Genuinely speaking did we get a reason? Because I’ll be honest here i don’t think it would’ve been too hard to make.
they just needed to make Overwatch version of Left 4 Dead 2 with some Destiny 2 sprinkled in and Improve the AI so the enemies aren’tso basic. they couldve added in the wacky and cool abilities as time went on. So I Genuinely don’t know how they could’ve dropped the ball when you had every card you needed
3 years wasted on making skins for OW2 and nothing else past the 2019 demo.
They said that when it came to developing it, they realized they couldn’t actually devote the resources, or create the concept they initially had. It wasn’t going to be realized or as expansive as they had hoped with the skill trees or with the expansive story missions.
I don’t know if they gave any reasoning or official announcement that they’re scrapping even the slow release of PvE…that’s the one that sucks to me. 
Just not enough people interested in it to be worth the investment, that’s all
They could, Activision just didn’t like how long it was taking to make a proper story mode kinda game
They want their money and they want it now, it’s why we get 4 Kiriko skins every season
I don’t think the “highly replayable” vision they had was realistic, so they scrapped it once that became clear. More missions would’ve been cool, but let’s be honest and accept that most people would’ve played them once and then never again. Just not worth the time commitment.
Left 4 Dead was fun back in the day, but that kind if game is boring to me now. Deeprock Galactic and Helldivers feel like more modern realizations of a game that scratches that co-op-and-kill-things itch, but I don’t see how OW could’ve incorporated anything on that level. Destiny 2 started to suck once they were worried about balancing separately for PvP and PvE. The PvP was only good in Destiny 1.
The devs got too ahead of themselves. They wanted to do a lot more than what was actually necessary.
PVE had 3 components:
Realistically they only needed to do the campaign with only specific characters receiving talent trees, instead they opted to make what they said was 100 hero missions with every character receiving a talent tree.
They wasted money and time. Coupled with the fact that the team wasn’t big enough to develop PVE and PVP at the same time, Microsoft decided it wasn’t worth putting any further resources into.
5 years of development was spent on the PVE and only 1 on the PVP.
I know you like to hate on the game like it’s your job, but get your reasons for hating it right.
They could’ve added the story itself over time. The whole reason it became an issue is because they wanted to make it an entirely new game, which you can’t do when you’re releasing it in chunks.
So they were stuck with building the entire game at once because of how they advertised it. They can still release PvE content that’s story based in chunks, yet are refusing to do so because of money grubbing content creators saying the game is fine as a PvP only game (even though they jumped ship at the first chance they got).
That is what they tell you.
From what have been shown and what has been released, does it look like 5 years of working on pve to you?
The whole OW2 development and situation with Bobby Kotick was a mess.
It’s impossible to summerize it all, and some of the facts are still obfuscated or are guessed based on employee exit interviews, but to sum it up as best as possible in as few words as possible: Bobby Kotick was an overpaid manchild who only knew how to cut costs and couldn’t manage any kind of real product development to save his life. His horrible management basically killed PvE.
We sadly live in a generation that would pay so much $ for changing color palettes and polygons/textures for their character. Why create a full fledged PvE when all that time can be used to make 10x more skins that sell for 10x more?
It has happened to Rockstar Games, as soon as they made a system where they sell cars/clothes individually, we don’t get any story expansion for single player, they don’t even bother with GTA6, some of the main people behind Rockstar/GTA have just took their GTAOnline paycheck and left the company.
LOLLLLLL
If you’ve never been apart of a game dev pipeline pls don’t ever say stuff like this
Yes they said and I quote “we couldn’t deliver on the vision”
Meaning they tried making it and felt it wasn’t good enough to keep working on it
And they’re right. Overwatchs PVE has always been mid at best
I think the issue was the “tech trees” for each hero.
So every time a new hero is added, you are signing up for a massive amount of extra work to get them into PvE.
im talkong relatively speaking. they already got a lot of the work and general concept done when they made the archive missions
so things like enemy models, assets and things like that were already done. they had several straight years to make it, as well as no doubt millions of dollars, and plenty of places to get inspiration from. No. i don’t think it would’ve been hard for them
Good PvE content is impressively difficult to make.
The “reason” is it was too expensive for the amount of money they felt they’d rake in.
Way more profitable to focus on “make hero. Sell skins for hero”.
Skins are where they make their money. That’s it. Overwatches business model is a cosmetic dress up game. Everything they do, is to sell skins.
What do you think is more “financially profitable”?
A model where you make the hero, and the skins
Or a model where you make continual PvE content- and the heroes, and the cosmetics?
It’s as barebones as possible to sell skins.
Corporate greed
20 cats
There’s a book published by a respected and generally credible industry insider that shed a lot of light on what happened behind the scenes. My understanding is Bobby and upper management only wanted a competitive shooter. Jeff Kaplan and the dev team wanted to move toward making PVE and eventually a MMORPG out of Overwatch.
There were lots of arguements and discussions how to move forward, with management wanting to spin PVE off as a separate game with a different team and Jeff wanting to expand the current team. Management wasn’t on board with that. Team pushed forward trying to do everything in-house, but found they couldn’t do everything themselves to the level they were happy with.
Management finally got tired of waiting and forced team to move forward with supporting PVP and pushing out half done PVE. Disappointed ensued.
Basically, different people had different long term visions for the game that clashed . They never could all get on the same page and what you see today is the result.
Layoffs, needing to update the engine and so on. It adds up
I mean look at this way, they make 3 heroes a year. 3-4 years for the pve they did make is not that surprising to me. I’m sure there was more done or in various stages of done that we never saw.
Enemy models were not done, they had to make a ton new enemy models especially for Null Sector. If it was just the same couple of models from archives people would have complained.
Also, each hero had a talent tree of around 50 talents. Sure, several of those were just numbers changes, but the others were things that required new VFX, new animations, etc. And every hero was supposed to get 50 talents. That’s 1600 talents to code, animate, and add VFX for for the entire launch cast. And then that means for every new hero that would ever be made, they would also need 50 PvE talents. You could argue that that was development bloat and they could have gave heroes way smaller talent trees but they made the mistake of showing the big trees off at Blizzcon so anything less would have caused major disappointment and complaints among players.
Missions also needed new maps/locales, animated cinematic moments, tons of dialogue being recorded. AI had to be vastly upgraded because the biggest complaint of Archives missions was that the AI was bad and boring and one dimensional. Etc.
They essentially had to make a new game only using the basic lore and some 3D models from OW2