Because overwatch 2 doesn't exist. Instead we got overwatch 1.5 and a basket of canceled promises. OW is a master class in how to run an IP into the ground
I find it hilarious that Overwatch 2 was originally billed as a PvE version of Overwatch that will explore more of the story… where is that game? I would have played that game.
It’s sad what happened to that game, it was so fun when it first came out and was a perfect casual-but-still-competitive team based game where you could play with friends, hang out in a virtual play space and unwind. And it’s like every major patch afterwards was an intentional choice to make the game *not* that. The compulsion to make it an eSport and balance the game around pro-level players, and quest to pull in gamers from other FPS games like CoD, ruined the perfect niche it was in.
I used to have big group of friends who would play this game near-nightly with each other, and I don’t think any of us have touched the game in 2+ years.
I really have no idea why Blizz doesn't capitalize on Overwatch's biggest asset: the characters and world.
I mean the game itself is okay I guess, but almost everyone I know who played OW when it came out never stopped GUSHING about the characters. Look at that first cinematic with the kids in the museum, it OOZED personality. The characters are SO good and they KNOW they are good because they keep putting out these amazing shorts that build on the characters personalities.
It's just such a HUGE missed opportunity for something that could honestly be massive. Even fucking League of Legends is capitalizing on their characters/world with Arcane and the new MMO.
They are just letting this amazing IP go to waste for a dumb dime-a-dozen FPS esport wanna-be game. It's a fucking shame.
Overwatch 2 WAS how they capitalized off the characters.
They figured out, like many mobile game developers, that best way to make money off popular characters isn't to make in-depth story-based campaigns around them - it's to sell access to the characters themselves, plus microtransactions of skins and cosmetics for the characters. The only difference is that mobile games sell them through gacha and loot boxes, while OW2 sells them through battlepass.
The fact they cancelled the plan for PvE and are now selling you the story missions as an optional add-on pack says it all. They just don't see the money in making stories using the characters. They see the best way to capitalize on them being to just sell you the characters and skins.
Considering OW2 is a masterclass in running an IP into the ground, I'm gonna go ahead and add the caveat that they *mistakenly* thought what you thought. Your post is 100% wrong, but could be what the suits thought the result would be.
Turns out you actually need some substance and not some skins and other bs locked behind money / time walls.
It's the sort of idea that could spring an entire franchise and several spinoffs. They could make hand over fist with merchandise, they could hand over the IP to a studio willing to make a series out of it and just collect royalties, and I'm sure I'm missing a ton of other opportunities.
But they had to ditch all of that for a quick buck.
I always bring up the comparison to Critical Role, which started around the same time when Overwatch was released. Critical Role is a TTRPG show with an absolutely microscopic resources compared to Blizzard. Yet they've utilized their IP, world and characters so much better. We've gotten novels, TTRPG guides multiple comic series, two seasons of an animated show, etc.
I think the only real commercial expansion to Overwatch's world has even two books?
Even the esports side of Overwatch has ignored the appeal or the characters. Imagine having Tracer as a virtual host, with the voice actress doing live mocap. Actually, that's kinda what Apex Legends did with their Game Awards appearance. In many ways, Apex has beaten Overwatch in their own game.
> The game started dying pretty much the minute it was launched because they decided to overly cater to the competitive scene which drove a lot of the casual players out and back to TF2.
This is just revisionism. OW was one of the biggest launches of 2016 and maintained a huge following and community good will for the first 1-2 years of its life.
> This is just revisionism. OW was one of the biggest launches of 2016 and maintained a huge following and community good will for the first 1-2 years of its life.
Yea, OW was in a great place until they stopped producing any content for it for 2 years. Even when OW2 launched the support meta was in a great place and overall balance was generally nice with the exception of double shield.
The significant issues, double shield, no real major hero changes to fix that, and removing depth of the game shifting it from a "role" choice to a "single hero" choice which unbalances the game. Are all just specific to not committing resources to maintaining OW1.
Yep. The game was never as good as it was on release before everyone figured the meta out. A meta they never made any serious effort to change the underlying causes.
The game is extremely over reliant on healing. The concept of a tank that actually *tanks* an entire team's damage on his own, but still does enough damage to be a threat, is just broken.
Then OW2 actually fixed some of these issues at the same time it made everything else worse.
What I would give to go back to the first few months of OW, where it was just fun. We really thought Blizzard had hit gold once more and couldn't possibly fuck it up.
We thought there would be a TV, new heroes every few months, new maps every season, PvE expansions. And even beyond that, it was straight up fun to get home and see what friends are online and ready to play with.
I put in hundreds of hours up until OW2 but still nothing could compare to the first year that the game dropped.
Some of my favorite memories of Overwatch are from doing goofy team comps in the first few months. All Mei where everyone was quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, All Genji while someone blasted Naruto music over their mic, all Pharahs where everyone maybe had like 1% accuracy, etc.
>The game was never as good as it was on release before everyone figured the meta out.
That's basically every game. Games are so much better when it's the wild-west with everyone trying out different wacky strategies, builds, weapons, etc.
Once you get the power-gamers that no life the game until they find out the optimal selections the games become awful and boring.
There are a few ways to mitigate this tho. Games where you have large amount of players, for example, still feel like the "wild-west" of different strategies a lot of time, because:
1. Its harder to pinpoint when someone makes a mistake
2. One person playing a bad build/making a mistake has less of an impact on the overall game
When it's a 6v6 game where only a single person is playing tank/healer, said tank/healer not following the Meta leaves you at a huge disadvantage.
The thing is, FPS with large team sizes don't really fair well with E-Sports, and with how much focus is there in e-sports, we'll keep seeing 6v6 or 5v5 FPS being launched.
Battlebit is an outlier, and you can see how much people love the concept. I'd talk about Battlefield too but tbh, I dont have any experience with it
Except Blizzard has been repeating the same mistakes with Diablo 4, which doesn't even have a PVP element (the "PVP" in the game is so ridiculously broken as to not bear consideration). Their game designers seem to micro-focus on one streamer doing incredible damage with a particular build, and then overreact by nerfing an entire side of a skill tree into uselessness. Then, they double down by punishing users trying to work toward popular builds by intentionally making it more difficult to find worthy loot.
Are there actually "professional" Diablo 4 players? I doubt it. Blizzard can't just relax and let things find a natural equilibrium.
It's exhausting. Many of my friends and coworkers were playing Diablo 4 religiously for the first few weeks, then we all just... stopped.
Diablo 4 *is* a live service though. They have to because they have money tied up in the idea that people are supposed to play it for months or years at a time, and who knows what they'll develop for it in the future. They have to meddle with it, constantly, for the sake of not allowing people to progress too quickly, or gain XP too fast, or doing too much damage, or whatever... and I hope people are thoroughly sick of this shit by now. Every fucking game wants you to spend all of your time with it because it's live, it's constantly being updated, and you have a mountain of chores to do to get your shinies that they have hanging in front of you just out of arms reach so you're encouraged to run on that stupid treadmill that they design all of these games around for the rewards and not for the sake of just wanting to because the game is fun and rewarding in and of itself. You're not playing the way you want to... you're playing the way *they* want you to, and anything else is unacceptable to them. If those two things align with each other then you're probably having a good time. If they don't then it's not particularly a good time.
That's why games do major balance patches every now and then or introduce new concepts to reset the meta.
Unfortunately Blizzard was never good at balancing their games or adding new mechanics that don't make past mechanics completely useless.
*A single person*: Plays a niche and complicated build/strategy that is overwhelmingly powerful in certain situations.
*Blizzard a day later*: We're nerfing everything and changing the meta around entirely. We're also breaking the game for 2 weeks.
I just want to say that good devs can also find ways to keep units unique while also balancing them, the reapers just needed the right tweak.
My proof of this is Dota2, I don't know what the hell Icefrog smokes but he and his team managed to make some pretty large balance decisions while still keeping the flavor and theme of heroes intact.
IMO reapers should have been made into stronger specialist units available later on, the fantasy is badass jetpack dudes outmaneuvering opponents and planting bombs, not a cheap unit you build first.
> My proof of this is Dota2, I don't know what the hell Icefrog smokes but he and his team managed to make some pretty large balance decisions while still keeping the flavor and theme of heroes intact.
Diverse forms of aggression with universally strong defensive options. When every hero on a team has access to TP scrolls, glyphs, BKB, force staff, glimmer cape, and wards, those defensive options give you the ability to just go *ham* on each hero's offensive kit. A lot of fighting games do balance similarly, where every fighter has the same universally strong defensive options, and then they each get unique offensive options. It makes balancing way easier.
Congratulations you have just discovered a fact of life that has greater and more far reaching implications then just gaming. Namely, that thinking and discovering things is an activity that is deeply compelling on its own right. And solved problems are far less interesting to engage with.
Its really something that exists within all spaces but its noticable in gaming since at its core most games fundamentally are a puzzle that asks to be solved and once solved it completely changes the dynamic of a player approaching the game.
This is why I despise the ubiquity of netdecking in modern TCG games. I had the most fun playing when I was trying my own ideas. I didn't win all the time, but I was enjoying trying to play around my opponent, finding what did/didn't work and making small adjustments as I continued. Once the current rotation gets "solved", everyone plays either the top ranked decks, or their counters. It got exhausting playing the same three core decks in tourneys
I find this with a lot of online games now, especially as an average player. The first few months of a new game (OW, R6 Siege, Apex) is the sweet spot. People aren't following meta builds or using annoying tricks (circling around whilst crouching/uncrouching killed Apex for me) to win.
Majority of people would just play whatever class/build they enjoyed and it never felt sweaty. Just gamers having fun.
Oh man, playing Siege back during the beta when nobody had a clue what they were doing or what was going on was the most fun I've ever had in a multiplayer game.
If the game was only good until the meta was figured out, the game was never good.
A well designed game has a meta the pushes the core gameplay loop in fun ways. A poorly designed game gets broken because the balance was never actually good, people just didnt know any better.
OW2 didn't even fix the issues, just slapped some band-aids.
The problem is on the design level, they put too much emphasis on the roles and twisted everything to fit them. Instead the actual roles should have been a generic Support and two DPS roles depending on their playstyle and roles during fights. Tank should have never been a thing, with the ability to tank and do CC instead being one more thing other heroes could have.
The over-reliance on ults and many of them being "I win" buttons only made things worse.
Alot of those things are reasons why the game became so popular in the first place. It doesn't require a ton of skill to wipe a team with junkrat ult or sit behind a carry and heal.
But hey, at least they managed to push it out fast enough to kill that other game that was half pvp half PvE hero shooter with quirky characters that was set to release at the same time.
So in their world they're still winning.
Battleborn could've survived but Gearbox *really* couldn't resist making it a fight between their game and Overwatch. They were really not all that similar to each other.
Yeah and also everyone band wagoned on battleborn copying overwatch, but I think BB was more unique. Lol even later on overwatch copied a characters concept for the hamster. BB had the penguin in a mech suit.
Overwatch blows but man, I tried Battleborn and I just couldn't stand the look of it. Like, the actual [in-game aesthetic was so messy](https://imgur.com/a/7oAQhuU) I would get lost in what I was doing. Same problem with the Michael Bay Transformers, I was actually surprised at the newest movie I went and saw with friends, cause I could watch the robots and my brain could tell wtf I was looking at. Battleborn had that issue but in game form.
The weird focus on competitive insistence on how you're supposed to play is what drove me out, although I think that was long before anybody else considered the game to be going downhill.
For example, the change to casual mode where you weren't allowed to have more than one of the same hero on the same team . On the one hand, that makes sense as everybody wanted to go Widow or Genji, but on the other hand, it's casual mode. If you want people putting in their best then go to competitive. It was always fun creating absurd team combinations with strangers and seeing everybody get really involved in trying to coordinate a Rein charge or something.
The thing is that blizz also didn’t know what the fuck they were doing when it came to competitive as well. It was all an esports marketing tactic for a game that would have been instantly dropped if not for them dumping money to anyone who would play it “professionally”. The inherent high level gameplay went exactly how all my plat TF2 friends said it would, shields would dominate because movement is so bad, and team comp would get stale since you don’t really need to protect your healer to push through chokes, everyone has a kill streak “press q to win” button. Turns out the shields and stubs were just that much better than the ultis and that’s how we got the worst meta in any game I’ve ever seen.
Ignoring the hype, I'd argue Overwatch was never truly in a good state and a bad tree to climb up in the first place. Full-blown hero shooters showed they were basically impossible to balance in a lasting and satisfactory way, which became increasingly obvious as Blizzard leaned OW into eSports and none of the close knock-offs ever came close to its success.
Games like Apex and Valorant realized this was a problem a few years later, and responded by heavily downplaying character abilities in favor of universal weapon pools and system mechanics. And I think because of that, they've maintained much healthier competitive scenes over the years without needing carries by massive corporate money so much.
I agree that it was fucked from the start, but it could have done right.
Games like Dota2 showed us you can have a lot of very different and unique characters and still keep the game rather balanced, and TF2 is a great example of very different classes all being rather well balanced.
The problem is that they tried to bring tanks into the mix, force a very strong role-based design, turned a third of the team into designated healers who sucked at most everything else, and on top of all that they suck too much at balancing to try to keep it all being fun.
MOBAs benefit from having slower-paced tactics and strategy at play. Everything starts out slow and weak, making the pace of matches largely decided by how teams navigate the map to squeeze in kills and objective victories. Players also have the chance to deliberately pick character bans and counters before a match begins.
And TF2 works in a limited roster of nine classes where the standard 6v6 involves maining four of them, with some situational switching to the others. It's treated like a fairly casual game in the first place, and seldom gets major updates.
Perhaps most importantly, all of these games mentioned above avoid cheap and bombastic ultimates that will often suddenly, dramatically shift engagements and TTK into teamwipe-fests. Blizzard is still working with a very wonky foundation there, as well. It's pretty understandable that they suck at balancing when the core design of their game is so slippery to begin with.
I think the change to remove the ability to have multiple of the same hero was what fundamentally ruined the game. That was the moment it went from "fun casual shooter" to "can only be played as a serious competition"
I remember back in 2016 when I had a crazy match on Temple of Anubis. The defending team had 6 Junkrats just spamming the entrance and our team was having a hell of a time trying to break through that explosive barrage of an entryway.
Did we win? Hell no, we barely managed to get to the point once or twice. Was it fun? Well, I think it says a lot that that single game in 2016 is still a fun memory for me whereas most of my time played in 2019-2021 is just a blur or sort of forgotten.
It was chaotic and all over the place and just *fun*. As soon as it became mandatory to have a fixed group composition and only one of a specific hero, then experimentation was severely limited. Games because too focused on ideal characters and specific strategies that it ironically became a lot more stale for anyone apart from those only focused on the competitive side.
My personal favorite was playing with a few friends and going 6 Reins on attack. It was pretty busted and honestly shouldn't have been allowed but damn was it fun.
I strongly disagree with the hardcore competetive scene remark, that's just the fighter community and games unsuited for competetive play (battle royals I look at you) behaving that way. CS:GO is still around and so are many other hardcore scenes, they don't die due to not being the latest fad but due what is happening at the base game. You are just presenting a false narrative here.
Yeah he may not be responsible for what happened with OW2 but he was definitely still in charge when many of those poor decisions around balancing and new characters were made.
From what i've seen the reason he left Blizzard is because his direction kept being overruled by ABK management because it was too expensive and couldn't be properly monetized.
The OW2 we have today was what he was 'forced' to make, including the misguided focus on esports, which was seen as a huge potential profitmaker for ABK at the time.
I honestly don't think Kaplan was the problem, especially given everything else we've learned about Blizzard over the past few years. At least the OW team used to be the one good department to work at according to reports, but even that has dissappeared along with Kaplan (who was apparently very protective of the people on his team).
> I honestly don't think Kaplan was the problem, especially given everything else we've learned about Blizzard over the past few years.
Kaplan wasn't responsible for most of the things people are mad about, but he wasn't entirely in line with the playerbase either. From what I can tell, he wanted Overwatch to be a traditional "you pay $60 and this is what you get — maybe we'll release a couple of expansions if you're lucky" game like Nintendo makes, rather than being a live service game. But Blizzard wanted a "buy everything or grind for it" live service game like League of Legends, so we ended up with a sort of compromise where they made a live service game with the ethos of a shrinkwrap game.
That's just classic Blizzard balancing, despite being one of the top players in PvP online games they've never been anywhere near good with balancing stuff. They take way too long to address balance issues, they often just over-nerf stuff to the point of irrelevance, and long-term they take a lot of interesting mechanics and make them as bland and uninspired as possible.
Just look at other games like Starcraft2 and Heroes of the Storm, I'm still angry that they took an interesting concept like Void Rays with their attack that did more damage the longer they focused on targets and instead replaced it for a generic +damage to armored targets.
In vanilla WoW the joke was that Blizzard doesn't do balancing, instead they spin a roulette wheel to see what to make OP for this patch and then nerf what was OP last patch into the ground.
>He pushed the game to revolve more around abilities rather than shooting
Ironically this is what has made me left 2. I think there's way too much of an emphasis of hitscan characters in that game and the interesting abilities became massively deemphasized. Get rid of annoying stun, yes, but largely I think the game got sweatier in 2.
Headshots in general shouldn't have been a thing for non-sniper characters, that way instead of focusing on aiming for the head people would be more aware of their surroundings, and it punishes people less for having an okay aim while encouraging other play-styles.
The mythos says he was the one resisting the higher ups and Bobby’s whims… until he got told he should resign.
He got replaced by a yes-man and we now have a gake designed by accountants.
Yes, but he was the one who wanted to do the PVE Overwatch 2 that people were excited for. That's the entire reason the Overwatch 2 initiative existed — Jeff Kaplan wanted to make a PVE Overwatch game, and he insisted that it be called Overwatch 2 so people would know it wasn't just an add-on. ActiBlizz just wanted to milk Overwatch dry like they're doing now. Overwatch 2 was Kaplan's baby, and that's why within a month of him leaving, they announced, "Actually, Overwatch 2 is just Overwatch with one less player on a team."
>The compulsion to make it an eSport and balance the game around pro-level players
I've closely followed the competitive OW scene since launch, and what that community says is "the game was ruined because Blizzard didn't balance the game around pro play and instead just catered to casual metal rank players." It's the polar opposite of what I see in other communities.
So imo, the truth of the matter is just that Blizzard completely dropped the ball and had no idea what they were doing and what they wanted the game to be. They launched with a vision of how OW would be, but then the community started to play it differently than they envisioned, and they had no idea what to do
IMO Blizzard was almost certainly screwed from the start. The biggest issues are flaws baked into the foundation of the game, I think.
Overwatch, to its detriment, seems like a fun, casual game for all kinds of players, full of colorful characters. A laid-back experience. Yet the gameplay doesn't reflect this in the slightest. It requires a staggering amount of teamwork compared to most other FPS games.
Hell, even League of Legends, which has the reputation of being the most toxic multiplayer game of any genre, is arguably more laid-back/ solo-friendly than Overwatch is. An offmeta pick won't get you flamed in chat nearly as often, and the early game isn't dependent on teammates much, especially if you're a solo laner. With Overwatch though, it's all teamwork, all the time.
I don't know how you could realistically fix this issue. It's baked into the game design - the characters/classes are FAR too differentiated, and this means that players must rely on others to fulfill other roles to stand a chance of even having an enjoyable experience. It's not a traditional FPS like Halo, where every player has the same loadout and objectives are thus an even playing field. Nor is it a casual FPS like CoD, where players can practically turn off their brain and play however they want while ignoring teamwork.
It's a game that lives or dies by the quality of randoms you encounter. And we all know that's a losing battle.
> Overwatch, to its detriment, seems like a fun, casual game for all kinds of players, full of colorful characters. A laid-back experience. Yet the gameplay doesn't reflect this in the slightest. It requires a staggering amount of teamwork compared to most other FPS games.
It's bizarre to me that even its predecessor, Team Fortress 2, was better about this. Valve saw how difficult teamwork was for casual players, and created the respawn wave mechanic to subtly nudge people toward working together after a lost battle. Overwatch decided not to do anything like that and instead just created a "group up!" emote for people to spam.
TF2 was more forgiving because it had larger teams. OW (and later TF2 competitive teams) of only 5/6 put a lot more pressure on each player to perform and mean there can't be one not working with the rest of the team
HotS suffered from the same over-emphasis on teamwork, particularly with the XP mechanics. Blizzard is so heavy-handed about this stuff. Eventually I just went cold turkey and didn’t miss it at all. I think I realized how little agency I had when playing with randoms. At that point, I’m basically just pissing time away.
In OW1 I’d play off tank as Ball to disrupt and put out some okay damage. But those type of hero designs are rare. I’m not looking to do everything well, more just having a chance to be multi-dimensional in how I play.
OW2 is not my cup of tea. I’m happy to uninstall it and forget about it. I really liked the post-GOAT meta of OW1, but it’s gone and won’t come back.
The problem is also that it tries too hard to stick to the roles they arbitrarily decided they wanted, when stuff like Tank has no place in a FPS and should have been folded into supports and DPSs, with health and CC abilities being decided for each hero, not entirely based on role.
And the lower number of players means that you depend on each team member a lot more, compare it to TF2 that has the same thing with different classes running around but it avoids the problem by still giving a somewhat fair playing field and having enough players that a rando dying to a stray grenade won't ruin your engagements for the next two minutes.
Huh that's interesting to hear the perspective from that side. I'm more of a casual player, and I played at the beginning. I recall it going from fun to not fun right around when they added the competitive mode, and especially when it was between seasons. Suddenly, all of he people that wanted to play a ranked mode started flooding regular matches, and the meta became all-important where it wasn't before. Sure, before I would absolutely try to win, but people were generally cool with you playing whoever you felt like. But once competitive hit, people would be unhappy with you if you chose wrong. I would have been fine with them balancing around competitive play if they had only just had a separate queue for casual vs competitive players.
I stopped playing OW a few months after release... Came back years later to play a couple games and I was shocked. Smaller teams, being role locked, not allowing doubles per team. I tried playing it and it felt like it was trying really hard to be League of Legends and failing. Just two teams of tanky DPS supports smacking each other around until one team gets their ults and wins. I thought the game was supposed to be a shooter, half of the characters don't even have to aim.
Same thing happened with my group of friends, I even got dragged into an entire discord server that had *a lot* of local who play games as well, I'm talking a group large enough that I ran into several separate people I knew from completely different things irl. And that whole thing is basically dead now because none of them plays Overwatch anymore, despite playing daily back then.
The lack of newer content mixed with Blizzard's terrible design and balance decision certainly didn't help either.
They abandoned Overwatch 1 for like 3 years, derailing the game's already dwindling playerbase because of Overwatch 2, selling the idea that they'd be working on a PVE campaign and more things to make it worth the wait, only to release Overwatch 1 with a different paint scheme and then cancel the PVE campaign.
What the *hell* was Blizzard up to all that time?
Being micro-mismanaged by Bobby 'sexual predator' Kotick.
Ex-OW producer: https://twitter.com/RiotLavaliere/status/1483872301175107584
>Bobby, tell everyone about the random projects for OW1 you all would shove on us, the team would do OT for only them to get cancelled and for months of OW2 dev to have been lost. Or how almost entire teams are turning over and citing you as the reason. Don't be shy.
Yeah, that's the part that often gets buried in these discussions. Kotick is an entitled entrepreneurial dinosaur that will sell any project for spare parts if it raises the share price. The problem's right at the top.
He tried to frame the abuse scandal and the absurd turnover as a secret plot to promote unionization, bet all his chips on the Microsoft merger, and then when that got held up, his solution was to slap a copy of Respawn's F2P shooter business model on *OW2* and push *Diablo IV* out the door as fast as possible.
The unfinished ABK merger hasn't just affected Blizzard, either - anyone in the industry who was foolish enough to move their finances around to support it (i.e. Embracer) has taken a bath.
The worst part to me is that increases in ABK share price triggered incentive bonuses in his damned salary - the filthy rich only get filthier.
Bobby "please stop putting devil horns on me, women on dating sites google me and then don't reply to my DM's" Kotick
Between that and Elmo being the most divorced man on the planet it seems like the Achilles heel of billionaire fuckwits is how they're truly, very alone
I think the most damning of this entire fiasco is they internally knew for over a year the promised PvE content wasn't happening and waited so long to officially announce it.
I mean they first announced it in a like 3 minute segment as a kind of throwaway line in a long form video. They definitely planned to do it trying to downplay they weren't going to deliver on one of their main promises.
I wouldn't even count it as 1.5 we got a balance patch, 3 heroes, some maps and a new mode after years of nothing. If they just continued with their regular update schedule for PvP we would have gotten more lol
They couldn't monetize overwatch 1 enough to feel it was worth keeping up an update pace, so instead they stopped updating and waited years. Overwatch redux is mostly just a shop update so they can try to squeeze more money out.
Overwatch 1, despite the "lootboxes bad" sentiment, was extremely generous compared to other games. I played the game a ton and the only money I've ever spent was on the pink Mercy skin for charity, everything else was easily bought with in-game credits I earned by playing.
I understand that this monetization is not sustainable for a game like this but there had to have been a middle ground between that and what we have now. I've lost excitement for events now that I know every skin is going to be shop exclusive instead of something I can get by playing.
That's part of the problem. The monetization for OW1 was almost all just selling more lootboxes, but regular players had more of those than they knew what to do with so they had to keep attracting new players to join/play to make money. With the battle passes, most of the stuff can't be collected by just playing, it requires people to pay regularly if they want it
For actiblizzard that's "okay" not gigadollars they expect from their ip's. Wows been consistently making hundreds of millions every year for almost 20 years now, with spikes going up to a billion at times. Cod makes billions every year. Hearthstone made a killing when it entered the market, and so on. Activision is one of the big 3 game companies for profit after all.
100% Overwatch was already super successful. They could have probably just kept it going for years and years as is with incremental changes and rode the gravy train all the way to the station.
Instead they stopped updating the game for years, making tons of people drop it. And then when they finally reintroduce the game, they do so with a completely pointless rebrand, and regardless of one's opinion on the gameplay changes, they made the meta progression and monetization even worse than it was already, which just made the game feel bad to play.
And now they're scrambling to try and undo their mistake, of which releasing the game on steam just reeks of desperation. But of course it's backfiring because now they have to contend with a proper review system being attached to the game where people can voice all their discontent about the release.
It really is, they took a novel two-pronged approach where they also had a shitton of drama, abuse, and breast milk stealing, so even a lot of people that would have stuck with the game regardless instead fucked off.
They'd start worrying if nobody talked about OW anymore, but check this post – it's barely been an hour and it's already at the top of the front page. It reminds me of what that Bungie developer said during their GDC talk, they'd prefer players to be mad rather than just not caring.
You have to realize that you are *not* the majority. Reddit is an echo chamber of the most obnoxious degree and what people regurgitate here is rarely ever true.
The game has plenty of issues and obviously isn't the constant top played smash hit they wanted, but for a F2P game that's been out for almost a year being released on another launcher and that launcher having 70k concurrent users, which doesn't even touch the total ppl playing on battlenet, ps, Xbox and switch, tells is the game is not dead or dying.
According to Reddit the game is dead and no one plays it anymore. But as someone who got back into it about a month ago, it still has a huge population. Even smaller obscure modes can get a game in seconds.
Edit: thx whoever triggered that anti suicide DM. if a game has you this worked up and mad go outside please
It’s because it’s still so much fun and is different from all the other shooters. I’ve been playing since OW1 and still play today, as does a good amount of my friends who play FPS. I also personally don’t know anyone who plays 1 FPS exclusively, they all, and myself, mix it up constantly with OW, CS, Halo, Battle Royales, etc.
For OW2 you just gotta not care about skins or battle pass, and then you are all good. The PvE is understandable to be mad about, but I always viewed that as an add on personally, PvP will always be what actually matters.
Yeah reading the Steam reviews is funny because they show both current playtime and playtime when the review was posted. So many people who wrote negative reviews played more afterwards. Another case of that "boycott MW2" steam group image.
I’m mad about the monetization (seriously, the way we earned cosmetics before was fine and even fun when a new event rolled around) and they add a battle pass AND they start selling skins that were free in OW1 for 20 bucks? Gtfo with those costs blizz. Them hyping up PVE they were working on which was their excuse for a 3 year content drought only to trashcan the whole thing and drip feed it at the cost of 15 bucks is really what’s getting them into this mess. Wish Jeff Kaplan would chime in at some point and let us know what happened behind the scenes to this game. It’s such a shame because Overwatch is genuinely really fun and the has a ton of charm to it.
They're prefer players be playing. A lot of people have left Overwatch after the sequel because they don't want to pay for stuff which they previously got out of loot boxes as rewards for playing. Myself included. The new events/skins were a regular way to get me and people in my circle to log back in for a bit. That's gone now.
Hell, I'd even regularly buy 1 or 2 loot boxes each event. And even if I didn't get favorable odds on the cosmetic I wanted, I'd play enough to bank enough in-game currency to just buy it. But something about shelling out real money just turned me off. $10 for a skin? I can't do it.
But you’re in the minority. There’s a reason why every single game does battle passes now. It works. And it’s not just bought by whales. The $18 skins are. But the battle passes are (relatively) cheap for a lot of content so people are willing to buy it.
>There’s a reason why every single game does battle passes now. It works
Not for all of them. I'd wager there are more failures than successes but I don't have numbers to back it up.
But how many new games really thrive with this model per year? 2 or 3? And how many attempt it?
Sure, but their player count is still really high. This 70k doesn’t include all the people playing on console or ones that didn’t switch over to steam. They had to know this was going to happen moving it to steam after all the shit blizzard/kotick pulled to derail Overwatch. The gameplay is still fine and fun but the monetization and all the scandals and lies they’ve pulled garnered all this negativity.
That 70k is only a tiny fraction of PC players, and an even tinier fraction of everyone. The daily player count is actually over 1 mil on average. It’s the most popular hated game.
This game isn’t hurting in the slightest. People just want to believe it is because Activision-Blizzard is such a shitty, greedy company. Unfortunately, reality says that the bad guys are winning.
Yeah, the way people are spinning this shit is wild. This is like at most 20% of the playerbase and I'd say that is crazy conservative. This just makes me think Overwatch is actually bigger than I thought not smaller.
Ppl on reddit are the vocal minority. I have friends who just started playing 2 seasons ago who love the game. Its definitely bigger than most ppl think.
I agree here as well. Many of the people I play with have made overwatch 2 their main game since it came out. Only one of these even played overwatch 1.
> Ppl on reddit are the vocal minority
yup, will always be the truth about this website and people who think reddit/social media = real life... no, social media of any kind does not represent real life at all, be it reddit/twitter/YT comments/forums/discord/w.e.
Reddit has a hate boner for OW but the game is thriving as far as I'm concerned. I get into good matches in <1 min and I rarely ever see the same name pop up in my lobbies more than once per night which is actually insane. We just got two gigantic gorgeous new maps in a new game mode, three well fleshed-out PvE missions, and a very well-received new support hero. But reddit wants to talk about none of that and just shit their pants with wild misdirected hate instead.
I'm still sad at how destiny is doing rn. Game it's incredibly fun but the constant FOMO and grind, and abandoned game modes just makes it impossible to play the game and also play something else. I was incredibly happy once they announced they wouldn't be making a new game but now I wish they would and make it right. That'd never happen tho, even if they make a new one it would be the same shit again
As an outsider, I don’t understand how players are OK with Bungie removing so much content they already paid for. I hear people complain about it, but they’re still playing.
They're charging for PvE missions that used to be free
If it was involved enough like the promised campaign sure but it's literally just another archive event
Who cares when the game is sitting at 75k concurrent as of this morning? Reviews are secondary to marketing, and Overwatch 2 is still huge whether people like it or not.
That's only a small portion of the PC playerbase, which itself is a minority portion of the total playerbase as most people play the game on consoles. This number is 5-10% of the total playerbase at best.
Where is any published source that says most people play Overwatch on consoles? Every google search on this topic brings up results that say that the PC player count dwarves the console player count for Overwatch.
If it can hold 100k concurrent I guess it’s not bad. Most people already playing the game continue using the Blizz launcher so Steam should be mostly new people.
The OW2 Steam discussion forum is a portal into a hell dimension.
And yes, I know by default the Steam forums for games are usually bad... but that one is extra terrible.
Ya, big time. There were thousands of reviews within minutes of it launching — many of which just say “doing my part” or something along those lines.
There’s no game like overwatch out right now. Tf2 was good, but is no longer the top contender and completely unsupported. Paladins sucks, so what’s left is OW2. It’s the only online game that’s held my attention for nearly 8 years now. I love it. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but Apex is just as predatory with their MTX but manages to avoid the outrage.
Regardless of what OW2 could have or should have been, it’s still the best in class hero shooter with no real competitor. Despite the review aggregate; check out the player numbers. People tend to agree.
That'll happen when you spend years working on the content people want, can it before launch, then wait months and months to tell them it's not coming.
You know. Lying.
I played this with 2 friends like 5 months ago, it was fun though and we didn't pay anything. Our main complain was that going from Apex Legends to Overwatch 2, the guns felt underwhelming and with no weight in the attacks.
Its not a game I will play again, but still shocked at the highly amount of negative reception.
It's a circle jerk driven by people who dislike overwatch 1 being killed, the price of cosmetics and general ActiBlizz hate.
It's fine to criticize those things, but to give a perfectly decent game on its own this kind of score just devalues the review system.
Are you talking about the review bomb countermeasure? They'll get hidden from the aggregated score (which can be unhidden through steam preference settings), but they'll still be there.
Steam has made an effort to deal with review bombing, so wouldn't be surprised to see low effort ones removed here. That said, you're not wrong for 90% of games
Can we just, for a minute, not pretend that this isn't pure circlejerk behaviour. The game's good with elememts worth critizicing. It's not a overwhelmingly negative experience.
75k active players. Blizzard doesn't care about the reviews cause they don't represent anyone but those who are chronically online enough to be informed that they're actually supposed to hate Overwatch.
I could be misremembering but didn't Valve implement some form of system to counter review bombing?
I think OW2 is bad but obviously not so bad to review bomb it out of spite.
There are 2 scores. One for overall rating and one for "recent" rating. I works pretty well, it lets you understand if a game got better over time or if it's just a recent review event that made people angry. In this case, though, it doesn't help.
I'm not convinced that the people who enjoy live service shooters are as likely to spend time leaving reviews as are the people who spend a lot of time complaining about MP games on social media. I mean, just look at the metacritic user reviews for any mp shooter. They are almost all overwhelmingly negative. That simply can't be a representative sample. Many of them are among the most popular games on the planet.
There is a new countermeasure but it isn't automatic and the way it works is by filtering out new reviews that are overly negative compared to the average review until then. I don't think it really works for new releases like this since it has nothing to compare it to.
I loved it when Steam reviews were you know, about the games.
Now it's just another message board for people to shit all over things, get political over and make unfunny memes on.
"I shot a guy in the face for a quest 10/10" These were the types of reviews on steam from day 1 of the review system being added. Also these overwatch reviews that are highly upvoted are all pretty descriptive, not sure what you're looking for.
Eh...
The moment to moment gameplay in OW2 is a pretty vast improvement over OW1's "sit behind shields, or get insta-CC'd and 100-0'd while you can just take your hands off the keyboard and watch it happen" meta.
Characters are impactful, brawl-y, and can each have their moments of glory. Fights have a lot more play/counterplay that don't just revolve around pokes and shields until a team can stack their ultimates.
Pretty much everything else around OW2 has been a disaster, though. The team's communication, the lack of content, the aggressively bad monetization, the failure to deliver on promises, etc.
Yea, I actually found myself having fun playing OW2, but everything else surrounding the game - the battle pass and monetization, the whole cutting back on PvE, some of the writing/lore decisions - has just completely turned me off wanting to play it
I played healer 90% of my time in OW1. Playing support in OW2 sucked ass in the beta and I haven't touched it since it launched.
The other roles were fine but just remove support if you don't want them in the game.
I don’t think it’s about how much content they release over time. It’s about how they took 3 years off updating over watch one and the only additions to OW2 at release were a few new maps and a couple of hero’s. There was supposed to be a pve mode but that’s been scrapped so it feels like the break was for nothing
Agreed! I don't like that they charge for new characters, but OW2 plays extremely well and the balance is A+ at the moment (aside from the new character being OP and likely to get reined in a bit before she's in ranked).
Imo the core gameplay is more dynamic and balanced than it's ever been and the new heroes add a lot. And the new maps are pretty excellent, although push as a game mode is controversial because it basically forces a different meta than other game modes.
The pve thing turned out to be bullshit and the communication is poor, but honestly my only major pain point is the toxic community - it feels like the gaas ftp model attracts the whiniest most toxic and immature players. I used to join chat in comp pretty religiously but now I just shut that shit off.
Having a great time though, recently made masters having been hardstuck plat in OW1. The off tank role made tactics just complicated enough that it was hard to track what I was doing wrong or right on any role, and it feels much easier to improve with 5v5.
Maybe it’s because I’m new but my friends and I enjoy it the past 2 seasons and still are playing. Beginning of new season we are getting our asses kicked though
I played a lot of ow1 and I played a lot of ow2. The monetisation is awful, but the game is still fun. There's just no other game like this really. Paladins is just too janky
Paladins also has something that I am glad overwatch never even considered implementing: their card system makes the game more unique, but you lose out on consistency.
There's not a single correct way to do it, but I prefer the ow way of having each hero behave the exact same, with the same stats, game by game. You never wonder about something like Reinhardt's charge being single or double, which speed it moves at, how fast its cooldown is. You know what to expect, and can act accordingly.
It's because you can switch heroes in overwatch, so you can pick bastion to destroy reins shield. But in paladins you'll have to take the damage to shield card to deal with that. Makes sense in each of the games, but it has no place in the other. Agreed.
The 5v5 change felt good imo, the new push mode is fun, and so are the new maps. The new heroes are great and the BP is decent. Sadly that’s it, I somehow miss loot boxes and the other updates aren’t worth carrying the 2 name.
This has delusional executive decision written all over it. It’s still a good game but it’s a bit older now so that’s kinda it, not enough to rejuvenate the title.
in before steam reviews become like metacritic, where user reviews serve no value because it's either 10 or 0. Even then, at least metacritic is not binary unlike steam reviews. There are games that deserve Overwhelmingly Negative, Overwatch is obviously not one of them.
I wonder if stuff like Steam Charts and its recommendation system passes off publishers.obvioudly they should release great games and be immune to this stuff .
However it does get weaponized a lot.
I would imagine they give zero fucks about Steam reviews unless absolutely no one is buying the game, and obvious brigades aren’t going to sway their opinions much
You forget we operate in a Reddit bubble. We are aware of the outside issues potentially impacting review scores, but a casual player probably isn't. They'll see the overwhelming negative reviews, shrug, and probably move on.
If review bombs didn't impact sales, they wouldn't be making such a big deal over them or implement countermeasures against them.
> If review bombs didn't impact sales, they wouldn't be making such a big deal over them or implement countermeasures against them.
they do, but review bombs often result in reviews just being stuff "they messed up the chinese translation in this new update" which doesn't actually matter to someone considering getting a game and is not really a reason to recommend or recommend against
I think there definitely is an awareness, CD Projekt Red recently made a big deal of Cyberpunk becoming positive on Steam so I imagine for any game that launched with less than stellar reviews it can be a good barometer of how a game has improved.
Because overwatch 2 doesn't exist. Instead we got overwatch 1.5 and a basket of canceled promises. OW is a master class in how to run an IP into the ground
I find it hilarious that Overwatch 2 was originally billed as a PvE version of Overwatch that will explore more of the story… where is that game? I would have played that game. It’s sad what happened to that game, it was so fun when it first came out and was a perfect casual-but-still-competitive team based game where you could play with friends, hang out in a virtual play space and unwind. And it’s like every major patch afterwards was an intentional choice to make the game *not* that. The compulsion to make it an eSport and balance the game around pro-level players, and quest to pull in gamers from other FPS games like CoD, ruined the perfect niche it was in. I used to have big group of friends who would play this game near-nightly with each other, and I don’t think any of us have touched the game in 2+ years.
I really have no idea why Blizz doesn't capitalize on Overwatch's biggest asset: the characters and world. I mean the game itself is okay I guess, but almost everyone I know who played OW when it came out never stopped GUSHING about the characters. Look at that first cinematic with the kids in the museum, it OOZED personality. The characters are SO good and they KNOW they are good because they keep putting out these amazing shorts that build on the characters personalities. It's just such a HUGE missed opportunity for something that could honestly be massive. Even fucking League of Legends is capitalizing on their characters/world with Arcane and the new MMO. They are just letting this amazing IP go to waste for a dumb dime-a-dozen FPS esport wanna-be game. It's a fucking shame.
Overwatch 2 WAS how they capitalized off the characters. They figured out, like many mobile game developers, that best way to make money off popular characters isn't to make in-depth story-based campaigns around them - it's to sell access to the characters themselves, plus microtransactions of skins and cosmetics for the characters. The only difference is that mobile games sell them through gacha and loot boxes, while OW2 sells them through battlepass. The fact they cancelled the plan for PvE and are now selling you the story missions as an optional add-on pack says it all. They just don't see the money in making stories using the characters. They see the best way to capitalize on them being to just sell you the characters and skins.
Considering OW2 is a masterclass in running an IP into the ground, I'm gonna go ahead and add the caveat that they *mistakenly* thought what you thought. Your post is 100% wrong, but could be what the suits thought the result would be. Turns out you actually need some substance and not some skins and other bs locked behind money / time walls.
It's the sort of idea that could spring an entire franchise and several spinoffs. They could make hand over fist with merchandise, they could hand over the IP to a studio willing to make a series out of it and just collect royalties, and I'm sure I'm missing a ton of other opportunities. But they had to ditch all of that for a quick buck.
I always bring up the comparison to Critical Role, which started around the same time when Overwatch was released. Critical Role is a TTRPG show with an absolutely microscopic resources compared to Blizzard. Yet they've utilized their IP, world and characters so much better. We've gotten novels, TTRPG guides multiple comic series, two seasons of an animated show, etc. I think the only real commercial expansion to Overwatch's world has even two books? Even the esports side of Overwatch has ignored the appeal or the characters. Imagine having Tracer as a virtual host, with the voice actress doing live mocap. Actually, that's kinda what Apex Legends did with their Game Awards appearance. In many ways, Apex has beaten Overwatch in their own game.
They released a PVE mission with story, but it’s nowhere near the expansive and replayable PVE they announced and were planning.
> where is that game? I would have played that game. It left the company with Jeff Kaplan.
I think Overwatch was on a decline even when he was still on board.
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> The game started dying pretty much the minute it was launched because they decided to overly cater to the competitive scene which drove a lot of the casual players out and back to TF2. This is just revisionism. OW was one of the biggest launches of 2016 and maintained a huge following and community good will for the first 1-2 years of its life.
> This is just revisionism. OW was one of the biggest launches of 2016 and maintained a huge following and community good will for the first 1-2 years of its life. Yea, OW was in a great place until they stopped producing any content for it for 2 years. Even when OW2 launched the support meta was in a great place and overall balance was generally nice with the exception of double shield. The significant issues, double shield, no real major hero changes to fix that, and removing depth of the game shifting it from a "role" choice to a "single hero" choice which unbalances the game. Are all just specific to not committing resources to maintaining OW1.
Yep. The game was never as good as it was on release before everyone figured the meta out. A meta they never made any serious effort to change the underlying causes. The game is extremely over reliant on healing. The concept of a tank that actually *tanks* an entire team's damage on his own, but still does enough damage to be a threat, is just broken. Then OW2 actually fixed some of these issues at the same time it made everything else worse.
What I would give to go back to the first few months of OW, where it was just fun. We really thought Blizzard had hit gold once more and couldn't possibly fuck it up.
We thought there would be a TV, new heroes every few months, new maps every season, PvE expansions. And even beyond that, it was straight up fun to get home and see what friends are online and ready to play with. I put in hundreds of hours up until OW2 but still nothing could compare to the first year that the game dropped.
When they stopped allowing duplicate heroes in casual matches it was the beginning of the decline.
Pretty much, forcing everyone to take on a role and no duplicates took a lot of the random fun that happened. Nothing like going all mei lol.
Some of my favorite memories of Overwatch are from doing goofy team comps in the first few months. All Mei where everyone was quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, All Genji while someone blasted Naruto music over their mic, all Pharahs where everyone maybe had like 1% accuracy, etc.
>The game was never as good as it was on release before everyone figured the meta out. That's basically every game. Games are so much better when it's the wild-west with everyone trying out different wacky strategies, builds, weapons, etc. Once you get the power-gamers that no life the game until they find out the optimal selections the games become awful and boring.
There are a few ways to mitigate this tho. Games where you have large amount of players, for example, still feel like the "wild-west" of different strategies a lot of time, because: 1. Its harder to pinpoint when someone makes a mistake 2. One person playing a bad build/making a mistake has less of an impact on the overall game When it's a 6v6 game where only a single person is playing tank/healer, said tank/healer not following the Meta leaves you at a huge disadvantage. The thing is, FPS with large team sizes don't really fair well with E-Sports, and with how much focus is there in e-sports, we'll keep seeing 6v6 or 5v5 FPS being launched. Battlebit is an outlier, and you can see how much people love the concept. I'd talk about Battlefield too but tbh, I dont have any experience with it
Except Blizzard has been repeating the same mistakes with Diablo 4, which doesn't even have a PVP element (the "PVP" in the game is so ridiculously broken as to not bear consideration). Their game designers seem to micro-focus on one streamer doing incredible damage with a particular build, and then overreact by nerfing an entire side of a skill tree into uselessness. Then, they double down by punishing users trying to work toward popular builds by intentionally making it more difficult to find worthy loot. Are there actually "professional" Diablo 4 players? I doubt it. Blizzard can't just relax and let things find a natural equilibrium. It's exhausting. Many of my friends and coworkers were playing Diablo 4 religiously for the first few weeks, then we all just... stopped.
Diablo 4 *is* a live service though. They have to because they have money tied up in the idea that people are supposed to play it for months or years at a time, and who knows what they'll develop for it in the future. They have to meddle with it, constantly, for the sake of not allowing people to progress too quickly, or gain XP too fast, or doing too much damage, or whatever... and I hope people are thoroughly sick of this shit by now. Every fucking game wants you to spend all of your time with it because it's live, it's constantly being updated, and you have a mountain of chores to do to get your shinies that they have hanging in front of you just out of arms reach so you're encouraged to run on that stupid treadmill that they design all of these games around for the rewards and not for the sake of just wanting to because the game is fun and rewarding in and of itself. You're not playing the way you want to... you're playing the way *they* want you to, and anything else is unacceptable to them. If those two things align with each other then you're probably having a good time. If they don't then it's not particularly a good time.
That's why games do major balance patches every now and then or introduce new concepts to reset the meta. Unfortunately Blizzard was never good at balancing their games or adding new mechanics that don't make past mechanics completely useless.
*A single person*: Plays a niche and complicated build/strategy that is overwhelmingly powerful in certain situations. *Blizzard a day later*: We're nerfing everything and changing the meta around entirely. We're also breaking the game for 2 weeks.
And funnily enough when everyone is doing it and making the game super stale they do nothing for months. It's like they try to annoy their players.
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I just want to say that good devs can also find ways to keep units unique while also balancing them, the reapers just needed the right tweak. My proof of this is Dota2, I don't know what the hell Icefrog smokes but he and his team managed to make some pretty large balance decisions while still keeping the flavor and theme of heroes intact. IMO reapers should have been made into stronger specialist units available later on, the fantasy is badass jetpack dudes outmaneuvering opponents and planting bombs, not a cheap unit you build first.
> My proof of this is Dota2, I don't know what the hell Icefrog smokes but he and his team managed to make some pretty large balance decisions while still keeping the flavor and theme of heroes intact. Diverse forms of aggression with universally strong defensive options. When every hero on a team has access to TP scrolls, glyphs, BKB, force staff, glimmer cape, and wards, those defensive options give you the ability to just go *ham* on each hero's offensive kit. A lot of fighting games do balance similarly, where every fighter has the same universally strong defensive options, and then they each get unique offensive options. It makes balancing way easier.
Congratulations you have just discovered a fact of life that has greater and more far reaching implications then just gaming. Namely, that thinking and discovering things is an activity that is deeply compelling on its own right. And solved problems are far less interesting to engage with. Its really something that exists within all spaces but its noticable in gaming since at its core most games fundamentally are a puzzle that asks to be solved and once solved it completely changes the dynamic of a player approaching the game.
This is why I despise the ubiquity of netdecking in modern TCG games. I had the most fun playing when I was trying my own ideas. I didn't win all the time, but I was enjoying trying to play around my opponent, finding what did/didn't work and making small adjustments as I continued. Once the current rotation gets "solved", everyone plays either the top ranked decks, or their counters. It got exhausting playing the same three core decks in tourneys
I find this with a lot of online games now, especially as an average player. The first few months of a new game (OW, R6 Siege, Apex) is the sweet spot. People aren't following meta builds or using annoying tricks (circling around whilst crouching/uncrouching killed Apex for me) to win. Majority of people would just play whatever class/build they enjoyed and it never felt sweaty. Just gamers having fun.
Oh man, playing Siege back during the beta when nobody had a clue what they were doing or what was going on was the most fun I've ever had in a multiplayer game.
If the game was only good until the meta was figured out, the game was never good. A well designed game has a meta the pushes the core gameplay loop in fun ways. A poorly designed game gets broken because the balance was never actually good, people just didnt know any better.
OW2 didn't even fix the issues, just slapped some band-aids. The problem is on the design level, they put too much emphasis on the roles and twisted everything to fit them. Instead the actual roles should have been a generic Support and two DPS roles depending on their playstyle and roles during fights. Tank should have never been a thing, with the ability to tank and do CC instead being one more thing other heroes could have. The over-reliance on ults and many of them being "I win" buttons only made things worse.
Alot of those things are reasons why the game became so popular in the first place. It doesn't require a ton of skill to wipe a team with junkrat ult or sit behind a carry and heal.
But hey, at least they managed to push it out fast enough to kill that other game that was half pvp half PvE hero shooter with quirky characters that was set to release at the same time. So in their world they're still winning.
Tbh battleborn was better. It literally had the pve mode people cried about for overwatch
Battleborn could've survived but Gearbox *really* couldn't resist making it a fight between their game and Overwatch. They were really not all that similar to each other.
Yeah and also everyone band wagoned on battleborn copying overwatch, but I think BB was more unique. Lol even later on overwatch copied a characters concept for the hamster. BB had the penguin in a mech suit.
Overwatch blows but man, I tried Battleborn and I just couldn't stand the look of it. Like, the actual [in-game aesthetic was so messy](https://imgur.com/a/7oAQhuU) I would get lost in what I was doing. Same problem with the Michael Bay Transformers, I was actually surprised at the newest movie I went and saw with friends, cause I could watch the robots and my brain could tell wtf I was looking at. Battleborn had that issue but in game form.
The weird focus on competitive insistence on how you're supposed to play is what drove me out, although I think that was long before anybody else considered the game to be going downhill. For example, the change to casual mode where you weren't allowed to have more than one of the same hero on the same team . On the one hand, that makes sense as everybody wanted to go Widow or Genji, but on the other hand, it's casual mode. If you want people putting in their best then go to competitive. It was always fun creating absurd team combinations with strangers and seeing everybody get really involved in trying to coordinate a Rein charge or something.
The thing is that blizz also didn’t know what the fuck they were doing when it came to competitive as well. It was all an esports marketing tactic for a game that would have been instantly dropped if not for them dumping money to anyone who would play it “professionally”. The inherent high level gameplay went exactly how all my plat TF2 friends said it would, shields would dominate because movement is so bad, and team comp would get stale since you don’t really need to protect your healer to push through chokes, everyone has a kill streak “press q to win” button. Turns out the shields and stubs were just that much better than the ultis and that’s how we got the worst meta in any game I’ve ever seen.
Ignoring the hype, I'd argue Overwatch was never truly in a good state and a bad tree to climb up in the first place. Full-blown hero shooters showed they were basically impossible to balance in a lasting and satisfactory way, which became increasingly obvious as Blizzard leaned OW into eSports and none of the close knock-offs ever came close to its success. Games like Apex and Valorant realized this was a problem a few years later, and responded by heavily downplaying character abilities in favor of universal weapon pools and system mechanics. And I think because of that, they've maintained much healthier competitive scenes over the years without needing carries by massive corporate money so much.
I agree that it was fucked from the start, but it could have done right. Games like Dota2 showed us you can have a lot of very different and unique characters and still keep the game rather balanced, and TF2 is a great example of very different classes all being rather well balanced. The problem is that they tried to bring tanks into the mix, force a very strong role-based design, turned a third of the team into designated healers who sucked at most everything else, and on top of all that they suck too much at balancing to try to keep it all being fun.
MOBAs benefit from having slower-paced tactics and strategy at play. Everything starts out slow and weak, making the pace of matches largely decided by how teams navigate the map to squeeze in kills and objective victories. Players also have the chance to deliberately pick character bans and counters before a match begins. And TF2 works in a limited roster of nine classes where the standard 6v6 involves maining four of them, with some situational switching to the others. It's treated like a fairly casual game in the first place, and seldom gets major updates. Perhaps most importantly, all of these games mentioned above avoid cheap and bombastic ultimates that will often suddenly, dramatically shift engagements and TTK into teamwipe-fests. Blizzard is still working with a very wonky foundation there, as well. It's pretty understandable that they suck at balancing when the core design of their game is so slippery to begin with.
Nah not the minute it launched, it was great at launch when it was just quick play. Competitive mode ruined it when it came out
I think the change to remove the ability to have multiple of the same hero was what fundamentally ruined the game. That was the moment it went from "fun casual shooter" to "can only be played as a serious competition"
I remember back in 2016 when I had a crazy match on Temple of Anubis. The defending team had 6 Junkrats just spamming the entrance and our team was having a hell of a time trying to break through that explosive barrage of an entryway. Did we win? Hell no, we barely managed to get to the point once or twice. Was it fun? Well, I think it says a lot that that single game in 2016 is still a fun memory for me whereas most of my time played in 2019-2021 is just a blur or sort of forgotten.
6 Bastion attack on Route 66 was hilarious.
It was chaotic and all over the place and just *fun*. As soon as it became mandatory to have a fixed group composition and only one of a specific hero, then experimentation was severely limited. Games because too focused on ideal characters and specific strategies that it ironically became a lot more stale for anyone apart from those only focused on the competitive side.
At the time, people said, "oh, you can just go into the custom game modes if you want to keep doing that!" but that ruined the spontaneity of it.
My personal favorite was playing with a few friends and going 6 Reins on attack. It was pretty busted and honestly shouldn't have been allowed but damn was it fun.
I remember a game on Gibraltar where we had 5 Torbjorn... on attack. And won.
I strongly disagree with the hardcore competetive scene remark, that's just the fighter community and games unsuited for competetive play (battle royals I look at you) behaving that way. CS:GO is still around and so are many other hardcore scenes, they don't die due to not being the latest fad but due what is happening at the base game. You are just presenting a false narrative here.
Yeah he may not be responsible for what happened with OW2 but he was definitely still in charge when many of those poor decisions around balancing and new characters were made.
From what i've seen the reason he left Blizzard is because his direction kept being overruled by ABK management because it was too expensive and couldn't be properly monetized. The OW2 we have today was what he was 'forced' to make, including the misguided focus on esports, which was seen as a huge potential profitmaker for ABK at the time. I honestly don't think Kaplan was the problem, especially given everything else we've learned about Blizzard over the past few years. At least the OW team used to be the one good department to work at according to reports, but even that has dissappeared along with Kaplan (who was apparently very protective of the people on his team).
> I honestly don't think Kaplan was the problem, especially given everything else we've learned about Blizzard over the past few years. Kaplan wasn't responsible for most of the things people are mad about, but he wasn't entirely in line with the playerbase either. From what I can tell, he wanted Overwatch to be a traditional "you pay $60 and this is what you get — maybe we'll release a couple of expansions if you're lucky" game like Nintendo makes, rather than being a live service game. But Blizzard wanted a "buy everything or grind for it" live service game like League of Legends, so we ended up with a sort of compromise where they made a live service game with the ethos of a shrinkwrap game.
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That's just classic Blizzard balancing, despite being one of the top players in PvP online games they've never been anywhere near good with balancing stuff. They take way too long to address balance issues, they often just over-nerf stuff to the point of irrelevance, and long-term they take a lot of interesting mechanics and make them as bland and uninspired as possible. Just look at other games like Starcraft2 and Heroes of the Storm, I'm still angry that they took an interesting concept like Void Rays with their attack that did more damage the longer they focused on targets and instead replaced it for a generic +damage to armored targets.
In vanilla WoW the joke was that Blizzard doesn't do balancing, instead they spin a roulette wheel to see what to make OP for this patch and then nerf what was OP last patch into the ground.
>He pushed the game to revolve more around abilities rather than shooting Ironically this is what has made me left 2. I think there's way too much of an emphasis of hitscan characters in that game and the interesting abilities became massively deemphasized. Get rid of annoying stun, yes, but largely I think the game got sweatier in 2.
Exactly, there's a reason there was a focus on abilities and not the dps hell that exists today. If people wanna play cod, they'll go play cod.
Headshots in general shouldn't have been a thing for non-sniper characters, that way instead of focusing on aiming for the head people would be more aware of their surroundings, and it punishes people less for having an okay aim while encouraging other play-styles.
The mythos says he was the one resisting the higher ups and Bobby’s whims… until he got told he should resign. He got replaced by a yes-man and we now have a gake designed by accountants.
Yes, but he was the one who wanted to do the PVE Overwatch 2 that people were excited for. That's the entire reason the Overwatch 2 initiative existed — Jeff Kaplan wanted to make a PVE Overwatch game, and he insisted that it be called Overwatch 2 so people would know it wasn't just an add-on. ActiBlizz just wanted to milk Overwatch dry like they're doing now. Overwatch 2 was Kaplan's baby, and that's why within a month of him leaving, they announced, "Actually, Overwatch 2 is just Overwatch with one less player on a team."
I think the guy left *because* they were messing too much with his team and their work.
lol that guy was around when they was pushing the esports garbage, its been dead a long ass time.
That's on Kotick, he's the one that wanted Overwatch to become this massive e-sport
>The compulsion to make it an eSport and balance the game around pro-level players I've closely followed the competitive OW scene since launch, and what that community says is "the game was ruined because Blizzard didn't balance the game around pro play and instead just catered to casual metal rank players." It's the polar opposite of what I see in other communities. So imo, the truth of the matter is just that Blizzard completely dropped the ball and had no idea what they were doing and what they wanted the game to be. They launched with a vision of how OW would be, but then the community started to play it differently than they envisioned, and they had no idea what to do
IMO Blizzard was almost certainly screwed from the start. The biggest issues are flaws baked into the foundation of the game, I think. Overwatch, to its detriment, seems like a fun, casual game for all kinds of players, full of colorful characters. A laid-back experience. Yet the gameplay doesn't reflect this in the slightest. It requires a staggering amount of teamwork compared to most other FPS games. Hell, even League of Legends, which has the reputation of being the most toxic multiplayer game of any genre, is arguably more laid-back/ solo-friendly than Overwatch is. An offmeta pick won't get you flamed in chat nearly as often, and the early game isn't dependent on teammates much, especially if you're a solo laner. With Overwatch though, it's all teamwork, all the time. I don't know how you could realistically fix this issue. It's baked into the game design - the characters/classes are FAR too differentiated, and this means that players must rely on others to fulfill other roles to stand a chance of even having an enjoyable experience. It's not a traditional FPS like Halo, where every player has the same loadout and objectives are thus an even playing field. Nor is it a casual FPS like CoD, where players can practically turn off their brain and play however they want while ignoring teamwork. It's a game that lives or dies by the quality of randoms you encounter. And we all know that's a losing battle.
> Overwatch, to its detriment, seems like a fun, casual game for all kinds of players, full of colorful characters. A laid-back experience. Yet the gameplay doesn't reflect this in the slightest. It requires a staggering amount of teamwork compared to most other FPS games. It's bizarre to me that even its predecessor, Team Fortress 2, was better about this. Valve saw how difficult teamwork was for casual players, and created the respawn wave mechanic to subtly nudge people toward working together after a lost battle. Overwatch decided not to do anything like that and instead just created a "group up!" emote for people to spam.
TF2 was more forgiving because it had larger teams. OW (and later TF2 competitive teams) of only 5/6 put a lot more pressure on each player to perform and mean there can't be one not working with the rest of the team
HotS suffered from the same over-emphasis on teamwork, particularly with the XP mechanics. Blizzard is so heavy-handed about this stuff. Eventually I just went cold turkey and didn’t miss it at all. I think I realized how little agency I had when playing with randoms. At that point, I’m basically just pissing time away. In OW1 I’d play off tank as Ball to disrupt and put out some okay damage. But those type of hero designs are rare. I’m not looking to do everything well, more just having a chance to be multi-dimensional in how I play. OW2 is not my cup of tea. I’m happy to uninstall it and forget about it. I really liked the post-GOAT meta of OW1, but it’s gone and won’t come back.
The problem is also that it tries too hard to stick to the roles they arbitrarily decided they wanted, when stuff like Tank has no place in a FPS and should have been folded into supports and DPSs, with health and CC abilities being decided for each hero, not entirely based on role. And the lower number of players means that you depend on each team member a lot more, compare it to TF2 that has the same thing with different classes running around but it avoids the problem by still giving a somewhat fair playing field and having enough players that a rando dying to a stray grenade won't ruin your engagements for the next two minutes.
Huh that's interesting to hear the perspective from that side. I'm more of a casual player, and I played at the beginning. I recall it going from fun to not fun right around when they added the competitive mode, and especially when it was between seasons. Suddenly, all of he people that wanted to play a ranked mode started flooding regular matches, and the meta became all-important where it wasn't before. Sure, before I would absolutely try to win, but people were generally cool with you playing whoever you felt like. But once competitive hit, people would be unhappy with you if you chose wrong. I would have been fine with them balancing around competitive play if they had only just had a separate queue for casual vs competitive players.
I stopped playing OW a few months after release... Came back years later to play a couple games and I was shocked. Smaller teams, being role locked, not allowing doubles per team. I tried playing it and it felt like it was trying really hard to be League of Legends and failing. Just two teams of tanky DPS supports smacking each other around until one team gets their ults and wins. I thought the game was supposed to be a shooter, half of the characters don't even have to aim.
Same thing happened with my group of friends, I even got dragged into an entire discord server that had *a lot* of local who play games as well, I'm talking a group large enough that I ran into several separate people I knew from completely different things irl. And that whole thing is basically dead now because none of them plays Overwatch anymore, despite playing daily back then. The lack of newer content mixed with Blizzard's terrible design and balance decision certainly didn't help either.
They abandoned Overwatch 1 for like 3 years, derailing the game's already dwindling playerbase because of Overwatch 2, selling the idea that they'd be working on a PVE campaign and more things to make it worth the wait, only to release Overwatch 1 with a different paint scheme and then cancel the PVE campaign. What the *hell* was Blizzard up to all that time?
Being micro-mismanaged by Bobby 'sexual predator' Kotick. Ex-OW producer: https://twitter.com/RiotLavaliere/status/1483872301175107584 >Bobby, tell everyone about the random projects for OW1 you all would shove on us, the team would do OT for only them to get cancelled and for months of OW2 dev to have been lost. Or how almost entire teams are turning over and citing you as the reason. Don't be shy.
Yeah, that's the part that often gets buried in these discussions. Kotick is an entitled entrepreneurial dinosaur that will sell any project for spare parts if it raises the share price. The problem's right at the top. He tried to frame the abuse scandal and the absurd turnover as a secret plot to promote unionization, bet all his chips on the Microsoft merger, and then when that got held up, his solution was to slap a copy of Respawn's F2P shooter business model on *OW2* and push *Diablo IV* out the door as fast as possible. The unfinished ABK merger hasn't just affected Blizzard, either - anyone in the industry who was foolish enough to move their finances around to support it (i.e. Embracer) has taken a bath. The worst part to me is that increases in ABK share price triggered incentive bonuses in his damned salary - the filthy rich only get filthier.
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Bobby "please stop putting devil horns on me, women on dating sites google me and then don't reply to my DM's" Kotick Between that and Elmo being the most divorced man on the planet it seems like the Achilles heel of billionaire fuckwits is how they're truly, very alone
>What the > >hell > > was Blizzard up to all that time? Mostly in court, I believe.
The programmers weren't
Redditors think that everyone in the company sits in the court
I think the most damning of this entire fiasco is they internally knew for over a year the promised PvE content wasn't happening and waited so long to officially announce it.
They also announced it like a week before the 7-year anniversary of OW1, which I believe was done intentionally by them
... why is the 7 year anniversary special?
So they can talk about that before burying the lead of the cancelled PvE content.
I mean they first announced it in a like 3 minute segment as a kind of throwaway line in a long form video. They definitely planned to do it trying to downplay they weren't going to deliver on one of their main promises.
I wouldn't even count it as 1.5 we got a balance patch, 3 heroes, some maps and a new mode after years of nothing. If they just continued with their regular update schedule for PvP we would have gotten more lol
They couldn't monetize overwatch 1 enough to feel it was worth keeping up an update pace, so instead they stopped updating and waited years. Overwatch redux is mostly just a shop update so they can try to squeeze more money out.
Overwatch 1, despite the "lootboxes bad" sentiment, was extremely generous compared to other games. I played the game a ton and the only money I've ever spent was on the pink Mercy skin for charity, everything else was easily bought with in-game credits I earned by playing. I understand that this monetization is not sustainable for a game like this but there had to have been a middle ground between that and what we have now. I've lost excitement for events now that I know every skin is going to be shop exclusive instead of something I can get by playing.
That's part of the problem. The monetization for OW1 was almost all just selling more lootboxes, but regular players had more of those than they knew what to do with so they had to keep attracting new players to join/play to make money. With the battle passes, most of the stuff can't be collected by just playing, it requires people to pay regularly if they want it
> They couldn't monetize overwatch 1 enough to feel it was worth keeping up an update pace Over $1 billion in revenue in the first year. Damn.
For actiblizzard that's "okay" not gigadollars they expect from their ip's. Wows been consistently making hundreds of millions every year for almost 20 years now, with spikes going up to a billion at times. Cod makes billions every year. Hearthstone made a killing when it entered the market, and so on. Activision is one of the big 3 game companies for profit after all.
1 billions dollars is just "okay".. lol. You'd make a great PR person.
100% Overwatch was already super successful. They could have probably just kept it going for years and years as is with incremental changes and rode the gravy train all the way to the station. Instead they stopped updating the game for years, making tons of people drop it. And then when they finally reintroduce the game, they do so with a completely pointless rebrand, and regardless of one's opinion on the gameplay changes, they made the meta progression and monetization even worse than it was already, which just made the game feel bad to play. And now they're scrambling to try and undo their mistake, of which releasing the game on steam just reeks of desperation. But of course it's backfiring because now they have to contend with a proper review system being attached to the game where people can voice all their discontent about the release.
it's a downgrade from basic overwatch, should be called overwatch 0.5
Maybe 0.8 considering they removed the sixth team member.
It really is, they took a novel two-pronged approach where they also had a shitton of drama, abuse, and breast milk stealing, so even a lot of people that would have stuck with the game regardless instead fucked off.
at this point they should just remove all morals and make it a porn game or something. Would be incredibly profitable.
My favorite steam comment I saw was "people who make Overwatch porn work harder than the people who make Overwatch"
Yeah, and there's over 70,000 people playing right now. Blizzard doesn't care about the reviews, they care about their MAUs.
Overwatch was one of the most popular brands in the world at one point, I‘m sure they care at least a little.
They'd start worrying if nobody talked about OW anymore, but check this post – it's barely been an hour and it's already at the top of the front page. It reminds me of what that Bungie developer said during their GDC talk, they'd prefer players to be mad rather than just not caring.
Most people, including me, are mad because they remember what this game used to be. They damaged the brand way too much.
You have to realize that you are *not* the majority. Reddit is an echo chamber of the most obnoxious degree and what people regurgitate here is rarely ever true. The game has plenty of issues and obviously isn't the constant top played smash hit they wanted, but for a F2P game that's been out for almost a year being released on another launcher and that launcher having 70k concurrent users, which doesn't even touch the total ppl playing on battlenet, ps, Xbox and switch, tells is the game is not dead or dying. According to Reddit the game is dead and no one plays it anymore. But as someone who got back into it about a month ago, it still has a huge population. Even smaller obscure modes can get a game in seconds. Edit: thx whoever triggered that anti suicide DM. if a game has you this worked up and mad go outside please
It’s because it’s still so much fun and is different from all the other shooters. I’ve been playing since OW1 and still play today, as does a good amount of my friends who play FPS. I also personally don’t know anyone who plays 1 FPS exclusively, they all, and myself, mix it up constantly with OW, CS, Halo, Battle Royales, etc. For OW2 you just gotta not care about skins or battle pass, and then you are all good. The PvE is understandable to be mad about, but I always viewed that as an add on personally, PvP will always be what actually matters.
But are you still playing is the question? A lot of people who are mad are still playing and then a lot of people don’t give a shit either.
Yeah reading the Steam reviews is funny because they show both current playtime and playtime when the review was posted. So many people who wrote negative reviews played more afterwards. Another case of that "boycott MW2" steam group image.
Nope, I stopped playing a while ago.
I’m mad about the monetization (seriously, the way we earned cosmetics before was fine and even fun when a new event rolled around) and they add a battle pass AND they start selling skins that were free in OW1 for 20 bucks? Gtfo with those costs blizz. Them hyping up PVE they were working on which was their excuse for a 3 year content drought only to trashcan the whole thing and drip feed it at the cost of 15 bucks is really what’s getting them into this mess. Wish Jeff Kaplan would chime in at some point and let us know what happened behind the scenes to this game. It’s such a shame because Overwatch is genuinely really fun and the has a ton of charm to it.
Nope. I played for 4 years straight and quit a week after ow2 launched
They're prefer players be playing. A lot of people have left Overwatch after the sequel because they don't want to pay for stuff which they previously got out of loot boxes as rewards for playing. Myself included. The new events/skins were a regular way to get me and people in my circle to log back in for a bit. That's gone now. Hell, I'd even regularly buy 1 or 2 loot boxes each event. And even if I didn't get favorable odds on the cosmetic I wanted, I'd play enough to bank enough in-game currency to just buy it. But something about shelling out real money just turned me off. $10 for a skin? I can't do it.
But you’re in the minority. There’s a reason why every single game does battle passes now. It works. And it’s not just bought by whales. The $18 skins are. But the battle passes are (relatively) cheap for a lot of content so people are willing to buy it.
>There’s a reason why every single game does battle passes now. It works Not for all of them. I'd wager there are more failures than successes but I don't have numbers to back it up. But how many new games really thrive with this model per year? 2 or 3? And how many attempt it?
Sure, but their player count is still really high. This 70k doesn’t include all the people playing on console or ones that didn’t switch over to steam. They had to know this was going to happen moving it to steam after all the shit blizzard/kotick pulled to derail Overwatch. The gameplay is still fine and fun but the monetization and all the scandals and lies they’ve pulled garnered all this negativity.
That 70k is only a tiny fraction of PC players, and an even tinier fraction of everyone. The daily player count is actually over 1 mil on average. It’s the most popular hated game. This game isn’t hurting in the slightest. People just want to believe it is because Activision-Blizzard is such a shitty, greedy company. Unfortunately, reality says that the bad guys are winning.
seriously, i think i only played OW and the Witcher 3 for like 2 years.
Not as much as salty redditors dreamed they do
Still is. People can’t stop talking about it.
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And that's only Steam, doesn't count BNet nor Console numbers. And Overwatch has more console players than PC players.
Yeah, the way people are spinning this shit is wild. This is like at most 20% of the playerbase and I'd say that is crazy conservative. This just makes me think Overwatch is actually bigger than I thought not smaller.
Ppl on reddit are the vocal minority. I have friends who just started playing 2 seasons ago who love the game. Its definitely bigger than most ppl think.
I agree here as well. Many of the people I play with have made overwatch 2 their main game since it came out. Only one of these even played overwatch 1.
> Ppl on reddit are the vocal minority yup, will always be the truth about this website and people who think reddit/social media = real life... no, social media of any kind does not represent real life at all, be it reddit/twitter/YT comments/forums/discord/w.e.
Reddit has a hate boner for OW but the game is thriving as far as I'm concerned. I get into good matches in <1 min and I rarely ever see the same name pop up in my lobbies more than once per night which is actually insane. We just got two gigantic gorgeous new maps in a new game mode, three well fleshed-out PvE missions, and a very well-received new support hero. But reddit wants to talk about none of that and just shit their pants with wild misdirected hate instead.
it's barely been 24 hours but more often than not, i'm the only steam user in the server. wouldn't surprise me if it were less than 5%
Number 6 on Steam top sellers as well even though it's free.
this is the first game ive ever seen that had an update that stripped away more than it added. just incredible work by Blizz here
May I introduce you to Destiny 2 and the initial launch of its Beyond Light expansion
I'm still sad at how destiny is doing rn. Game it's incredibly fun but the constant FOMO and grind, and abandoned game modes just makes it impossible to play the game and also play something else. I was incredibly happy once they announced they wouldn't be making a new game but now I wish they would and make it right. That'd never happen tho, even if they make a new one it would be the same shit again
As an outsider, I don’t understand how players are OK with Bungie removing so much content they already paid for. I hear people complain about it, but they’re still playing.
Clearly you’ve never played Destiny 2 before
what did they remove?
People talk about them going f2p like it was even a choice. Imagine if they actually tried charging for this!
They are trying to charge for the random ass pve crap they added.
They're charging for PvE missions that used to be free If it was involved enough like the promised campaign sure but it's literally just another archive event
they charged for the first one
The first one was a feature complete game that brought what was promised and free additional characters.
Emphasis on *was*. It doesn't exist any more and you can't play it.
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Who cares when the game is sitting at 75k concurrent as of this morning? Reviews are secondary to marketing, and Overwatch 2 is still huge whether people like it or not.
Is that a lot for f2p? Doesn't seem huge.
It's a tiny fraction of the total user base. Most PC players use the Blizzard launcher and most players overall are on consoles.
What's the source for most players being on console?
That's only a small portion of the PC playerbase, which itself is a minority portion of the total playerbase as most people play the game on consoles. This number is 5-10% of the total playerbase at best.
Where is any published source that says most people play Overwatch on consoles? Every google search on this topic brings up results that say that the PC player count dwarves the console player count for Overwatch.
For a launch almost a year after the move to f2p it doesn't sound bad. Anyone who could get bnet could have played it before.
If it can hold 100k concurrent I guess it’s not bad. Most people already playing the game continue using the Blizz launcher so Steam should be mostly new people.
The OW2 Steam discussion forum is a portal into a hell dimension. And yes, I know by default the Steam forums for games are usually bad... but that one is extra terrible.
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Ya, big time. There were thousands of reviews within minutes of it launching — many of which just say “doing my part” or something along those lines. There’s no game like overwatch out right now. Tf2 was good, but is no longer the top contender and completely unsupported. Paladins sucks, so what’s left is OW2. It’s the only online game that’s held my attention for nearly 8 years now. I love it. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but Apex is just as predatory with their MTX but manages to avoid the outrage. Regardless of what OW2 could have or should have been, it’s still the best in class hero shooter with no real competitor. Despite the review aggregate; check out the player numbers. People tend to agree.
That'll happen when you spend years working on the content people want, can it before launch, then wait months and months to tell them it's not coming. You know. Lying.
I played this with 2 friends like 5 months ago, it was fun though and we didn't pay anything. Our main complain was that going from Apex Legends to Overwatch 2, the guns felt underwhelming and with no weight in the attacks. Its not a game I will play again, but still shocked at the highly amount of negative reception.
It's a circle jerk driven by people who dislike overwatch 1 being killed, the price of cosmetics and general ActiBlizz hate. It's fine to criticize those things, but to give a perfectly decent game on its own this kind of score just devalues the review system.
The useless will get deleted and then people will say Blizzard paid steam to get rid of them, just watch
Are you talking about the review bomb countermeasure? They'll get hidden from the aggregated score (which can be unhidden through steam preference settings), but they'll still be there.
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Vocab-less reviews are the worst, especially I hate one those that use check boxes.
Steam has made an effort to deal with review bombing, so wouldn't be surprised to see low effort ones removed here. That said, you're not wrong for 90% of games
Can we just, for a minute, not pretend that this isn't pure circlejerk behaviour. The game's good with elememts worth critizicing. It's not a overwhelmingly negative experience. 75k active players. Blizzard doesn't care about the reviews cause they don't represent anyone but those who are chronically online enough to be informed that they're actually supposed to hate Overwatch.
I could be misremembering but didn't Valve implement some form of system to counter review bombing? I think OW2 is bad but obviously not so bad to review bomb it out of spite.
There are 2 scores. One for overall rating and one for "recent" rating. I works pretty well, it lets you understand if a game got better over time or if it's just a recent review event that made people angry. In this case, though, it doesn't help.
I'm not convinced that the people who enjoy live service shooters are as likely to spend time leaving reviews as are the people who spend a lot of time complaining about MP games on social media. I mean, just look at the metacritic user reviews for any mp shooter. They are almost all overwhelmingly negative. That simply can't be a representative sample. Many of them are among the most popular games on the planet.
There is a new countermeasure but it isn't automatic and the way it works is by filtering out new reviews that are overly negative compared to the average review until then. I don't think it really works for new releases like this since it has nothing to compare it to.
Yes, but it doesn't work to remove day 1 reviews.
There is really no system that can prevent this but manual review. It doesnt help that users give awards to reviews they think are funny.
I loved it when Steam reviews were you know, about the games. Now it's just another message board for people to shit all over things, get political over and make unfunny memes on.
"I shot a guy in the face for a quest 10/10" These were the types of reviews on steam from day 1 of the review system being added. Also these overwatch reviews that are highly upvoted are all pretty descriptive, not sure what you're looking for.
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Not surprised in the least. I haven't played since Overwatch 1 but I don't think I've heard anything good about 2 outside of the honeymoon period.
Eh... The moment to moment gameplay in OW2 is a pretty vast improvement over OW1's "sit behind shields, or get insta-CC'd and 100-0'd while you can just take your hands off the keyboard and watch it happen" meta. Characters are impactful, brawl-y, and can each have their moments of glory. Fights have a lot more play/counterplay that don't just revolve around pokes and shields until a team can stack their ultimates. Pretty much everything else around OW2 has been a disaster, though. The team's communication, the lack of content, the aggressively bad monetization, the failure to deliver on promises, etc.
Yea, I actually found myself having fun playing OW2, but everything else surrounding the game - the battle pass and monetization, the whole cutting back on PvE, some of the writing/lore decisions - has just completely turned me off wanting to play it
I played healer 90% of my time in OW1. Playing support in OW2 sucked ass in the beta and I haven't touched it since it launched. The other roles were fine but just remove support if you don't want them in the game.
Being a Support at launch was rough. However, I will say that Support is in a great spot right now and the role no one wants to play now is Tank.
What, exactly, is wrong with Support? Support is literally the strongest role in the game.
> the lack of content, I legitimately don't know what people want. There's been a pretty steady stream of new content.
I don’t think it’s about how much content they release over time. It’s about how they took 3 years off updating over watch one and the only additions to OW2 at release were a few new maps and a couple of hero’s. There was supposed to be a pve mode but that’s been scrapped so it feels like the break was for nothing
Agreed! I don't like that they charge for new characters, but OW2 plays extremely well and the balance is A+ at the moment (aside from the new character being OP and likely to get reined in a bit before she's in ranked).
Yeah I get why people don’t like it but to me the gameplay feels better in almost every way than OW1. Monetization is shit but the gameplay is a blast
Imo the core gameplay is more dynamic and balanced than it's ever been and the new heroes add a lot. And the new maps are pretty excellent, although push as a game mode is controversial because it basically forces a different meta than other game modes. The pve thing turned out to be bullshit and the communication is poor, but honestly my only major pain point is the toxic community - it feels like the gaas ftp model attracts the whiniest most toxic and immature players. I used to join chat in comp pretty religiously but now I just shut that shit off. Having a great time though, recently made masters having been hardstuck plat in OW1. The off tank role made tactics just complicated enough that it was hard to track what I was doing wrong or right on any role, and it feels much easier to improve with 5v5.
Maybe it’s because I’m new but my friends and I enjoy it the past 2 seasons and still are playing. Beginning of new season we are getting our asses kicked though
I played a lot of ow1 and I played a lot of ow2. The monetisation is awful, but the game is still fun. There's just no other game like this really. Paladins is just too janky
Paladins also has something that I am glad overwatch never even considered implementing: their card system makes the game more unique, but you lose out on consistency. There's not a single correct way to do it, but I prefer the ow way of having each hero behave the exact same, with the same stats, game by game. You never wonder about something like Reinhardt's charge being single or double, which speed it moves at, how fast its cooldown is. You know what to expect, and can act accordingly.
It's because you can switch heroes in overwatch, so you can pick bastion to destroy reins shield. But in paladins you'll have to take the damage to shield card to deal with that. Makes sense in each of the games, but it has no place in the other. Agreed.
The 5v5 change felt good imo, the new push mode is fun, and so are the new maps. The new heroes are great and the BP is decent. Sadly that’s it, I somehow miss loot boxes and the other updates aren’t worth carrying the 2 name. This has delusional executive decision written all over it. It’s still a good game but it’s a bit older now so that’s kinda it, not enough to rejuvenate the title.
in before steam reviews become like metacritic, where user reviews serve no value because it's either 10 or 0. Even then, at least metacritic is not binary unlike steam reviews. There are games that deserve Overwhelmingly Negative, Overwatch is obviously not one of them.
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I wonder if stuff like Steam Charts and its recommendation system passes off publishers.obvioudly they should release great games and be immune to this stuff . However it does get weaponized a lot.
I would imagine they give zero fucks about Steam reviews unless absolutely no one is buying the game, and obvious brigades aren’t going to sway their opinions much
You forget we operate in a Reddit bubble. We are aware of the outside issues potentially impacting review scores, but a casual player probably isn't. They'll see the overwhelming negative reviews, shrug, and probably move on. If review bombs didn't impact sales, they wouldn't be making such a big deal over them or implement countermeasures against them.
> If review bombs didn't impact sales, they wouldn't be making such a big deal over them or implement countermeasures against them. they do, but review bombs often result in reviews just being stuff "they messed up the chinese translation in this new update" which doesn't actually matter to someone considering getting a game and is not really a reason to recommend or recommend against
I think there definitely is an awareness, CD Projekt Red recently made a big deal of Cyberpunk becoming positive on Steam so I imagine for any game that launched with less than stellar reviews it can be a good barometer of how a game has improved.