i searched ‘overwatch 2 gameplay’ on youtube out of curiosity and was surprised to see they had fully playable missions available for streamers in late 2019. i was then trying to cross reference a loose timeline between the first and second game’s development paths but i can’t find anything on when they started working on ow2.
honestly i’m just trying to figure out why the hell they announced the game so early on if they’re trying to pump the breaks because the game ‘has a long ways to go’ and they need to ‘set realistic expectations’ nearly 2 years after announcing it.
like i get that there was likely 6 months or more of downtime due to the plague but i have the feeling we’re looking at a late 22 or early 23 release at best which is wild considering the first game took ~3 years to develop after reassessing project titan or whatever it was called.
idk i’m confused. i know games take forever to develop but i can’t logically understand why the second game would take longer than the first?
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what OW2 ? (lil black kid meme)
GabeN.'s hl3 meme incomming
I dunno. 1993? Feels like it anyway
Apparently work started on OW2 in 2017 - although to exactly what extent, we don’t know. Maybe it was just conceptual at that point. But that timeframe is why people originally thought it would be due for release in late 2020/first half of 2021 (and hey, maybe it still is - we’re going off rumours here).
And no, work didn’t stop for 6 months because of COVID-19. No technology company ‘stopped work’ because of COVID - they just worked from home instead. Even Activision-Blizzard worked on and released plenty of other games last year. Sure, they might be some degree of delay because of the virus, but blaming a full 12 month delay solely on the virus is just using it as a convenient excuse.
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i feel like 2017 is a fair assumption which really just deepens the general sense of what the hell are they doing? i was talking to my friends and we have a few running theories:
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they were making progress but the layoffs gutted them more than they were expecting so it slowed to a crawl
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the project sat backseat to the success of owl which would explain the glacial pace.
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they weren’t planning on a 2020 or even a 2021 release but they wanted something to announce at 2019 blizzcon that would distract from the pressure they were dealing w because of the hk protests
i’ve been a loud contender for number three but a combination of all of the above is also likely. i also want to mention i’m not like hugely vested in the second game nor whining because it hasn’t released yet - i’m honestly just wondering why a company this big and successful shot themselves in the foot and proceeded to flounder like this. they sure as hell can’t say they were too busy focusing on the first game because its been starved for content for well over a year now.
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This doesn’t make sense. Blitzchung was banned on October 6 2019 and the Zero Hour trailer for Overwatch 2 was presented at Blizzcon less than a month later. There’s no way the Blizzard wrote, created unique models, animated and recorded voice acting for that short in a month - just getting the voice actors in that amount of time would be almost impossible. And if they weren’t planning to launch the game until 2021/2022, it wouldn’t make sense to sit on a ready-for-release trailer for years, either.
Metro had already started leaking OW2 content before that point, too.
OW2 was going to be announced at Blizzcon 2019 well before Blitzchung did his thing.
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To be exact Jeff said last Blizzcon that they’ve started working on OW2 right after the original game was shipped and development of OW2 gained more speed in 2017. He also said they new they’re gonna make OW2 when OW1 was still in beta in 2015.
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