and then the replacement ruined things even more, not only didnt made the pve, ruined pvp and everything and havent done a single good thing, the few decent decisions were tihngs overwatch 1 already had like no more pay to win heroes, or things any other game in the market had for years but bad implemented, like coins in the battle pass, not enough to buy next. whatever people wanted a story mode and without it they doomed ow2
Answer: Greed and laziness.
They chose the “spend little earn big” strategy.
They banked on the popularity of OW1 and the goodwill of the community as resources to drive this lame strategy and earn big in a short period.
The inevitable “collateral damage” is a bad reputation and a downfall of the game. But that doesn’t matter to the people in charge.
The shareholders only have one life to live, and OW2 was a great opportunity to fill their bank accounts so that they never have to work again. Overwatch 2 is just a tool to achieve that goal.
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Keller is basically just dealing with the fallout of decisions that were made from 2017 - 2021.
Jeff dipped and left him holding the bag.
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and he failed, i dont care for excuses. jeff sin was being too ambitious and wanting overwatch to be something special, what a crime, not being on corpo crap of $20 skins and battle passes, i mean seriously, he was too ambitious, im not being ironic. on the other side, the replacement sin is being too lazy and incompetent who clearly is doing nothing and cares for the game, not listenig to the community, literally doing nothing
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It’s sad that Aaron Keller takes the blame for Jeff Kaplan’s decisions from the looneys.
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Aaron’s done an OK job all things considered.
Communication could be better still, but it’s way better than it used to be. Team 4 is all-around more responsive to feedback than they used to be, too.
As for this:
It was going to happen regardless of who was in charge. This was set in stone the day that Fortnite became the most popular game on the planet. It changed the way the industry thinks about monetization of live-service games. Combine that with the way the Overwatch community was complaining about loot boxes circa 2017/2018 (and yes, it did happen) and it was inevitable.
Also, here’s a good way to gauge how the Overwatch community felt about Loot Boxes prior to 2019: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/search?q=loot%20box%20before%3A2019-01-01
As a fun bonus, here’s a bunch of people asking for a Battle Pass system: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/search?q=battle%20pass%20before%3A2019-01-01
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If you read between the lines, they basically said they didn’t want to fork out the cash and invest the time to do it. They could have 100% made the game the people wanted, they just didn’t want to do it. There is literally no reason they “couldn’t” do it.
And to be frank why would they when they can make more money with their F2P model and ludicrous shop pricing model.
Unprofitable. Essentially.
They had to rush some of it out to appease shareholders (as OW1 was tanking hard, so OW2 arrived before it was ready). They tried to sell the PvE side, and it failed.
The money men cancelled it suddenly without much warning to team 4. Hence why some feel like they were “lied to”.
I agree and even if I sound nit-picky, why do they still offer the Invasion-Bundle in the shop if they know that there won´t be a continuation of that mode?
I mean when there was trouble surrounding the Alien-Zarya-Skin they offered a re-fund or when the Hero-Gauntlet-Mode wasn´t played as much as they wanted they just removed it. But for whatever reason they keep the Invasion-Missions even so now it most likely is only gathering dust as no one is playing it anymore.
If they really won´t continue PvE they might as well take it out of the shop.
Because someone might want to play it.
Totally different situation. They wanted that out of the game, they had to refund.
It was always in the rotation. So it just never came back around as it wasn’t popular.
Neither of these are really comparable.
It’s hard to tell because they gaslight so hard, but they seemed to have some really genuinely bad ideas. Like at one point they mentioned they’d have to release heroes slower to pvp because they HAD TO all have full talent trees on release?
Just insane, there’s no reason every hero in pvp had to even be in pve immediately. When that was mentioned is when I realized it was never happening, think I even made a post on it.
I mean of course the real problem was making it OW2 instead of OWPVE with eyes on OWMMO - all being separate teams alongside OWPVP - but I think everyone understands that at this point lol.
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They should have asked me to do it obviously 
I think it’s more of they didn’t get things going , jeff’s methods are always unique.
Overwatch was actually made in a year or less from scratch after failed stuff.
Everything from engine to stuff was from scratch not titans only concepts and maybe some assets were used but not tech.
They kinda build a grand idea first and execute fast in a grind, it’s old school development cycle that most new people can’t accommodate nowadays they will probably complain to hr and sue you.
But between kottick internal struggles and Covid i doubt they didn’t hit the ground running so nothing much was there except for those few showcases.
Well there are some Overwatch mods for L4D2 and mods that turn zombies into robots.
All that’s needed is OW voice clips.
Every time I watch the cinematics and then OW genesis especially it makes me think “wow… Imagine if Overwatch has an mmorpg where you’re a soldier in the Omnic Crisis, choose a country to start in, customise your character, play through enough story to end of the Omnic crisis and then choose your faction… Then maybe an expansion where a new race is added (omnics) and you can make a new character to go through the story as an Omnic… Oh well”
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Why couldn’t they make PVE ?
'Cause PVE required to have less heroes to make it viable and to distant itself from PVP Overwatch.
It was impossible for them to build that many PVE talent trees while working on new heroes at the same time AND work on huge content that wouldn’t feel boring after a few days / weeks.
OW1 should have remained what it was : a good P2P PVP game and simply leave it with the content it had back then, so OW devs could focus on a real sequel that was PVE focused, with a different concept, less heroes and a strong story and gameplay.
I believe that what canceled OW2 was that bad decision to go F2P and monetize an old 2016 game (through shops) that already had a very long run.
Eventually, they simply stuck with the low-effort easy cash-grab project and abandoned an ambitious and more creative project, that was supposed to be PVE.
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Yeah I can kinda see this.
It’s how they approached Project Titan as well - they spent years building various assets for that thing too. And it met exactly the same fate - most of it was scrapped and the leftovers were re-used for something else.
Usually the ‘announce a shipping product’ step comes somewhere at the end of this process though - not at the start. Titan didn’t even have a final name, but they were already promising Overwatch 2 features while doing this.
As I said above, their comms throughout their entire thing just sucked.
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All the talent that could make the game left the sinking ship that is ABK.
Those who are left can barely use the tools left behind to keep the current games going due to the fact that they don’t hire based on technical knowhow anymore.
As is ow has too many op abilities, if they doubled down on that with the skill trees the only way they could make a good game is to heavily invest on enemy ai otherwise it would just be dmg sponges doing basic stuff, boring.
and considering there would be plenty of enemies that would require lots of resources, servers prolly wouldnt be able to handle it
Because it sucked.
There are many problems they couldn’t overcome and some are due to very overwatch core design.
L4D2 lies on leaving players capable to adapt. In OW, you are stuck with one hero with 3 skills that will never change. So teamplay gets very limited : the damage dealer will deal damage and the healer will heal. Engagement is impossible because beyond completing the game with each hero, there’s no variations within a run to keep players engaged to try new things and witness new things.
In L4D2, you can be anything you want almost at any time : you can be frontliner with shotgun/melee weapon, you can be the one carrying the healing goods, you can be the one with snipers focusing on killing specials infected.
In L4D2, enemies are designed to force people to play together. Most of special infected would win any of their duels as they incapacitate their targets. OW tried this with Rialto event but thing is, as one is stuck with healing class, the players haven’t the same value and the same capability of saving their mates.
I haven’t touched Destiny 2 but as far as I know, the most engagement for it is character building at least through loot.
There’s no loot in OW.
And there’s no loot possible. I mean, they wouldn’t give Brig a machinegun right ? It wouldn’t be Brig anymore.
Even if one would go with creating one weapons variant like “Fire Flail” or “more knockback but less damage”, the flail gameplay will remain the same 90% of the time and so the player behaviour would be the exact same, 90% of the time. Ain’t like switching from a machinegun to a shotgun or a sniper which imply a strong change in player behaviour and strategy.
OW PvE shares a problem that Evolve showed : strong classes design and defined heroes lock players up in one role that gets boring within a run and don’t encourage people to replay as the whole experience would be too similar.
There has been some “loot” and “skill building” things in Sanctuary event (Hallowen 2023) and one other event (I’ve forgotten its name where players would pick cards adding hero skills effects) and if those were kinda fun, I doubt most people would play it for hours and hours as they’d quickly go with the same build over and over again.
The lack of evolution within a run and the limited adaptability are coming straight from Hero Shooter design and therefore, PvE would have a very hard time to keep people engaged beyond few hours.
I feel like even successful PvE are rather based on a very slow, long-time building your hero rather than getting missions of 20 minutes. L4D2 and Killing Floor which are based on less than one hour games are more about adaptability and avoid stucking players in One Role with only One Weapon which is what Hero Shooter does.
One other reason is that OW was a PvP game before PvE. OW PvE could have been a thing as a whole separate game but not sure players would have followed that idea. And I feel PvP and PvE player bases are different enough to get people who would have blamed Blizzard for released a whole PvE game rather than expanding the PvP.
PvP is also a safer/easier way to make money.
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This is an amazing explanation.
They spent years working on Talent trees but didn’t seem to even think of how they could build actual, engaging PVE FPS gameplay around them. They focused on the talents first, because those were the things they wanted to build their MMORPG on top of. The gameplay was an afterthought and - no surprises, it would’ve been bad.
We can tell it would have been bad because:
- They went to great lengths to not show it. Remember, this was the “highly replayable” mode - there was nothing to spoil. They could have showed hours of gameplay if they thought it reflected well on the product.
- They scrapped it after years of work