that they werenât given the resources. It sucks balls.
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Iâve done some backend development for my own âproject gamesâ and yes, it is really difficult.
It seems simple to add something like a âfaster firerateâ skill. The implementation of that can get really complicated. Admittedly I donât know how overwatch is developed.
Just from a backend UI perspective, you have to manage something like how youâll keep track of the ability being turned on or âpurchasedâ, what factors go into the ability being turned on (exp), an entire system for the exp, a save system to store all the variables for every character, and tackle the wall of bugs that could conflict or break each individual ability as theyâre added. For one character, it might seem doable but the process can get overwhelming since the more thatâs added, the more complicated the code can get to even manage or simply navigate. (I mean just right click > View Page Source on this webpage and youâll get the front end html).
Thatâs just from a UI perspective too. Like, how you make the buttons function on menu screens. That doesnât include the art process, the engineering of the actual skills (which often takes physics into account), or the multiplayer functionality.
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