I just don’t get how Blizzard ended up in this place with Overwatch 2.
They had the most incredible game and it is now in this state, the entire game is just in a sorry state.
We have reached a place where the heros who are popular get most skins, always stay meta and anything interesting or unique is shutdown as fast as possible. We are playing a fixed skin shop, where your games are just completely manipulated.
I had a ranked game where the enemy Dva was 30-0 and my Sigma hadn’t got 1 kill in 4mins, like nothing
How the hell have we reached games like this? Because nobody at Blizzard give a rats if the game is good or not. They care about making money and they don’t care about the quality of the matches the players play.
So sad the old dev team has gone, the new people are the worst
I’d argue that the game is in its best state ever. I love all the new OW2 heroes, maps, and modes. Stadium is a crazy new addition I never would’ve even considered. We have more unique play styles than ever. We have more polished gameplay than any other game. Every hero works well for something.
I’ve never missed a competitive season in 10 years. Games like Rivals come along and just make me more thankful for the quality of this game. Balance isn’t perfect, and there are things about OW1 I miss (like OQ being the default), but I don’t think any other current PvP game can make an argument for being better than this one.
It’s one of the biggest selling games of all time. Still one of the top 20 most played games. Has millions of active players (somewhere between 15-20m)
I’m not sure where you think they’ve “ended up”.
Or, are you conflating you not enjoying the game any more with the game being bad.
Because it is totally fine not to enjoy a game, but acknowledge it’ll do fine.
My issue with Rivals is that they have good design ideas that always, without exception, feel terrible in execution. Everything feels so janky and unresponsive. It’s a mix of tech and UI issues, but it doesn’t really matter what content they add as long as it feels terrible to play. Gambit is one of my favorite characters ever from any franchise, but I just have no interest in fighting with Rivals’s jankiness to try him out. OW has never had that issue. We have polish for days.
Matchmaking quality? 1st downgrade on around OW2 released, 2nd one on OW2 S9 bullet/projectile buff
Meta/gameplay/fight between roles? Catering to crybabies on forum and reddit claiming 9000% of their games don’t they have 222 by adding role queue
Monetization? when OW became F2P game, business model shifted, just like how LOL release 10 Yasuo skins at the pace of all monster character have 1 combined
I tried remapping him to make it so I did not need opposite buttons to charge his dash, but that ruins the button on his deck. And not only that, but his Heart AOE and Spade AOE are literally the same animation, but opposite buttons.
The hardest part about Gambit is developing the muscle memory for that counterintuive controller mapping.
Bobby Kotick was too focused on corporate greed, resulting in a poorly managed PvE project that was constantly being interrupted by Bobby to make devs work on stuff that would ultimately be scrapped, resulting in a ton of wasted time and resources. Not to mention all of the layoffs, as well as the changing of ownership over to Microsoft into a free to play format. With a lot of the experienced devs gone being replaced with less experienced devs, and with Blizzard now needing to conform to whatever Microsoft wants probably puts a bit of a damper on how things are done. All of this culminates into state of things today. All things considered, things could definitely be worse since OW didn’t straight up die, but I do think there is still a lot they could improve upon to make the game better.
It is all about aesthetics… You make ugly characters those skins have almost 0 value… People with a completionist mindset not gonna be interested unless they are whales most not gonna care game is out to long plus fomo… Why do you think venture lacks skins… Only skins venture gets are the ones they would hand out for free.
It was doomed from the beginning when Bobby was still in office.
Pushed all the talented devs away with his ridiculous deadlines, focused on OWL which ultimately ruined the balance of the game forever, caused PVE in Ow2 to get delayed constantly because of random tasks that never got finished, and then it lead to Ow2 being the disaster as it is now.
Now we have a game thats a shell of its former self. Its doing a lot better than how it was years ago, but its nowhere near as good as Ow1 ever was.
Jeff played a part in it too, though. Iirc the decision to put Overwatch on ice and focus on PvE was his. Then Kotick got rid of the culture that made Overwatch possible, so we’re left with mediocre devs to keep the thing going. Or great devs with mediocre leadership. Whatever, the result is the same.
There’s still horribly designed heroes, poor balance and a revolving door of garbage/meta heroes, a matchmaker that makes Diamond to GM games and Mercy throwing games by existing.
Is it the best state? Debatable. Some of these things have existed so long that I don’t know if we can say it’s the best state or not.
As for the new OW2 heroes most have been incredibly problematic causing terrible metas for months at times. Why we like that instead of Blizzard refining what the heroes they have, I don’t know.
I think we have two clashing sides when it comes to OW, and that is where the stark difference in opinion on the games state comes into play.
You have, on one side, the people like me and I am guessing like you, who were intrigued at the game at launch. It was a fun shooter, but the REAL treasure was the “crafted with love” character roster, the growing and intriguing story/lore, and the potential the WORLD of overwatch had. It seemed limitless in the early days. The original story mode missions were AWESOME (hell, the call back with Vendetta and the Retribution mode made me giddy). We saw what this game could BECOME. As Winston (the human one) said “Never accept the world for what it appears to be. Dare to see it for what it COULD be”….and we did! I go back to the video of OW2’s announcement and that STADIUM of fans filling the air with cheers and hype for the advancing of the story…it was a beautiful thing! And now……that is all but destroyed. There is no “world” of OW anymore. They cinematics simply aren’t as good, the newer characters have less heart and soul somehow, and the game feels like it got cheap. All it will remain is a pvp pew pew fest…and that makes a lot of us sad.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the gameplay itself is as clean as it has ever been. Balance is ALWAYS going to be a challenge, but I don’t think there are any egregious oversights there right now. And they are giving us/trying out new modes constantly. The game is quite healthy and the players who still play it are loyal and enjoy it (for the most part I think). If the ONLY way you look at overwatch, is as a “team based, pvp shooter” and look at it as JUST that, you won’t be disappointed. I do not think there is anything fundamentally wrong with feeling like the game is amazing if that is simply all you are into…it is just a shame that OW was not able to grow (successfully) beyond that, when it EASILY could have.
Just my personal feelings on it. I belong in the former group, but still love the characters so…I log on, get my battlepass done, and that is about it, hoping and praying for even a separate PvE/story based game, or at LEAST a successful book/tv series (thinking in the same vein as Arcane with LoL)……so we CAN watch OW grow into something more still. My fingers will be crossed on that until the game truly dies.
It’s mediocre devs with horrible leadership. First of all, no one with morals wants to work at Blizzard knowing the office environment and the lawsuits they have had to settle around harassment. So quality people leaders stay well away. Second, Blizzard has ruined their reputation as a studio with products like Remastered and Diablo 3/4, and Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm dying.
So no good game developers are coming here unfortunately, because why would you when there’s a plethora of better developers to choose from?
