I’m sure others have had this idea although I’d like to talk about it. Have a gamemode created in arcade where everything is reverted to season 1/2. Patches, hero selection, stats, ect.
Reason being?
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For people who came to the game after what people describe as being the time in where they had the most fun. I wasn’t here for season 2 and didn’t really play during season 3 either.
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For people who want to go back to a time w/o a lot of cc.
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Nostalgia purposes I guess.
Personally, I think it would be really fun to play the game like back what it was like in 2016. If it’s added as an arcade mode it wouldn’t replace quickplay ( obviously ). I really don’t see a downside to this other than people on the forums ranting even more about “how the game used to be fun” after experiencing gameplay in 2016 again.
If you’ve got any opinions or ideas be sure to post them below haha.
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This idea pops up from time to time. There are huge obstacles to supporting old (legacy) content and behavior in the game. It is commonly a nightmare to try and reintegrate old code into a new version of the client because things may have changed drastically. Aside from that you have significantly increased the maintenance cost of the code because every change the devs make (e.g. balance changes, new heroes, new maps, etc) need to now also be tested with all the old behavior as well, or it will just becoem broken or unbalanced itself.
P.S. please keep in mind the above is onyl a note about the client. You also have backend servers, and entire tool chains to manage old assets, different web protocols, etc.
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It’s just hard for me to even want to entertain the thought, as a game developer, since I recognize the excessive amount of effort involved in doing this and know it would be nowhere near justified.
Then again the devs aren’t scared of arcade modes being unbalanced, total mayhem anyone?
Total mayhem is pretty much designed to be imbalanced. If the goal is supporting a “classic” mode, then you’d want to ensure that it actually plays the same way it did when the game came out. It would completely defeat the purpose of a classic mode if new changes accidentally break it and the balance of it.
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I realize there’s more to just changing the stats of characters when it comes to developing a mode like this; although, other than stats, what do you think the devs would have to change?
[E] - Theoretically Easy
[M] - Not necessarily hard.
[H] - Hard/Very Time-Consuming/
- Abilities - [M/H]?
- Disabling Characters [E]
- Changing Statistics [E]
- Restricting Map Pool - [E] If this mode were to be implemented, would you enjoy a restricted map pool, or would you think that newer maps should be in the mode as well?
- Old Character abilities/interactions - [H]
- Backend//tool chains//web protocols// - As you brought up, this would probably be hard. Depending on how the game is designed, theoretically ( although very unlikely ) this could be easy if developed with reversion in mind.
If I’m forgetting anything or have any invalid info please let me know what you think. I honestly don’t think emotes/sprays should be messed with. That’s pretty common sense though. This post is addressed to everyone; not just NighthAwk.
Things like porting old abilities and matching the exact original behavior as well as all the backend stuff would likely be by far the hardest parts. Keeping in mind that this needs to be supported in parallel with the main game likely means they probably just duplicate all the code for every old hero to avoid the possibility of regressing behavior with new changes, but you still have to be careful with any code that is shared. You know all of those things they did like in the recent PTR patch where they changed the behavior of boops and knockback? Yeah that needs to be completely duplicated to avoid any of that new behavior influencing anything.
Supporting both of these at runtime cna be incredibly complex and so time consuming that the value you get from it is not worth it.
All of the above can absolutely be done, but the concensus from people who hve experience in software engineering is pretty unanimous that it would be a huge undertaking that would have very little value.
While it seems like a good idea on paper, most of the nostalgia comes from the game being new and something you have never seen before.
No one has ever seen someone play a certain hero, or use a certain ability, until further down the timeline. Adding this game mode would just have everyone roll Mccree to see how broken he was, and some other quirky things to test out. Other than that, doesn’t seem likely.
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This was attempted in SC2 and it did not go well.
Also the so-called ‘Vanilla WoW’ is still WIP.
It’s pretty cool that they’re working on a Vanilla WoW, if you’ve tried it or seen gameplay what do you think about it? Is it finicky or broken at all? Is it a separate gamemode similar to old runescape//new runescape?