Subject. I don’t understand this from any side - neither from playing nor from business.
Arguments:
The entire OWL channel has 210 Mil. views combined. The entire Play OW channel has 631 Mil views, an exact triple of that of the OWL
The OWL channel is heavily pushed and advertised meaning they spend a lot on marketing there whereas Play OW is not
Most popular subjects watched in the OWL are of course opening ceremonies with the top ranking videos in the range of ~1…2 Mil views. The most popular subjects in the Play OW channel are related to lore with the top-ranking videos in the range of 15…40(!) Mil views
Even the regular developer updates on the state of balance in Play OW have more views than all but top 4-5 videos in OWL
I don’t want to belittle or offend OWL but I do not understand why Blizzard insists on pushing eSports while abandoning something where there’s so much interest. Animated shorts are the best performing topics meaning that lore and universe of OW has a huge untapped potential. Appealing to “casual” players in more game modes to explore OW universe seems like a logical choice.
EDIT: Yes, I know that technically PvE is planned. But it’s neither here nor there. It’s unclear what will it be, it remains to be seen when (if) it’s going to be. And even the fact they prioritized the OWL-oriented stuff over OW lore & universe expansion tells volumes. The whole 5v5 was to pander to eSports and they focused on that first to push it off the gates. Remember: 5v5 was not done for players as OWL started its season with 5v5 while the rest were in OW1 for half a year. It was extremely tailored to eSports. If they followed where engagement and player’s interest are, they would laser-focus on the lore and not just now, but back then in 2016 when first animated shorts revealed huge demand in the expansion of said lore.
Investing into the lore requires them to actually stick to it, and yet theyve shown theyre willing to toss out and retconn any and all details. Lore is not consistent at all
But they didn’t invest into it in OW1 either. They had years upon years while the talent was there and before OW2 was even conceived. Some animated shorts date back to 2016. I always thought of those videos as Blizzard trying to gauge the interest in the lore (which is a great way of doing it). So they got a pitch but then no catch - they completely dropped the ball with the follow up and stopped mid-way even back then in OW1.
Fair, but even that is a drop in the bucket and cannot be called “investment into lore”. Occasional post or two versus creating real stories, missions, game modes and related stuff? Okay, I guess. And the mission events they had performed absolutely through the roof, like Archive missions. So I still fail to get why they didn’t follow up on that back then.
But I guess it’s all a rhetorical stuff anyways. I would never expect any blue poster to visit this thread (not with bad optics for OWL) and even if they do - I’d never expect some cohesive explanations on their reasons that doesn’t involve some weird sponsorship / eSports market share / related corpo stuff.
Yet that’s neither here nor there. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know when (if) that even is. If they cared about that stuff a lot, they would not go for 5v5 just to appease OWL and instead focus on pushing PvE & lore content first.
Bu nope - they decided to go for the content that panders to the eSports and pushed the real point of connection to their player base to the back burner. And I can’t get why.
I google it, and I’m told Hanzo is 38, Genji is 35, and Kiriko is…in her early 20s?? So I’m just as confused as you.
First, lets define what “kids” mean. Sometimes people call adults 18 to late 20s “kids” due to youth and inexperience; Hanzo could have been 23, Genji could be 20, and you could get away with calling them “kids” in a manner of speaking. But Kiriko is in her early 20s now. You could call Kiriko a kid NOW, but Genji and Hanzo are way out of that bracket.
But they couldn’t have been literal children, because Kiriko would be a damn fetus or even more likely nothing at all. Hanzo and Genji beat by like 10 years. If Hanzo was 13, and Genji was 10, Kiriko still wouldn’t be close to being born; they’d still have to wait a decade!
If Hanzo and Genji were in their 20s, but Kiriko was in her 10s, it still would be a lie to say they were all “kids” because Kiriko would be a literal child while Hanzo and Genji would only be “kids” in a manner of speaking.
Is there something I’m missing? Why not just have Kiriko start training with them at or around 10? She could have been some child who showed promise and eventually got to train with Hanzo and Genji; they could have been older brother figures to her.
Because the are a game studio, and game studios are not made up of lore nerds, they are made up of math nerds.
I’m speaking in huge generalities, obviously. No doubt everyone at Blizzard enjoys popular fantasy/sci-fi entertainment like anyone else. But you aren’t going to find story people running any AAA game with the possible exception of a single-player, narrative focused game. These teams are run by math people, game designers trying to make the equation of a game add up on a spreadsheet.
Everything to do with narrative in OW is secondary. To them, a hero’s lore is the same as a building texture. Not that important, just let someone make something that generally fits the style of the game and it’s good enough. It’s not fussed over or deeply considered.
The thing they are most passionate about is the core gameplay, and they will clearly neglect other things in pursuit of that. The OW2 UI is another good example of something they consider superfluous.
The people running game dev teams didn’t get into their roles hoping to tell great stories. Narrative designers certainly do, but they have as much power over the entire enterprise as the guy making the animation rigs.
Not to mention, most story people in AAA gaming are just qualitatively worse than successful scriptwriters for movies or TV, or novelists. The bar for quality is just much lower in games than other fields that work with narrative art.
The math nerds have to hire the other nerds in order to make a successful franchise like Overwatch, so that’s not an excuse. If you say the lore is important, then it has to be treated as such.
Eh? There are literal writers on the payroll in any game studio that makes AAA games. You thought all the WoW universe was created by “math folks” or “programmers”?
Hero rendering tech and game grapical engine have nothing to do with game direction, game lore or design. The graphical engine is just a tool, some means to an end. I didn’t get your post, sorry. It’s just wrong on so many levels.
Literally irrelevant: they advertise the lore as something important, they have no choice but to either treat it as such, or be raked over the coals about it.
I haven’t made any comment on what’s right or wrong, only WHY the thing happens that this person asked about.
No, and I have no idea where you even got that. I don’t think you understood my post at all. Of course they have writers. Of course I know that.
Let me make this extremely simple for you: Aaron Keller is not a writer. Aaron Keller runs the OW team. Aaron Keller is not PERSONALLY invested in story or narrative as his craft, his area of expertise. We can surmise that Aaron Keller did not get into video game development to tell stories, as he is not a writer of any kind. Aaron Keller has more influence over the game than anyone else on the OW team – that is, every writer on the team is subordinate to a guy who is a non-writer.
I have no idea what you read, but I don’t think it was my comment. You are having a totally different conversation than the one I’m having.
You’re partially correct, but you split these two groupings incorrectly. Game lore is ALSO not a core part of game design IN BLIZZARD’S THINKING. It is not a core part of game direction TO THEM. It is a secondary consideration.
For a game like God of War: Ragnarok, narrative and lore is very important. It’s a core part of that game. For OW, the people making the game do not consider lore and story to be that fundamental. Just like they don’t consider the UI to be fundamental to its design. That obviously doesn’t mean they don’t think it should have a UI, it means they only care if it functions at a basic level. We see that in how the OW2 UI is much lower quality than OW1’s. It still exists, it still mostly performs its functions. It just isn’t a priority to this team.
