the cinematics all paint overwatch to be this lazy rip-off of Incredibles, but the execution is somehow even lazier than that. This is just a game about people killing each other over and over again, exactly what does that have to do with some defunct team of super heroes?
if you wanted to do a video game where players spend all day shooting at each other, why not just make a gladiator themed game?
instead you have all of these goofy cartoon characters shouting out cheers and jeers in the middle of battle all having a fun time but every battlefield is littered with the corpses of people that are all friends with one of the characters, so like the heroes can’t die, but the rest of the people on the planet can die? And instead of, i dunno, protecting other people, all of the overwatch heroes just spend every day of their life shooting at each other for fun?
This game has no cohesive story, and what’s worse is it didn’t NEED a story, so you just threw in a confusing bag of other people’s ideas and said HEROES, GET YOUR HEROES AND SHOOT EACH OTHER
this game is like if Nintendo came out with Splatoon 3 but every battlefield was made out of all the squid kids dead parents
So many of y’all throw a temper tantrum when a character gets “revealed” as gay. What you should be asking is why is that announcing a character is gay is literally the only way Blizzard knows how to progress the “plot” of this game. This game is static. It’s sterile.
If you dont like the story, why come into the Story Discussion subforum to complain about it?
The reason the game doesn’t make sense is because it isn’t canon - these characters don’t go out and push payloads or defend objectives, and they certainly don’t get resurrected dozens of times a day. Death still happens, and many of these heroes have never met face to face. The game has nothing to do with the story of Overwatch.
However, Overwatch does have a cohesive story outside of the game. The animated shorts, origin trailers, comics and short stories all provide information to build the Overwatch universe. The plot has been lacking, but the devs have said the setup phase of storytelling is almost finished, so the plot should pick up soon.
Team Fortress 2 was similarly cartoony and non-canonical. If you want a novel, play Gears or, better yet, read a book. The story is not completely unimportant, but it’s intentionally pretty open, to facilitate the large community of creators that imagine off of the lore. Your post doesn’t sound like a valid argument or complaint, it’s biased and ranty.
Even though tf2 is similar, the lore outside the game and the game modes have some kind of correlation. I mean, i didn’t read the comics but i kinda know that there are these two guys, blutarch and redmonn, that are fighting for some lands. They have hired some mercs and these soldiers of fortune are fighting for these lands; either by capturing control points or carrying payloads to sabotage their bases.
In Overwatch i can’t see that. Why are they escorting a limo in hollywood? There are some heroes that hate Hollywood actors?
Why can a team have Winston and Reaper even though the cinematics show them as enemies. I haven’t watched and readed the comics and cinematics but i think that tf2 achieves a better cohesion between lore and game modes than Overwatch.
Anyway, the game is very fun to play, what’s important to me
The gameplay =/= lore , in Overwatch, you don’t play the story per see, there is no point in fighting for a point, it’s just gameplay. Having two Reinhardt facing each other , or Talon heroes mixing with Overwatch ones makes absolutely zero sense lorewise.
But every map is set in the lore and have references to what’s really happening in the lore. And the payload maps all have different things to escort (this isn’t story mode you see, escorting them or stopping them is just gameplay ^^)
For Hollywood, you’re escorting a famous omnic film director, HAL-Fred Glitchbot, that recieved threats from anti omnics groups.
King’s Row focuses on delivering an EMP to destroy the Omnic Underground in Britain. Dorado centers on delivering a power cell to a Lumerico ziggurat to restore power to the town. Eichenwalde charges you with retrieving the armor of the fallen Balderich von Adler. Route 66, delivering the Echo crate (or the crate formerly known as Echo’s) to the Deadlock hideout. Rialto, weapon shipments to Talon HQ. Numbani, with how much it’s story has been resolved, is probably the least impactful in terms of purpose with maps.
Story and game segregation definitely exist, but it’s an effective practice that doesn’t affect either to any significant extent.
I actually thought overwatch’s story had a few things in common with the Incredibles - basically just the whole “super powered/ extraordinary individuals fell out of favor with the public, and all activities of such “supers” became outlawed,” leaving some to become vigilantes
You can have criticisms, so long as it leads to constructive discussion. People coming in saying “The story is crap, its a rip off of the Incredibles, lol lets just shoot each other and respawn, by the way gay backstory,” they’re not doing that. They have no reason to be here as they evidently don’t care and just want to complain.
Honestly guys… Don’t kid yourselves… sometimes companies takes routes to maximize profits with minimal effort. Blizzard is smart for making gameplay =/= lore (unlike e.g. Apex Legends where the Apex games is tied), cause that means:
They can skimp out lore/correlation whenever they want… only provide short story/comics when needed (e.g. new hero/events/maps)
-x
Which is o.k., since it doesn’t stress out the artist/story department, but Blizzard… is just slow pumping any content (whethet it’s WoW or Overwatch) = which makes it jarring
Just look at the recycled events, no new maps so far… everything always concentrated in Q3-Q4 every year (cinematics) + 1 mid-year (Archives)… other than that nothing.
I would say there is a difference between maximizing profits, and creating a lesser read comic or short story for no direct revenue. They stopped making one-off comics shortly after the anthology released (I wouldn’t say it sold well, but I dont know the exact numbers,) and every short story was a tie in with an in-game event.
This is the point I am more curious about. No new map in this gap means this is the first piece of core gameplay content we’ve missed since the game came out. Unless they announce it at Blizzcon, of course.
Well… I think we all understand the Blizzard pattern (and got use to it, although it is abyssmal for the initial 2 Billion it brought to Activision_Blizzard)…
Contents are always kept in Q3-Q4 every year… there’s a long recession after that like 8 months of pure recycled/lore dessert [except mid-year 1 Archive event, which 2019 was technically recycled (enemies) too].
Blizzard seems to have chosen to burn that initial 2 Billion for their endeavours, and so far… this 4 years we’ve been steadily losing player-base/interest.
I would argue that keeping things fresh around the year… with anything… lore/comic/short/animation/maps/4x hero releases will actually lead to more profits since player-base are excited/less prone to leave.
What I’ve heared and read is this and it would explain a lot:
Overwatch is as it is today because of a last minute major change.
Blizzard had its lore, and design all setup. They were even already busy making the game… a Warcraft type of game is… until they figured that this might become a rival to their own Warcraft. So instead of shooting themselves in the foot, they pulled the plug out that idea, but they already had an functional setup, so they changed it to what we have today.
But that i’ve been told. And if it’s true it would explain many of the gaps, hero works missing lore etc. because they had to change things to make it fit.
