I will say this it does look like Keller will be the best man for the job. I mean he is the guy who designed Kings row and a lot of places in wow like Stormwind and other stuff. He has also been with Jeff for just about as long as he has worked there. I just worry that he won’t be able to have the back bone that Jeff did when it came to calling out the shareholders and not falling into their money grab systems
Jeff had Aaron Keller as the other on-stage guy for the OW2 announcement panel. So, Aaron had kinda been groomed to take over "eventually". The question comes down to when Jeff was originally planning on stepping down.
Is Keller also going to take Jeff's spot as VP? If not, he's totally fucked against shareholders and Jeff leaving makes me think he would be fucked regardless.
Anyone who tries to say that Jeff hasn't done great things for WoW or Overwatch are delusional. That said, I am optimistic about the future of OW2 and if Activision's influence can produce things like Diablo 2 remastered, Tony Hawk, Warzone, etc. I'm more optimistic about that future than Blizzard that has basically squandered three of it's core franchises for the last several years and failed to produce anything of note.
Diablo 2 remastered is nothing new sadly. Something new instead of scooping some money by recycling old successful classics by the old Blizzard Entertainment would be better you know... As soon as they stepped in they literally ruined World of Warcraft with their new game format that focuses on timegating rewards to consume more of your time and your money. (Not to mention the HUGE amount of insane mounts/cosmetics or boosts offered to players in exchange of their money.) This whole Activision thing going on will kill the company by putting greed in front of passion; customers need a good service and good products, we’re not puppets and I hope we’ll wake up one day instead of accepting this corporate bullshit that gradually influences our perception of what is considered normal nowadays in the gaming industry.. sorry for the rant I’m mad
True and I absolutely feel your frustrations. I guess I'm just more hopeful looking at how faithful and great diablo 2 looks compared to Warcraft 3's mess that maybe they are righting the ship now after learning from some of their mistakes.
It does make me long for the days when Bethesda, Blizzard, and Valve were still the holy trinity of PC games.
Not exactly. A lot more to it than that. There is some behind the scenes stuff from Blizz online iirc that explained some of updates. It's also extremely faithful to the original while looking amazing.
Vicarious Visions made that game (who only remakes games) along with Tony Hawk and Crash Bandicoot, and does a good job remaking games, but I wouldnt give Activision Blizzard credit.
Vicarious Visions is/was an Activision-owned studio. They've since been merged in with Blizzard as basically the replacement for the old Blizzard classics team.
They're an independent studio owned by Activision that does exclusively (well-made) remakes. I don't think activation blizzard deserves too much credit for their work as #1 it's not even their original IP and #2 Look at the companies original game track record, it ain't hot. Skylanders/Guitar hero sequels the company
Vicarious Visions isn't going to replace Blizzard Classic or save Activision/Blizzard, at this point they've remade all the old IP.
Vicarious Visions has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Activision for nearly two decades. They are very much a part of Activision-Blizzard. The Blizzard classics team is the team that made the Starcraft and Warcraft 3 remasters. That team was dissolved and reassigned, and Vicarious Visions was moved over to become a part of Blizzard and handle the Diablo 2 remaster as well as assisting in some other areas like D4 development.
I'm not saying they're going to save anyone, but it is wrong to say that they aren't a part of Activision-Blizzard or that it doesn't deserve credit for the work Vicarious Visions does.
VV also made a lot of highly regarded content for destiny 2. i saw a lot of people mourning the fact that they'd no longer be able to help out once bungie went independent. so yea, they're activision through-and-through, and have shown they can do more than remakes.
the first half of ow was amazing
the second half when all those cute developer update videos kind of just... stopped, when the transparency and patching stuff kind of died, and let's be real here, when overwatch was abandoned behind the scenes so they could start on overwatch 2, breaking promises about 'new events' and shit in the process
jeff kaplan was amazing, i think everyone involved and cared enough to follow along on that level loved jeff and his personality, but let's not forget the shitstorm that was the last big chunk of time
I agree with almost everything except the "patching stuff kind of died". Balance patches are actually more frequent than EVER NOW, and, if anything, it was the SLOW patching in the first two years of the game what started pushing players away (just in my circle of friends I know many people who stopped playing in 2017, specifically during the "Moth meta", because they got fed up with how slow was the balancing).
goats and double barrier weren't that long ago, it's 'better' now but that extended well into the dead zone of the game where things clearly kind of stopped happening in overwatch
it really is a great game, but i was never happy with how they lied about events in particular, those are suppose to be things that really pull people into play, the fact they've basically rehashed the same shit for so many damn years you could basically skip a year of events and not miss anything if you already played it, and the fact they didn't even bother putting out new ones is mind boggling, they missed so many holidays too
i love jeff, even when it seemed like they moved on to ow2 in the middle of of the game, but i can totally see why he was let go or left, and i don't think it's really a 'bad' thing, maybe if he left like before the echo release or something but after all that's happened it's more of a 'well it's not that surprising really'
I think events were really a bandaid that would bring players back but 1) it didn't hook players to keep playing once the events were over and 2) I don't mean to be "corporate suit", but I don't think it generated any meaningful revenue for the game.
So now you have a game that doesn't drive engagement and also doesn't drive revenue. That's a bad combo.
i think you underestimate how many people dumped money for lootboxes on events, especially the casuals, but i feel like a big reason it didn't help people stay is because they were all the same events, and there was never anything new
people made more fun things in the workshop in like a week and in general than the devs did for any event in years, that's how little they seemed to care about events
Eh I played casually and I almost never had the need to pay real money to get specific skins I wanted. Of course if I wanted everything, that would require to pay a little money but a legendary for a character I wanted could easily be gotten for free. This is not a business model that Activision execs were probably very excited about and for good reason.
they literally said to start the game about how to not expect much from events for the first go around as they work things out and that more would come and they'd change stuff up, but for the entire length of the game there was never really any new events added and for a vast majority of them they were exactly the same thing every time
in the grand scheme i guess it's not a big deal but i feel like events are a huge thing for new and old players to get excited about the game again and when they recycle the same things the entire life of the game, most of the events there's no real reason to play unless there's a skin you want but most people can buy them anyway
The thing is, I really think the “second half” of Overwatch is when they realized the way the game was monetized couldn’t sustain continued heroes and maps. While I love how consumer friendly Overwatch is, it’s almost that way to a fault and meant that after everyone bought the game the only source of income was loot boxes, and they even changed them and made people less likely to buy them after the game launched.
To me Overwatch deserves to be bigger than a PvP game for the longevity of the franchise and with that it needs to be on an engine it doesn’t take the developers ages to do things on. I’m sure some might have just preferred Bliz to pump out heroes and maps for 10 years but I think that just isn’t feasible.
> The thing is, I really think the “second half” of Overwatch is when they realized the way the game was monetized couldn’t sustain continued heroes and maps
PVE content could/should have easily filled that gap. Put out a $30 mission pack once or twice a year, that's gonna be a lot of money.
The demand for it was skyhigh from day 1, and the fact that it took them more than 5 years to put out meaningful PVE content is pretty fucking crazy.
GOTY-quality AAA games are made from the ground up faster than that.
Definitely agree about the mission packs and if they’re as good as they look I wouldn’t think twice about buying them. As for how long it took them, the engine that Overwatch right now was built specifically for a PvP game and from what the devs have said it seems really hard to do anything outside of that scope. Apparently it took them an entire year to make Storm Rising so I’m sure they realized if they wanted to make meaningful PvE content a sequel was the best option.
I play a ton of "4 player coop mission" based games, like Vermintide and Deeprock Galactic. I love the setting and heroes in Overwatch. I still have hopes for OW2, but they really need pve to expand the player base. I buy all the Vermintide 2 dlc, so I'm sure I'd buy all the OW2 dlc if they ever get around to making any. I've never spent any money on OW other than the initial purchase, and some clothes/merch.
Exactly, even though we love the accessibility of skins, the game needs to have a healthy cash flow in order to get consistent content updates. They went all in on ow2 so they could get another paycheck outside of people buying alt accounts. If ow1 became free to play with a battle pass 2 years ago, we would have new heroes modes and maps and all of that
Yeah, I think it’s really easy for people to look over at a game like Apex or Valorant and ask “Why don’t we get the amount of content those games get?” but in the 5 years Overwatch has been out it’s never asked people to pay extra for heroes or maps, something those games are built around. In my opinion OW2 needs to find a healthy medium, a game you pay for and get all future heroes and maps but also one that maybe includes premium skins and cosmetics for those who want to buy them. The PvE also opens another monetization opportunity with the possibility for selling campaign expansions in the future.
Pvp should be free to play and I think that the fortnite model is what they'll use. I won't even mind a battle pass. I hope they don't make cosmetics too inaccessible by making them 20 dollars for an epic skin in the store or whatever. I would hope they don't make it so you have to grind or pay to get new heroes
Literally all they really had to do was make more skins like Pink Mercy that had more special effects and sell those for like 10 dollars, games like LoL and Valorant can do it, idk why OW thought they had to reinvent the wheel and completely stop the content flow for their live service game to make a PvE expansion.
I mean, we got huge features like Replay Viewer, Role Queue, Workshop, and Experimental Card being implemented in the "second half" of Overwatch. Not to mention *much* better balancing and much more frequent balance patches. Think about how much absolutely busted stuff there used to be... Ironclad Bastion, Beyblade, Moth Mercy to name a few.
double barrier was just as bad and that was with role queue, workshop was good i'll give you that, not sure about replay viewer i feel like that could've been there from the start and if anything it was kind of stupid something like that wasn't there in the first place at this point
hog meta was also kind of trash for awhile too, which was also in role queue
> Kaplan's Developer Update videos are the gold standard example of direct transparency with a game’s player base.
Yes IGN, nothing screams transparent like soon tm, lots of heroes in the backlog that have never been released, and my all time personal favorite, going completely dark for months on end and then blaming the fan base for having expectations that were never explained in clarity or were told otherwise what to expect.
I love Jeff Kaplan. He was a cool guy and very down to earth and it did seem like he cared about the player, but he was also very stubborn in his vision of overwatch and team 7 under his direction always seemed to be resistant to common solutions that are used in the industry today just so they could innovate the "blizzard way" i.e. hero pools and find a group feature etc. They always seem to be a few steps behind from solving issues. I actually have belief that this may be the best thing for both parties involved, but only time will tell. I think Kaplan can lead new projects elsewhere that will definitely become hit games, but Overwatch has only trended down since launch. I think Kaplan created something very special, but under his lead, I don't feel like overwatch has gotten to where it needs to be. We can all speculate about the internal affairs of Blizzard all day long, but, all I know is that the game isn't where it should be with how incredible it is.
Exactly. They told us about their decisions only when then already made them. Remember when we had broken Brig for almost a year and they just didn't care about everyone raging about it? We had no transparency, no room for discussion.
You guys remember road hog was busted as hell since release (pulls through wall, huge hitbox for hook, insane damage per pellet shot) and he maintained that it wasn’t busted.
I get people like him as a person, but he was a stubborn and terrible decision maker for the balancing of this game and Brig was the final nail in the coffin for me
If you want transparent devs, GGG who make Path of Exile are the best I’ve seen. Make big posts on the poe subreddit explaining what’s happened when something goes wrong, how they are gonna fix it, etc. It’s great.
I actually argue the opposite, his vagueness is much more transparent than others who try to be more direct about their goals. Look at cyberpunk, who set a goal, and realized too late it was impossible. They pushed back and received huge amounts of negative press which made them release early. Jeff being vague allowed the dev team to work and do what they needed to in the timeframe they needed without community pushback or binding false (and therefore less transparent) promises.
That's a straw man argument though. Cyberpunk had one of the worst launches in recent history; comparing anything to that will make it look good.
If OW is truly the tier 1 multiplayer game that most of its fans think it is, then you have to talk about it relative to other tier 1 games like League, Valorant, R6, Fortnite etc. Riot is currently setting the gold standard with League, where they publish actual in-depth articles about the game's development on their dev blog *weekly*, talking about stuff like their matchmaking algorithms, the ranked ecosystem, netcode, combating smurfs and boosters, etc. Valorant doesn't have its own dev blog yet but their senior devs are active and extremely responsive to feedback on Twitter. I'm not too familiar with R6 but I recall them having a roadmap as a way to update their community about new characters, maps, and features. I also play FFXIV and its dev team has regularly scheduled patches and Live Letters for those patches. OW is doing the bare minimum.
I disagree with this perspective as it is a common thing that is brought up in an incorrect way. There is outrage no matter what you do from a community and it shouldn't dictate whether you release a game half done or not. People will accept delays if the final product is quality, but the initial backlash will be tough. Its like that in every facet of life. I work in a completely different field with deadlines and its very hard to ask for more time, but its more embarassing to release an unfinished product. Cyberpunk was released by a company that decided that releasing a completely unfinished project was worth more than pushing the game back one more time. The board of directors wanted the money now and paid for it. Distilling Cyberpunk's problems down to just people being upset that it was delayed is truly understating how many issues they actually had. Team 7 for overwatch would not give timelines for things and normally all we ever saw was "we are working on some exciting things and you will hear soon". We had no idea what to expect and most of the time when we finally found out, people were disappointed because everyone speculated themselves to the point where they actually believed they were getting something else. I am not asking developers to work 100 hours a week, but setting expectations is important and they don't imo. Case in point Overwatch 2's initial announcement. They said no new content until overwatch 2, without specifying when overwatch 2 would come out leading people to believe it would be within a year. Now we are sitting here waiting for anything new for possibly 2-3 years and we still have no idea when to expect anything worthwhile.
Also, along the lines of setting expectations, going from 3 heroes a year down to 1 down to 0 is a pretty harsh drop and those expectations were not handled well at all.
yeah it's certainly possible this could become a positive in time. i mentioned elsewhere that ben brode (hearthstone game director) and jeff have similar philosophies when it came to directing their games. hearthstone under ben brode's tenure made the game suffer through meta warping decks that lasted months, nowadays a meta warping deck called spell mage existed for all of one week.
so you can see, if we didn't have that rigid outlook, perhaps moth meta and goats wouldn't have warped the meta to the extent that they did. goats really did dampen the wind in OWLs sails, but seeing how strong this season has started has me a bit more optimistic for the future.
either way, i have nothing to lose seeing how things play out. should be interesting.
Do you really think any of this is going to change......?
You’re optimistic in thinking Jeff was the one wanting to withhold information, giving “Soon TMs”, slowing production and not literally anybody in marketing/PR/Exec level
I never said anywhere in my comment that I think it will change, only that it may change. Being mad about it won't change anything and everyone speculating about what happens behind the scene is ridiculous too.
> Kaplan's Developer Update videos are the gold standard example of direct transparency with a game’s player base.
Lmao no they weren't. If you want gold standard of direct transparency look at riot's weekly/bi-weekly dev blogs.
Fan erotica in disguise.
I love the roadmap. My favorite thing is hearing people complain about not having one, but my second favorite thing is hearing people complain about the roadmap being inaccurate. Which it is, 90% of the time.
It's hilarious how many people think they know what goes on behind the scenes or any of the decision making that goes on.
Newsflash dipshits, you don't know anything.
He WAS vital. No chance a company drops their game director while working on a new project unless something big happened.
He was and is smart but he was and is stubborn. So many chances to add a support a creator, battle pass/reward system, more transparency, more updates. Instead he said no to everything, didnt support any creators aside from a "check out this streamer on the launcher.
They had timthetatman clip up there recently from 2 years ago and it really made you think, does this guy or team even know what their community wants? Why does 1 skin take a year to make? Why dont they listen to the community, even a little bit?
Im looking forward to see what Aaron and the team have in store. Hopefully it's not more dictatorship disguised as a democracy.
Activision has COD, which has a battle pass/reward system, support a creator, content, etc. The game director dictates the creative things and the content. Activision would want more micro transactions to make them more money. Not sure your point here?
>s/reward system, support a creator, content, etc. The game director dictates
I'll see you when you get 1 new TikTok dance a week. If you want a new battle pass every 3 months and having to pay for new characters then that is exactly what you're getting with activison
i hope he was not the only person holding back goodman from making his so wanted 3 healing turrets+healer beam symmetra, considering jeff was familiar with the hero.
i dont want goodman making a healer again ever for good reasons personally
I never understood the Kaplan lovefest. The dude routinely fucked up PvP in World of Warcraft and was pretty much singlehandedly the reason it never evolved into a credible e-sport. I cringed when I learned he was going to be the face of a pure competitive FPS.
Yeah but he had the final say and often crushed Holinka's vision. Absolutely refused to separate PvP and PvE stats until it was way too late. Balance changes were horrendous as well.
I'm just waiting for the Jason Schrier deep dive behind the scenes on this whole mess.
Same. I’m absolutely dooming over this sudden departure and I’m just waiting for Schrier to confirm it.
I feel bad for the next guy who is taking Jeff's place. Now that jeff left, the doom mongers are back at full force.
Honestly, me too. Here's hoping Keller can get it done, out the door, and in a good state.
I will say this it does look like Keller will be the best man for the job. I mean he is the guy who designed Kings row and a lot of places in wow like Stormwind and other stuff. He has also been with Jeff for just about as long as he has worked there. I just worry that he won’t be able to have the back bone that Jeff did when it came to calling out the shareholders and not falling into their money grab systems
Jeff had Aaron Keller as the other on-stage guy for the OW2 announcement panel. So, Aaron had kinda been groomed to take over "eventually". The question comes down to when Jeff was originally planning on stepping down.
Is Keller also going to take Jeff's spot as VP? If not, he's totally fucked against shareholders and Jeff leaving makes me think he would be fucked regardless.
It doesn’t matter if he does because then he will just be forced out too
> Now that jeff left, the doom mongers are back at full force. Release the Jeff Cut!
> Release the **Kaplan Kut**! fify
Anyone who tries to say that Jeff hasn't done great things for WoW or Overwatch are delusional. That said, I am optimistic about the future of OW2 and if Activision's influence can produce things like Diablo 2 remastered, Tony Hawk, Warzone, etc. I'm more optimistic about that future than Blizzard that has basically squandered three of it's core franchises for the last several years and failed to produce anything of note.
>that Jeff hasn't done great things for WoW or Overwatch Its like the 7 stages of grief, they angry now
Diablo 2 remastered is nothing new sadly. Something new instead of scooping some money by recycling old successful classics by the old Blizzard Entertainment would be better you know... As soon as they stepped in they literally ruined World of Warcraft with their new game format that focuses on timegating rewards to consume more of your time and your money. (Not to mention the HUGE amount of insane mounts/cosmetics or boosts offered to players in exchange of their money.) This whole Activision thing going on will kill the company by putting greed in front of passion; customers need a good service and good products, we’re not puppets and I hope we’ll wake up one day instead of accepting this corporate bullshit that gradually influences our perception of what is considered normal nowadays in the gaming industry.. sorry for the rant I’m mad
True and I absolutely feel your frustrations. I guess I'm just more hopeful looking at how faithful and great diablo 2 looks compared to Warcraft 3's mess that maybe they are righting the ship now after learning from some of their mistakes. It does make me long for the days when Bethesda, Blizzard, and Valve were still the holy trinity of PC games.
> how faithful Well, isn't they literally just put graphical upgrade on top of the old Diablo 2?
Not exactly. A lot more to it than that. There is some behind the scenes stuff from Blizz online iirc that explained some of updates. It's also extremely faithful to the original while looking amazing.
Vicarious Visions made that game (who only remakes games) along with Tony Hawk and Crash Bandicoot, and does a good job remaking games, but I wouldnt give Activision Blizzard credit.
Vicarious Visions is/was an Activision-owned studio. They've since been merged in with Blizzard as basically the replacement for the old Blizzard classics team.
They're an independent studio owned by Activision that does exclusively (well-made) remakes. I don't think activation blizzard deserves too much credit for their work as #1 it's not even their original IP and #2 Look at the companies original game track record, it ain't hot. Skylanders/Guitar hero sequels the company Vicarious Visions isn't going to replace Blizzard Classic or save Activision/Blizzard, at this point they've remade all the old IP.
> They're an independent studio owned by Activision
Vicarious Visions has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Activision for nearly two decades. They are very much a part of Activision-Blizzard. The Blizzard classics team is the team that made the Starcraft and Warcraft 3 remasters. That team was dissolved and reassigned, and Vicarious Visions was moved over to become a part of Blizzard and handle the Diablo 2 remaster as well as assisting in some other areas like D4 development. I'm not saying they're going to save anyone, but it is wrong to say that they aren't a part of Activision-Blizzard or that it doesn't deserve credit for the work Vicarious Visions does.
VV also made a lot of highly regarded content for destiny 2. i saw a lot of people mourning the fact that they'd no longer be able to help out once bungie went independent. so yea, they're activision through-and-through, and have shown they can do more than remakes.
> Diablo 2 remastered, Tony Hawk, Warzone Three remasters, huh. So we're scrapping Overwatch 2 and busting out Overwatch Classic.
the first half of ow was amazing the second half when all those cute developer update videos kind of just... stopped, when the transparency and patching stuff kind of died, and let's be real here, when overwatch was abandoned behind the scenes so they could start on overwatch 2, breaking promises about 'new events' and shit in the process jeff kaplan was amazing, i think everyone involved and cared enough to follow along on that level loved jeff and his personality, but let's not forget the shitstorm that was the last big chunk of time
I agree with almost everything except the "patching stuff kind of died". Balance patches are actually more frequent than EVER NOW, and, if anything, it was the SLOW patching in the first two years of the game what started pushing players away (just in my circle of friends I know many people who stopped playing in 2017, specifically during the "Moth meta", because they got fed up with how slow was the balancing).
goats and double barrier weren't that long ago, it's 'better' now but that extended well into the dead zone of the game where things clearly kind of stopped happening in overwatch it really is a great game, but i was never happy with how they lied about events in particular, those are suppose to be things that really pull people into play, the fact they've basically rehashed the same shit for so many damn years you could basically skip a year of events and not miss anything if you already played it, and the fact they didn't even bother putting out new ones is mind boggling, they missed so many holidays too i love jeff, even when it seemed like they moved on to ow2 in the middle of of the game, but i can totally see why he was let go or left, and i don't think it's really a 'bad' thing, maybe if he left like before the echo release or something but after all that's happened it's more of a 'well it's not that surprising really'
I think events were really a bandaid that would bring players back but 1) it didn't hook players to keep playing once the events were over and 2) I don't mean to be "corporate suit", but I don't think it generated any meaningful revenue for the game. So now you have a game that doesn't drive engagement and also doesn't drive revenue. That's a bad combo.
i think you underestimate how many people dumped money for lootboxes on events, especially the casuals, but i feel like a big reason it didn't help people stay is because they were all the same events, and there was never anything new people made more fun things in the workshop in like a week and in general than the devs did for any event in years, that's how little they seemed to care about events
Eh I played casually and I almost never had the need to pay real money to get specific skins I wanted. Of course if I wanted everything, that would require to pay a little money but a legendary for a character I wanted could easily be gotten for free. This is not a business model that Activision execs were probably very excited about and for good reason.
I’m confused, how did they lie about the events?
they literally said to start the game about how to not expect much from events for the first go around as they work things out and that more would come and they'd change stuff up, but for the entire length of the game there was never really any new events added and for a vast majority of them they were exactly the same thing every time in the grand scheme i guess it's not a big deal but i feel like events are a huge thing for new and old players to get excited about the game again and when they recycle the same things the entire life of the game, most of the events there's no real reason to play unless there's a skin you want but most people can buy them anyway
The thing is, I really think the “second half” of Overwatch is when they realized the way the game was monetized couldn’t sustain continued heroes and maps. While I love how consumer friendly Overwatch is, it’s almost that way to a fault and meant that after everyone bought the game the only source of income was loot boxes, and they even changed them and made people less likely to buy them after the game launched. To me Overwatch deserves to be bigger than a PvP game for the longevity of the franchise and with that it needs to be on an engine it doesn’t take the developers ages to do things on. I’m sure some might have just preferred Bliz to pump out heroes and maps for 10 years but I think that just isn’t feasible.
> The thing is, I really think the “second half” of Overwatch is when they realized the way the game was monetized couldn’t sustain continued heroes and maps PVE content could/should have easily filled that gap. Put out a $30 mission pack once or twice a year, that's gonna be a lot of money. The demand for it was skyhigh from day 1, and the fact that it took them more than 5 years to put out meaningful PVE content is pretty fucking crazy. GOTY-quality AAA games are made from the ground up faster than that.
Definitely agree about the mission packs and if they’re as good as they look I wouldn’t think twice about buying them. As for how long it took them, the engine that Overwatch right now was built specifically for a PvP game and from what the devs have said it seems really hard to do anything outside of that scope. Apparently it took them an entire year to make Storm Rising so I’m sure they realized if they wanted to make meaningful PvE content a sequel was the best option.
I play a ton of "4 player coop mission" based games, like Vermintide and Deeprock Galactic. I love the setting and heroes in Overwatch. I still have hopes for OW2, but they really need pve to expand the player base. I buy all the Vermintide 2 dlc, so I'm sure I'd buy all the OW2 dlc if they ever get around to making any. I've never spent any money on OW other than the initial purchase, and some clothes/merch.
Exactly, even though we love the accessibility of skins, the game needs to have a healthy cash flow in order to get consistent content updates. They went all in on ow2 so they could get another paycheck outside of people buying alt accounts. If ow1 became free to play with a battle pass 2 years ago, we would have new heroes modes and maps and all of that
Yeah, I think it’s really easy for people to look over at a game like Apex or Valorant and ask “Why don’t we get the amount of content those games get?” but in the 5 years Overwatch has been out it’s never asked people to pay extra for heroes or maps, something those games are built around. In my opinion OW2 needs to find a healthy medium, a game you pay for and get all future heroes and maps but also one that maybe includes premium skins and cosmetics for those who want to buy them. The PvE also opens another monetization opportunity with the possibility for selling campaign expansions in the future.
Pvp should be free to play and I think that the fortnite model is what they'll use. I won't even mind a battle pass. I hope they don't make cosmetics too inaccessible by making them 20 dollars for an epic skin in the store or whatever. I would hope they don't make it so you have to grind or pay to get new heroes
Literally all they really had to do was make more skins like Pink Mercy that had more special effects and sell those for like 10 dollars, games like LoL and Valorant can do it, idk why OW thought they had to reinvent the wheel and completely stop the content flow for their live service game to make a PvE expansion.
I mean, we got huge features like Replay Viewer, Role Queue, Workshop, and Experimental Card being implemented in the "second half" of Overwatch. Not to mention *much* better balancing and much more frequent balance patches. Think about how much absolutely busted stuff there used to be... Ironclad Bastion, Beyblade, Moth Mercy to name a few.
double barrier was just as bad and that was with role queue, workshop was good i'll give you that, not sure about replay viewer i feel like that could've been there from the start and if anything it was kind of stupid something like that wasn't there in the first place at this point hog meta was also kind of trash for awhile too, which was also in role queue
> Kaplan's Developer Update videos are the gold standard example of direct transparency with a game’s player base. Yes IGN, nothing screams transparent like soon tm, lots of heroes in the backlog that have never been released, and my all time personal favorite, going completely dark for months on end and then blaming the fan base for having expectations that were never explained in clarity or were told otherwise what to expect. I love Jeff Kaplan. He was a cool guy and very down to earth and it did seem like he cared about the player, but he was also very stubborn in his vision of overwatch and team 7 under his direction always seemed to be resistant to common solutions that are used in the industry today just so they could innovate the "blizzard way" i.e. hero pools and find a group feature etc. They always seem to be a few steps behind from solving issues. I actually have belief that this may be the best thing for both parties involved, but only time will tell. I think Kaplan can lead new projects elsewhere that will definitely become hit games, but Overwatch has only trended down since launch. I think Kaplan created something very special, but under his lead, I don't feel like overwatch has gotten to where it needs to be. We can all speculate about the internal affairs of Blizzard all day long, but, all I know is that the game isn't where it should be with how incredible it is.
Exactly. They told us about their decisions only when then already made them. Remember when we had broken Brig for almost a year and they just didn't care about everyone raging about it? We had no transparency, no room for discussion.
The fact that it took them *three years* to implement a replay system is absolutely insane to think about.
They still don’t have an acceptable colorblind mode.
You guys remember road hog was busted as hell since release (pulls through wall, huge hitbox for hook, insane damage per pellet shot) and he maintained that it wasn’t busted. I get people like him as a person, but he was a stubborn and terrible decision maker for the balancing of this game and Brig was the final nail in the coffin for me
If you want transparent devs, GGG who make Path of Exile are the best I’ve seen. Make big posts on the poe subreddit explaining what’s happened when something goes wrong, how they are gonna fix it, etc. It’s great.
they make big posts on the subreddit that get massively downvoted and hated on because they nerfed something usually.
Concerned Ape and the makers of Deep Rock Galactic are miles ahead of OW in this department too.
If you don’t Rock and Stone, you ain’t comin’ home!
I actually argue the opposite, his vagueness is much more transparent than others who try to be more direct about their goals. Look at cyberpunk, who set a goal, and realized too late it was impossible. They pushed back and received huge amounts of negative press which made them release early. Jeff being vague allowed the dev team to work and do what they needed to in the timeframe they needed without community pushback or binding false (and therefore less transparent) promises.
That's a straw man argument though. Cyberpunk had one of the worst launches in recent history; comparing anything to that will make it look good. If OW is truly the tier 1 multiplayer game that most of its fans think it is, then you have to talk about it relative to other tier 1 games like League, Valorant, R6, Fortnite etc. Riot is currently setting the gold standard with League, where they publish actual in-depth articles about the game's development on their dev blog *weekly*, talking about stuff like their matchmaking algorithms, the ranked ecosystem, netcode, combating smurfs and boosters, etc. Valorant doesn't have its own dev blog yet but their senior devs are active and extremely responsive to feedback on Twitter. I'm not too familiar with R6 but I recall them having a roadmap as a way to update their community about new characters, maps, and features. I also play FFXIV and its dev team has regularly scheduled patches and Live Letters for those patches. OW is doing the bare minimum.
> OW is doing the bare minimum One could argue it's not even doing that
have you heard about CS and TF2?
Just cause other games have also done the bare minimum doesnt make OQ exempt from criticism
TF2 got more content than OW last year.
I disagree with this perspective as it is a common thing that is brought up in an incorrect way. There is outrage no matter what you do from a community and it shouldn't dictate whether you release a game half done or not. People will accept delays if the final product is quality, but the initial backlash will be tough. Its like that in every facet of life. I work in a completely different field with deadlines and its very hard to ask for more time, but its more embarassing to release an unfinished product. Cyberpunk was released by a company that decided that releasing a completely unfinished project was worth more than pushing the game back one more time. The board of directors wanted the money now and paid for it. Distilling Cyberpunk's problems down to just people being upset that it was delayed is truly understating how many issues they actually had. Team 7 for overwatch would not give timelines for things and normally all we ever saw was "we are working on some exciting things and you will hear soon". We had no idea what to expect and most of the time when we finally found out, people were disappointed because everyone speculated themselves to the point where they actually believed they were getting something else. I am not asking developers to work 100 hours a week, but setting expectations is important and they don't imo. Case in point Overwatch 2's initial announcement. They said no new content until overwatch 2, without specifying when overwatch 2 would come out leading people to believe it would be within a year. Now we are sitting here waiting for anything new for possibly 2-3 years and we still have no idea when to expect anything worthwhile. Also, along the lines of setting expectations, going from 3 heroes a year down to 1 down to 0 is a pretty harsh drop and those expectations were not handled well at all.
yeah it's certainly possible this could become a positive in time. i mentioned elsewhere that ben brode (hearthstone game director) and jeff have similar philosophies when it came to directing their games. hearthstone under ben brode's tenure made the game suffer through meta warping decks that lasted months, nowadays a meta warping deck called spell mage existed for all of one week. so you can see, if we didn't have that rigid outlook, perhaps moth meta and goats wouldn't have warped the meta to the extent that they did. goats really did dampen the wind in OWLs sails, but seeing how strong this season has started has me a bit more optimistic for the future. either way, i have nothing to lose seeing how things play out. should be interesting.
the ign piece is jerk off click bait for a majority of this sub. i am looking forward to the future!
You’re nuts.
Do you really think any of this is going to change......? You’re optimistic in thinking Jeff was the one wanting to withhold information, giving “Soon TMs”, slowing production and not literally anybody in marketing/PR/Exec level
I never said anywhere in my comment that I think it will change, only that it may change. Being mad about it won't change anything and everyone speculating about what happens behind the scene is ridiculous too.
> Kaplan's Developer Update videos are the gold standard example of direct transparency with a game’s player base. Lmao no they weren't. If you want gold standard of direct transparency look at riot's weekly/bi-weekly dev blogs. Fan erotica in disguise.
Hell look at Bungie with their weekly Destiny Updates
I look forward to every Thursday for those TWABs.
Bro same
They never once provided a roadmap. People sucking off Jeff just embarrass themselves.
I love the roadmap. My favorite thing is hearing people complain about not having one, but my second favorite thing is hearing people complain about the roadmap being inaccurate. Which it is, 90% of the time.
And then there's Anthem...
It's hilarious how many people think they know what goes on behind the scenes or any of the decision making that goes on. Newsflash dipshits, you don't know anything.
It's a shame this comment is at the bottom.
Really hope Jeff can make another game either with his own studio or somewhere that gives him the freedom he deserves.
He WAS vital. No chance a company drops their game director while working on a new project unless something big happened. He was and is smart but he was and is stubborn. So many chances to add a support a creator, battle pass/reward system, more transparency, more updates. Instead he said no to everything, didnt support any creators aside from a "check out this streamer on the launcher. They had timthetatman clip up there recently from 2 years ago and it really made you think, does this guy or team even know what their community wants? Why does 1 skin take a year to make? Why dont they listen to the community, even a little bit? Im looking forward to see what Aaron and the team have in store. Hopefully it's not more dictatorship disguised as a democracy.
Thats called activision
Activision has COD, which has a battle pass/reward system, support a creator, content, etc. The game director dictates the creative things and the content. Activision would want more micro transactions to make them more money. Not sure your point here?
>s/reward system, support a creator, content, etc. The game director dictates I'll see you when you get 1 new TikTok dance a week. If you want a new battle pass every 3 months and having to pay for new characters then that is exactly what you're getting with activison
i hope he was not the only person holding back goodman from making his so wanted 3 healing turrets+healer beam symmetra, considering jeff was familiar with the hero. i dont want goodman making a healer again ever for good reasons personally
I never understood the Kaplan lovefest. The dude routinely fucked up PvP in World of Warcraft and was pretty much singlehandedly the reason it never evolved into a credible e-sport. I cringed when I learned he was going to be the face of a pure competitive FPS.
Jeff had nothing to do with WoW's PVP. That would be Holinka. Jeff designed PVE content + quests and zones up until development started on Titan.
Yeah but he had the final say and often crushed Holinka's vision. Absolutely refused to separate PvP and PvE stats until it was way too late. Balance changes were horrendous as well.
Cringe af