I want to clarify first things first, I know that this game isn’t dead and I know that a lot of people still play and enjoy this game. That isn’t what the point of this post is.
The past year has seen the largest decline in Overwatch not in terms of player numbers, but in terms of care and quality of the game. Nothing new is being produced for the game, we get a balance patch every month that- if we’re lucky- will address heroes that the community as a whole views as over or under powered. The most recent hero release was Echo, on April 14th 2020, more than a year ago. The most recent map release was Kanezaka on January 12th 2021, which isn’t even a Competitive map (although it is a great map).
For the past 7 months, the only content that Overwatch is receiving is the Overwatch League tournament skins, the occasional lore event, the standard events that haven’t been changed in years, and the aforementioned patches. I’m a plat/diamond player and since Echo’s release, there have been no meaningful changes to the game (except for the brief Hog meta) that actually influenced how the game is played at a mid-tier level. And this isn’t just a mid-tier thing. These patches play it so safe are so afraid to take risks or really dig into a few heroes that they really only have an impact at the highest level of play. I understand the philosophy of balancing the game around OWL and T500 as this is where the game’s internet presence comes from, but it is just miserable for the 99% of people that enjoy this game and want to see it evolve.
Right now, the only deviation in the 99%'s experience is the events. I like that there is still lore being produced for the game and I loved just about every new skin but the challenges are easy and 5 years into the game the skins are so easy to get that they’re kind of meaningless. The most interesting way to play and enjoy the game is easily the workshop, as Competitive is just the same thing over and over again. Members of this community have done an amazing job of producing wonderful workshop game modes that open up the idea for new experiences in Overwatch.
As much as I love the workshop, it epitomizes the problem with Overwatch and its development team: laziness. I don’t mean to insinuate that the developers don’t care about the game, I know that they do, but there isn’t a ton of effort being put into the game. Almost everything new revolves entirely around skins that, as I have mentioned, don’t mean anything to the people that have been playing the game for a long time. The workshop allowed the developers to put their effort into developing a powerful toolset so that the players could make their own fun. I have a professor in my BFA program for game design that hates this style of design and I can easily see why he doesn’t think it’s fun, especially in this case. Why should the players have to put in hours of effort just to finally get something unique? It’s kinda of like if Minecraft never released big updates and only released one new block every few months and relied on modders to make the game interesting. This being said, I’m glad they added the workshop as it does produce fun game modes for the players that want to spend their time putting in that effort.
Now, what could be causing this lack of attention towards Overwatch? Well, the obvious answer is Overwatch 2. I know that developing a game takes time and when Overwatch 2 was announced in November of 2019 (almost 2 years ago at the time of writing this post) it was in the very early stages of development. But, if I’m being honest, Overwatch 2 is just an expansion. It allows for play with Overwatch, it keeps roughly the same competitive structure, most of the same heroes and maps, and it is using the same engine. I’m excited for Overwatch 2, but why is it taking so long? Maps take a while, but not this long. New heroes take time to iron out and balance, but not this long. A whole new game mode would take a while, but not this long, not with a professional development that has the time and resources. And what about the Paris and Horizon reworks we were promised years ago? Is it really better that they be postponed for Overwatch 2 even though the maps already made and they just need to shuffle some objects and structures around.
Let’s use a similar model to Overwatch 2, World of Warcraft expansions. WoW expanions take about 2 years to develop and they have massive content patches every few months that keep each expansion relevent. If it takes the WoW team 2 years to produce an expansion, then why are we two years into an Overwatch expansion and it still isn’t planned until 2022, 3 years in, and that estimate is at the earliest. Maybe it’s because of Covid? This makes sense as the Coronavirus could easily slow down the production of anything as the studio has to rethink their approach to development. But on the other hand, other studios have been able to continue their work with fewer slow downs despite the pandemic. Even Blizzard themselves were able to release World of Warcraft: Shadowlands in late 2020, only a few months after their normal release date for expansions.
Now, why do I think that is because of laziness? Because the State of California identified lazy behavior as a part of a recent discrimination lawsuit against the company. One of the instances cited is of male employees refusing to do work and forcing female employees to do the work instead. I don’t know if this incident applied to Overwatch specifically, but I think that it’s entirely possible that it did considering Overwatch’s slow rate of development.
I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes at Blizzard but I do know this: players from every facet of this game are submitting feedback about the lack of content and this lack of changes. I see it in ranked games, in general chat, in these forums, and in the streams of pro players where almost all of them have the same complaints that have never been properly addressed. To add onto that, I also know that there is a communication channel for professional players to communicate problems to development directly, and I know that that channel is largely ignored by developers. The solution appears to me to be simple: do something, anything. Blizzard could release a map that is just terrible that nobody enjoys playing on, and many players would still be excited to have a new map. They could release a broken hero, as they have done before with new heroes, and players would flock to that hero just to have something new. Overwatch isn’t in decline because the player base is awful or because the game sucks, it’s declining because the developers just don’t do anything meaningful for the game or its content.
Thank you for reading my entire frustrated essay, I would love to hear what other people think in this thread about the state of the game and how it could potentially be improved in the future.
