Significant portion of pre launch time was taken up developing what 5v5 would be like. They sold the concept of PvE because that in itself is easy. But following through with it while you’re currently developing 5v5 pvp was creating a disaster for resources.
The more attention they gave to PvP the less worked on PvE and so it delayed PvE more. All of this happened because OW2 had to be pushed out of the door early to recoup the cost that they were spending on making OW2.
This also explains why balancing as a whole has been sort of rough. Because many Heros didn’t make the translation to the new format. Had OW2 cooked longer we’d probably be in a better state now.
the account i can play on atleast for now i didnt bother buying the invasion bundle as it is a waste of money for stuff that onyl has 3 missions and left at a cliff hanger
The full-length campaign train has sailed. I never really cared about “skill trees” especially when their initial reveal was the usual “+x% Betterer At DoThingy”. I just wanted a standard co-op shooter campaign of around 5 hours + cutscenes.
I’m only wondering why we don’t at least get Archives events again.
(I’m not really wondering, I just know the only answers are bad ones.)
Cause a horse in World of Warcraft sold more than Starcraft 2. That is the reason. Why devote time, people and money on something that is maybe gonna sell okay when you can make 42 Kiriko skins with each selling more than the whole mode ever would?
Going back to Starcraft 2. They launched a bonus campaign that was sold in three mission packs of three missions each. That clearly didn’t do much as it wad dropped as the commander characters for PvE mode over there were easier and faster to make. It all comes down to money.
he is the director, he is responsible for everything, blaming his predecessor for all the problems the game have and he being scot free for fixing nothing? then why he got the job if he cant be responsible of overwatch?
he had years to do something, he took the job in 2021, he had a full team of people before layoffs yet did nothing, ow2 launch was a disaster with him in charge
loot boxes were a problem at the beginning but later they added coins to the loot boxes and change the algorith to not get repeated things, i and a lot of people got a lot of free stuff for free just for playing, loot boxes in ow1 were the most generous system ever, the change to ow2 where literally nothing was free and you had to grind 9 months for a single skin with paywalled heroes, no, loot boxes were better and now we miss them
i guess people wanted a good battle pass with a lot of good rewards and enough coins to buy the next battle pass and maybe some skins, and no pay to win heroes locked on tier 55 with very grindy challanges just to get some xp
We got to play the missions they were working on and its not hard to see why they scrapped it. It played like an upscaled version of those holiday modes they used to release and I don’t think a skill tree would’ve salvaged it. It was not hard to see that the game was coming out boring.
The old blizzard would spend a whole decade rebuilding it from the ground up until they got it right, but new blizzard wasn’t interested. It’s important to remember though, if they did go down the road Jeff wanted, we would get no OW content at all and the game would still just be OW1. In fact, knowing how long blizz usually takes on projects like this we probably wouldn’t even get an announcement until 2028.
Honestly, I’m not sure if I disagree with the approach. Why let a good PvP game like OW go to waste while spending a decade developing a new game? But there split leadership wound up ruining the execution for both unfortunately.
Honestly I have to agree with bobby and upper management on this one. OW was first and foremost a competitive shooter and should not have been forced into making it PVE because Jeff wanted it as such. Its unfortunate that the upper management didn’t force team 4’s hand sooner so the PVE could have been killed before PVP was held back for so long.
There’s plenty of blame on both sides. Bobby wanted his PVP league and the dev team wanted PVE and MMORPG. Both could have succeeded had a compromise been reached. PVP could have continued development instead of dead years and PVE could have been developed by a dedicated team. The potential was there to do both. But egos and distrust got in the way.
He had 18 months to build and ship the game that was announced at Blizzcon 2019. I’m clearly talking to a child because you realise you’re asking for something insane, right?
Those changes happened in September 2017, before this forum existed. Every search result I showed you where people were calling Loot Boxes ‘predatory’ was from after that.
he had 18 months to do the pve and finish at least one mission (the three missions relased were done before jeff left, fully playable in 2019 with more features) and keep overwatch 1 intact, keep working on the story missions and tell us 1 year before launch pve was not going to happen like they promised, they hurry to work on pvp that is trash, unbalanced, with a 5vs5 format they didnt even test, this is all his fault, game is full of problems that have nothing to do with pve
one year and a half after launch and then 4 and a half years before changing to f2p, sounds perfect, by the time game closed you could have everything for free
I see the lack of a dedicated PVE mode/campaign as one of Overwatch’s biggest failures. In fact, its one of modern gaming’s biggest failures IMO. I say this a lot, but games have had PVE campaigns/side modes for decades, and the fact that Blizzard couldn’t handle it would be like someone saying “we just can’t make maps for this game”, or something like that.
You can’t do what’s standard? You can’t do the basic thing games have been doing since the dawn of gaming? Why?
Maybe not now, but that’d only be after Blizzard failed at releasing that kind of content. And in that case, my issue is still there. Why couldn’t they do the standard for games?
It pretty clearly just wasn’t a priority at any point from 2015-2021. And to an extent, that’s fine - despite your claim, there are other live service games that do (or did) the same thing. The most notable examples being TF2, Valorant, Apex Legends and Fortnite (unless you want to argue that “Save the Word” is a campaign lol).
The priority was the thing that management later decided was infeasible (Hero Mode) because it wasn’t going to result in a good product and built mountains of technical debt for the live-service.
Hard to speculate. If we take rumors at face value, OW2 multiplayer portion was only in development for a year and change, while the PVE sector fell into a black hole. If that is the case, then OW2 does make a lot of sense as to how it launched under cooked.
Trouble is that there are countless reasons on how things can go wrong but considering Blizz made the original overwatch from the leftovers of a failed attempt at making a pve shooter game, I would hazard a guess that they ran into the same design pittfalls that the earlier team stepped into, but this time with more intervention from Kotick and the gang. They tried a neat trick, landed funny and it ended up being a different trick entirely… then tried the original trick again, not having learned anything.
Thats just one problem from a concept/design perspective. Add in production issues, then you have a behemoth of a project with a release window that keeps going out of reach.
I would be less inclined to think they had technical issues preventing them from making the OW2 they tried to hype up during blizzcon, but feature creep and loss of core gameplay focus probably derailed the development that no amount of technical wizardry could pack in everything they genuinly wanted to stick into the game within a time frame that Kotick would be willing to budget for.
Remember folks - you can afford to drop the ball when there isn’t anyone else competing with you on the court. Pick it back up and pretend like nothing happened, your customers don’t know where else they’re gonna turn to.
hmm maybe i dont remember that to be fair im not exactly sure they advertised a lot about them failing, i actually thought it was because they thought it was boring.
which i can see if they did simply keep the bots and maps from missions but give us the ability tree thing.
