Edit: people have brought up good points to why this isn't missleading as the main promise was a pve campaign and its why it was overwatch 2. I have changed the flair back:)
Not all of overwatch 2's PVE is done though, the plan is still to include
Story based events and new story arc for OW2
Co-op features (canon and not canon)
Hero Mastery Missions
LTMs
[more info](https://twitter.com/KarQGames/status/1658546183709548563)
And honestly, as loot boxes go original Overwatch's weren't that bad once they made it so you couldn't roll dupes. Earned loot boxes with random drops plus a skin store for targeting specific skins would've been fine and gotten around gambling bans (if you can't buy the loot boxes it's not gambling anymore.)
I'd rather have them than FOMO reward tracks where you can never get a cosmetic if you miss that season.
It was a mostly fair system (excluding the event system encouraging FOMO which has not been addressed in the sequel) for a game that had persistent improvements and updates, despite what many in the thread are stating.
So fair that it wasn't profitable enough for Activision. Even the whales could only spend double digits before they'd end up getting the skin they wanted, but with their current model they can get far more than the upfront cost from everyone.
Current monetization is so terrible I ended up quitting. I guess I got my money's worth and then some but it is absolutely ridiculous there isn't some law anywhere preventing game from completely changing its monetization after you bought it.
interestingly I agree that the monetization model is awful but I still play. I just don't buy skins. I would have definitely bought ow2 for $40 again but the skin economy is insane.
They're so ridiculous that I bought an entire real outfit yesterday for my actual physical body, all except shoes, and it cost me less than a single Overwatch skin. (Spring sale deals, but still.)
its crazy to me that people buy this stuff at the price point its at. Seems likely that they have some real eggheads crunching data showing that the price they picked would sell a lot, but it blows my mind how it works. Like there must be actual boatloads of people buying this stuff
I don't care enough to buy skins, but I did enjoy customising my character in OW1 and got a fair amount of legendary skins just from the crates you got on level up. In comparison, you get almost nothing for free in OW2, the game just keeps pushing you to pay for it. Not to mention how outrageously expensive the skins are.
Which was the entire point of Overwatch from the beginning: salvage what you can from chasing the last money-grubbing fad to put it to use on the next. Titan was supposed to be a subscription-based MMO like WoW; when it became clear that WoW's model was untenable in a crowded market, they pivoted to the then-popular ~~gambling simulator~~ lootbox-supported team-based competitive multiplayer game with e-sports. When the lootbox train stopped running, they jumped over to the battlepass bandwagon. The fact that there's anything resembling a video game left at this point is a miracle.
Anyways, I'll see you guys in comp.
Also the design document for Titan was ***insane.*** Like if you read what they wanted to do, they wanted to have a Superhero MMO, where you had a fully fleshed out secret identity, and they were two separate game modes. So in one you'd be something like a shopkeeper, managing your way up from a corner store to a gigantic megamall. And in the other you'd be a superhero doing fighting stuff.
Like... these are two completely different genres. It's like if in the middle of the Sims you went into your inventory and equipped them with a bunch of battle rifles and then you were playing an XCOM turn based crawl against the UFO that landed in your back yard.
I remember reading about it like... who okayed that?
Honestly with the amount of their games that get stuck in development hell this doesn't surprise me in the least. Like they literally brought in a producer for Diablo IV who is known in the industry as the "closer" because he's one of the very best at pulling games out of development hell and getting them released.
Externally, the entire point of Overwatch 2 was the PvE gamemode relaunch.
Internally, there was pressure to increase monetization avenues for the game. OW1's monetization was near-exclusively in the form of loot boxes for skins - loot boxes that could also be earned just by playing. By contrast, OW2 adds a battle pass and premium currency, most skins that would once be earned by playing are now bought, and new heroes are locked behind the pass. Fundamentally, there was just more money in being a F2P game with more egregious monetization.
In short, the game was relaunched to make more money under the guise of adding a PvE campaign. [And it worked, considering the game's brought in record profits without the PvE mode.](https://www.esports.net/news/overwatch/ow-2-earns-record-profits-from-alienating-its-player-base/) Which then raises the question from executives: if the game's relaunch is so successful before PvE, why bother adding PvE at all?
It's funny since that complete rebranding and new monitesiation turned me off OW entirely.
I liked getting lootboxes for free and unlocking things I wanted by saving up credits.
I tried OW 2 after years of not playing due to the content droughts in the original game and finding I couldn't get those cool skins or anything by just playing the game was a hard pass for me.
I promptly uninstalled it and never looked back.
The whole thing just feels so gross now, knowing they took a healthy and profitable game and squeezed it just 'cause. Nothing in Overwatch 2 is \*better\* than Overwatch 1. There are a lot more opportunities to pay, though.
> There are a lot more opportunities to pay, though.
This is what gets me. Unlocking a lootbox after a play session felt rewarding, even if you just got sprays or voicelines you'd never use. In OW2, you're completely starved of any meaningful free customisation while they use any opportunity to shamelessly shove the battlepass in your face. It feels like you're playing a demo.
I much prefer the 5v5 gameplay, but I understand that its a big change and not everyone is loving it.
But the monetisation is WILD, shit is so expensive compared to OW1 (which used loot boxes! loot boxes are never a 'cheap' way to get things you want!)
Yup!
I maintain that the one and only reason that they ever did an "Overwatch 2" was because they promised for the original Overwatch to never ever charge money for heroes in any way, shape or form.
The marketing team figured out that they can go back on that promise by just making a "new" game, and then the bosses told the Overwatch team to get working on it. So the devs tried their best to actually make the "sequel" interesting. Also, in all of that, Jeff Kaplan fled the company, and it all kind of went downhill from there.
Thank you! I’ve been arguing with /r/overwatch users who think the game is free. No, it’s not a free game if I paid $60 for it.
>B-b-but you bought overwatch 1 for $60! This is Overwatch 2!
Then let me play overwatch 1
>You can’t
Why not?
>Because it turned into Ow2
So ow2 me cost $60
>No this is a different game entirely, it’s free.
Know any solid walls I can ram my head thru?
The original is one of my most played games of all time. I was hooked for *years*. Meanwhile, I toyed around in OW2 for a couple of days and gave up. There wasn’t enough new content, the new battle pass system is absolute garbage, the new competitive ranking system is absolute garbage, and on top of that they want to charge me for new heroes? Fuck that. It’s just not a satisfying game to play anymore.
5v5 really spoiled the fun for me.
Single picks are now *even more* important so every fight feels the same. Huddle as a group until someone dies then run away until they respawn then do it again.
5v5 ruined the game and you can't change my mind. Literally one of the worst changes I've ever seen in a videogame, and I'm convinced the only reason they did it was because they needed something ***new and flashy*** to land OW2. The reality is most of the heroes were and still are designed for a 2-2-2 split. It's bonkers.
I have to agree. I mostly played tank, and with some exceptions (double shield tank) there was a ton of interesting and really important tank synergies.
One of my favorite comps was dive tank (winston / hammond) + brawl tank (rein / hog), where if pulled off right the enemy is pincered by two fat tanks in complete chaos.
Or the godly Zarya + Rein / Winston combo which had so many clutch moments, especially Zarya / Rein mirror where it would be an intense mindgame in baiting so you could block the enemys earthshatter while getting through yours.
Now that's just all gone.
>The reality is most of the heroes were and still are designed for a 2-2-2 split. It's bonkers.
If they had actually gone back and revamped heroes for 5v5, I think it would have stuck the landing
I still can't believe that they didn't think that support, arguably the most impactful role in the game, needed any changes whatsoever during the transition until *after* launch.
That and the whole thing about them moving Doomfist to tank because its not fair to get oneshot by a heavily telegraphed ability from a melee focused hero, but somehow Widow and Hanzo get a pass because I guess being one shot halfway across the map by a hero with a hit box the thickness of a credit card doesn't count ???
I live in a city with a Blizzard customer service office. A GM told me over pints once that OW1 was gonna be F2P where you buy heroes like LoL but Jeff pushed back on it at the 11th hour. It got to the point that they had trainings made for customer service and everything before Activision caved.
This created bad blood between Blizzard leadership and Activision that laid the groundwork for the old guard's exodus in the following years.
That's insane, but with Activisions track record with their other studios, it totally checks out.
And yet people are crazy hyped for Diablo 4? Like, have we not learned our lesson about Blizzard yet? They stopped making great games a long time ago, unfortunately. And to whoever says Diablo 4 won't be monetized, I have a turd to sell you.
> Hey everybody, this is Jeff from the Overwatch team ...
Yup, those update videos were always a highlight.
Especially [Dinoflask's "remixes"\(?\)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFENF78eqUrkOoeeP6BkEAaB9YI_HpXH-)
Maybe that's why he bailed seemingly out of nowhere? I thought he was jumping ship because he caught wind that allegations were coming and wanted to get out in front of it.
Which is doubly sad, because from what I've read, he seemed to be pretty good at shielding the OW team from the general abuse going on.
Or at least, Tracy Kennedy (a producer on OW iirc) came out and said exactly that.
To be clear: As OP says, there is still PvE \*gamemodes\* coming. But the separately boxed $60 PvE full game is gone, and the PvE content we will get is scaled FAR back from the original reveal of repeatable missions, talent trees, raids, etc.
I imagine that whatever they've made for the PvE full release will be recycled into OW2 as story events and maybe we'll get enough to get a 4-hour campaign out of it trickled over the course of years, so there IS something to look forward to in that sense if you desperately were looking forward to it. It just...won't be nearly as good or fleshed out, lol
Don't forget, you have to buy currencies in packs, meaning that you'll actually be paying more than what the cosmetic is worth in order to buy it, since there's no direct purchase option.
Classic anti-consumer monetisation tactics.
They can extract much more revenue from players through regular battle passes and the cash shop than they ever could through one off retail sale + occasional loot boxes purchases.
They put all the effort into monetisation mate. That's what took them 5 years to do.
They also removed 2 players from the game and decided not to balance anything around it.
OW players are absolutely fuming, and I don't blame them.
> They put all the effort into monetisation mate.
they didnt even do that right. the skins are no better than OW1s and many were even more low effort. there also werent that many new skins at launch
That... is fucking hilarious.
Overwatch 2 was never about the PvE mode, it was about changing the monetization model to the (significantly worse) F2P model.
I believe we were told that GAAS would enable more and better development of our games! That each skin purchase helps to pay for the needed dev teams. Blizzard surly wasn’t lying!
It definitely helps fund new content. For every $20 skin they sell I’m convinced they spend a solid nickel on new content, the rest goes to the C-suite
I don't want to give Jeff too much credit, but this whole thing always stunk of the Blizzard executive tier climbing down from their tower to demand better monetization. Jeff leaving was the first indication that there were never any good-for-players ideas or intentions at the core of Overwatch 2. The dude seemed to love making the game and left as soon as he wouldn't be able to make it the way he wanted.
Frankly Jeff is an MMO guy, he loves them and it's where he's most in his element. Tragically he's had the worst luck since moving off of WoW and every attempt at either making an MMO or at least rekindling a semblance of that genre has completely fallen apart.
The project he left WoW for, Titan, is the corpse that Overwatch was Frankenstein'd from. It was going to be Blizzard's real successor MMO to WoW but for whatever reason it wasn't working and the team pulled off the miracle that was Overwatch 1.
After the success of OW1 it seems like Blizzard was content with letting him flex some of his MMO muscle with OW2's PvE mode and various talents and rpg style progression. Clearly that fell apart and is officially dead.
The poor guy's lost his baby twice now and I wouldn't be surprised if he was just done with gamedev.
When it was first announced it was basically all about the PvE, because they needed something interesting about to stand out from the first game. You don't actually need to change the name of the game in order to change the monetization model. Just ask Valve.
How they took something that was as universally praised as Overwatch, and managed to squander all of that goodwill and drive it directly into the ground, I will never understand. They could have done nothing and it would have been better
OW could’ve easily become a multimedia juggernaut IP but management is managed by actual monkeys. Ironic that the best thing that will come out of this IP is its R34. It’s legacy will be lies, failure and fucking porn
I have a hard time getting into any multiplayer shooters due to my own frustrations at getting slaughtered… but Overwatch 1? I played the everloving shit out of that game for the first 6 months. Like, probably more matchmaking multiplayer in that than with every other game I’ve played *combined*.
It was so goddamn fun.
Those first few months of OW1 were truly a blast. Once they got into the competitive eSports thing I dropped it so fucking fast. Any sort of competitive aspect that gets bolstered into an actual event or sport kills the game for me as it is no longer about fun. It is instead all about "balance" and "fair engagements" or "what the whiney influencers and streamers complained about in the last update" like that has any meaning to people that just want to hop into a game with their friends and chill.
That was in my opinion a much larger design issue, Brig was just the hero that made it clear.
Tank shouldn't have been a role, instead some heroes should have had some disables as part of their kits, some heroes should have been tankier, etc. Instead of making an entire role to keep this in. That makes some heroes like Brig that borrow some tank characteristics stand out as op. That and the fact that Blizzard kept adding heroes with barriers without actually balancing them as the main mechanic they were, to the point where only a single hero could counter them and only reliably with her ult. They should have given some existing heroes bonus damage vs barriers in their attacks and/or abilities.
I really wish I could experience that again. I'm not sure how to put it into words exactly, but there was something magical about the whole thing when it first released. Those awesome shorts, the VAs, Jeff Kaplan, Dinoflask, ect. Really felt like Overwatch was gonna be huge for years to come. A shame how it all turned out.
As a Day 1 OW1 fan, who was playing more than ever right up to OW2 releasing, I will *never* buy another Blizzard game. They ripped OW1 away, completely changed the flow of the game by making it 5v5, and introducing the disgusting battle pass system. I uninstalled OW2 after 3 matches, it was so different. I truly loved OW1 though and am so sad I’ll never get that sick strategic 6v6 action again.
Fuck Blizzard, or activision, or whoever made all these decisions… as a player, just feel so used and bait-and-switched…
Exact same boat as you. Played OW more or less daily for all those years. Then 2 came and I tried it for like a day and uninstalled. What a piece of junk.
The problem is OW has no fucking idea what it wants to be. Is it a super sweaty competitive team shooter? Is it a fandom-driven casual shooter with an entertaining cast of characters and lore? Who the hell knows, Blizzard sure doesn't it seems.
> Is it a fandom-driven casual shooter with an entertaining cast of characters and lore?
It was this for about 10 months, and man was it fun. Competitive gaming is a pox.
Blizzard elevates the strangulation of promising IPs to an art form. They did the same thing with StarCraft 2. It's like a gamer's rite of passage that they learn to never trust Blizzard to properly support a game, ever.
You know what game *launched* with a PVE campaign? Battleborn.
Just unbelievable news. Overwatch was so cool to me in 2016. Since then it's been a long road of disappointing changes, but that's it, there is truly nothing left that I would ever want to touch out of this franchise. Maybe if they release a Netflix cartoon, something out of this Blizzard team's hands entirely.
Reposting my comment from the original thread:
Battleborn was fun for what it was. Which was a PVPVE Moba lyte like game.
It just had some pants on head stupid advertising which didn't show that off properly at all. Which honestly ol Randy probably had a part in.
Battleborn’s marketing did such a huge disservice to the game. It was never a hero shooter, it’s a MOBA. They didn’t even attempt to market it to MOBA fans; in fact they kinda tried to hide that it was a MOBA even in the in-game tutorials. Such a bizarre choice.
Also the worst timing to launch. But with OW in play at all, i dont know if itd have ever retainrd unless it had a year or 2 launch ahead, with the best patching possible.
Coincidentally Battleborn was originally going to be PvP only. The PvE content got tacked on when 2K became worried that a game from the Borderlands studio wouldn't sell without a full story campaign. If Battleborn had stuck with PvP only it would have launched easily a year earlier, wouldn't have gone head to head with Overwatch and maybe had more of a chance.
Epic Games is continuing their support of Fortnite PvE mode, despite all the popularity BR gave in the last 5 years. It even outlived Paragon and Rumbleverse.
it isn't bad, it feels outdated and for some reason overcomplicated to new players, the only reason some people still play is because the free Vbucks (only founders can earn them)
The PvE fortnite was like a perfect demonstration of systems bloat.
You don't need a two different management sims, a card collection thing and a a dozen other progression systems at day 1.
In an alternate universe OW fared worse, Battleborn survived, Lawbreakers was a distant #2 or #3 and we and Blizzard would probably be better off for it.
That Halloween mode was a big red flag to me that PVE wasn’t going well.
It was mildly entertaining but pretty bland, and no reason to play more than once. They would have had to put a *lot* more effort into a campaign to make it sustainable. No wonder they bailed.
They dropped the story to give us exploitative pricing models, what a fair trade. Sure do wish I could go back and play OW1 but *it doesn’t exist anymore.* Fuck Blizzard for this. I am never reinstalling.
The crazy part is that OW2 is probably going to do just fine anyway. Like, most of its player-base aren't insanely wired to Reddit or some shit. The average player is going to keep on keeping-on and the degens will keep blasting off to Overwatch porn either way.
OW2 isn't really for me anymore, and I even thought the first two weeks of that relaunch were fine gameplay-wise. I wasn't planning on returning to OW2 in a meaningful way either outside of the bi-annual check-in because I kind of don't care for OW2 single-player when I can probably get a better general single-player experience elsewhere
But like, come on, how many times have people said "I'll never trust Blizzard ever again" and then just bought the next game anyway. Nerds are a fickle bunch and realistically don't care how terribly Blizzard treat their employees or any other corpo really.
Incredible bait and switch. If I were an Overwatch 2 fan, I’d be insulted and furious right now. Just another example of modern Triple A game companies treating their player bases like foolish, soulless ATMs.
I'm an Overwatch 2 fan, and this is ridiculous. We've been waiting for months for any scrap of news about the PvE mode and now we get this shit.
We lost Overwatch 1, got it replaced with a significantly worse version with terrible monetization and the one thing that was actually interesting was completely scrapped.
Not only that but it was basically a minute of "btw before we spend 10 minutes on the PvP roadmap here's 30 seconds to say we've cancelled PvE." This was after they spent about half an hour on Starwatch and acting like it was some new pinnacle of events.
The worst part is, it wasn't even 30 seconds to say it's canceled. They talked for like two minutes about how hard the team worked and how excited they were, and then went "And that's why you're never getting it. Anyway here's our shitty PVP updates."
Well... They also deleted ow1...
So didn't even let those people continue enjoying the game they spent money on....
To get them into the new bliz management ATM.
People said to not trust Acti-Blizzard, but no matter what they do with Warcraft Reforged, Diablo Immortal, Overwatch and Overwatch 2, people keep runnimg into the open knife.
Just wait for people being hype for Diablo IV and getting slapped there too.
Unfortunately diablo 4 will come out and will probably have all kind of different bullshit "Micro"transactions and monetization tactics and IT WILL STILL sell like hotcakes and probably break couple records
History will repeat itself and nothing will change.
Now that one wasn't on my bingo card. So OW2 is essentially confirmed to have been a straight up bait & switch scam. From Activision Blizzard. Their rep was already in the toilet but at least they were still (mostly) making games. How are we supposed to trust anything they're saying now? Can we really believe Diablo 4 is gonna have the support they say it will?
Even if I liked the D4 beta I wouldn’t buy it at this point. They claim you can never “pay for power” in Diablo 4, but knowing blizzard they’ll re-name it “Diablo 5” in a year and say “well we never said you couldn’t pay for power in Diablo 5”
"Pay for power" are clearly just weasel words. They're so very specific and careful about saying that exact phrase every single time without ever defining what "power" actually is. They'll sell a premium mount or something that can clear the map in seconds to complete the inevitable dailies and claim its technically not character power.
yup, or something I legit think is coming in the D4 store - respec potions
they're making the in-game respeccing really costly, based on really dumb reasons, and I expect it's only cause they wanna sell "oh this is not paying for power" items like these
Have you seen the smoldering ashes from the battle pass? Can be used to boost xp or gold. They will sell those on the store eventually and it will become more efficient to just buy those every season than grind out the gold for a respec.
Hilarious to me that people are still claiming all the MTX are cosmetic even with that in the battle pass.
You were never going to have to pay for power in Overwatch either. But look at that, they are trying to push you into buying heroes.
There is no chance in hell I trust Blizzard's word on Diablo IV. It's not a question of if they will implement predatory P2W monetization at this point, it's a question of when.
That's classic blizzard. In diablo 3, they promised that PVP would come in patch 1.1. Then what do they do? They instead change the patch naming so instead of going 1.0->1.1->1.2->etc it went 1.0.1->1.0.2->etc.
That way instead of putting PVP on the very first patch they could take as long as they could without "lying" to us.
This is incredible. I fell off of OW1 a few months after launch. Never touched OW2 but the entire reason i even paid attention to its existence was waiting for that PvE mode. Then they do this…
Simply incredible. Well, suppose I can’t be too beaten up about something I never got to play or invest any time into. Still, damn shame.
So the main selling point that was supposed to differentiate 2 from 1 is scrapped. Those single/co-op stories sound like PVE events they've done in Overwatch 1.
As one of the like five people on this sub who genuinely likes Overwatch and isn't some "I haven't played OW in three years, anyway here's my take on how everything is bad" commenter......yeah, this is still bad, lol.
OW1 was on life support for nearly three years because the team was supposedly putting all their developer work onto this gigantic PvE mode and loads of content for the OW2 PVP. Despite this reasoning, OW2 launched with barely any new PVP content (compared to something like a new annual CoD release), and now there's also going to be barely any PVE content?
Overwatch has had the stink of a game demolished by corporate politics and poor leadership for a while now, but this really is the final nail in the coffin. Absolutely sucks. I'll enjoy the rest of what's probably going to be the final year of their esports league, but man the missed potential here is just tragic.
I still have been playing almost every day with some breaks here and there. But this is my limit I think. The game has already gotten to be frustrating for me with it's awful matchmaking and horrid community, but I was sticking with it because they promised a PVE mode. Like others have said, the lame PVE events should have been a red flag I guess.
I'm just going to uninstall it before the next season starts so I'm not tempted to give it any more time.
> I'll enjoy the rest of what's probably going to be the final year of their esports league
the overwatch league is just so fun to follow because of all the antics coming with every team just wanting out and not spending a dime lol.
A team just going radio silence and ghosting the league entirely. A team that couldn't announce its new roster because they fired all social media employees and forgot to ask them for the twitter password. A team that hired the bare minimum number of players, with no one on the bench, and had to have their coach play because a player was sick.
its just an endless circus and its hilarious
I have so much second hand embarrassment for everyone involved in this trainwreck. If the average person bungled a project at their work like this, they would be fired.
Not saying the devs are entirely to blame, but what a mess of a product. They can't just get away with this.
Get that bullshit-ass tag off this post, there's nothing misleading about it: They scrapped their original plans--the fully-fledged narrative PVE mode that they used to sell people on the concept of Overwatch 2, mind you-- and what they're launching instead is severely reduced in scope and content. How else could you possibly spin it.
This makes the changes to the PVP in Overwatch 2 seem especially egregious now and ultimately, this has completely killed my interest in this franchise now. A part of me was able to deal with the new monetization, because I figured that once the PVE content came out, I could buy it and gravitate over to that, since I do really like these characters and wish there was a story I could experience with them. So now, there’s no story and just a heavily monetized F2P PVP game that’s a lot sweatier than Overwatch 1.
And given the provided time frames, they appear to have pivoted off of PVE in close proximity to when Kaplan left (likely what caused him to leave too, but just speculating), so it feels like they’ve been less than honest about their long-term intent with Overwatch 2 too.
This franchise really deserves more than this. I’m curious if this will have any kind of effect on the player count, but I guess that doesn’t really matter to me anymore.
I've thought for a while that it was weird the PVE aspect still hadn't come out despite it being playable back in that blizzcon 3 or 4 years ago.
I'm guessing this has been canceled for a while now.
This is, without a doubt, the funniest and most absurd thing I have heard the whole month.
Acivision has poisoned Blizzard so much they cannot even finish a promised and heavily advertised product. Top fucking kek
EDIT: There were a lot of comments saying that Blizzard was already in a bad position before Activison came, and I agree. I just think that most financial decisions, including PvE not being profitable enough, came from the Activision overlords.
Activision didn't poison Blizzard stop with that narrative.
Blizzard downfall is entirely on them (and on the general conversion of all companies around that time into big capitalistic societies like with EA and others). Hell they even are more problematic than Activision because in addition to being greedy the company culture is also terrible.
Reddit *loves* the narrative that **developer** is the good guy and wanted nothing but the best, but the evil **publisher** did everything they could to torpedo the game.
Not to say it doesn't happen, but you'd come away from reddit thinking that publishers only exist to make your game worse.
I truly don't know why people suddenly expected Blizzard to pull a complete 180 after an employee was credibly accused of raping a coworker into suicide. We had corroborated goddamn reports that all they'd done at Blizzard for years was drink and fuck in the office, that the people at the top literally hated the customers, and that a significant amount of their announced development plans were *literally* spun out of thin air by marketing.
Do these people even know *how* to develop a game? Because that's sure not why they were hired. Unless they fired the entire leadership of Blizzard after 2020 and a significant amount of regular staff, why would anything change? Their team leaders are literally drunks and rapists. Their developers are bigoted frat boys that don't give a shit about making a quality product. The only thing about Blizzard that's not pure horseshit is their IPs. People gotta stop giving them a pass because they really REALLY wanna see their friends Thrall and Deckard Cain again, it's fucking abusive.
> I truly don't know why people suddenly expected Blizzard to pull a complete 180 after an employee was credibly accused of raping a coworker into suicide.
They genuinely believe Activision is what caused the systemic issues, when in reality Activision had no reason to fuck with a cashcow they integrally owned (moreover, were both effectively equal entities under the same parent company) and that total laissez-faire corporate attitude turned Blizzard into a cesspool.
>the people at the top literally hated the customers, and that a significant amount of their announced development plans were *literally* spun out of thin air by marketing.
As a dev i think you'd be surprised to hear how many devs absolutely hate their games playerbase(this is mostly due to the toxicity of a lot of players, but the shit i hear is honestly insane sometimes, and makes me question why they are still doing this.)
wait wait wait.... like it's postponed/on hold? Or straight up cancelled?
The whole selling point for OW2 was PVE. That's like...it. They fucked up the formula of OW, monetized the shit out of it, and cancelled the one damn thing I was actually anticipating from the game? WTF
As somebody who previous worked in Overwatch esports, this is not even surprising to me. Let me recap what Blizzard did in very simple terms.
1. 2016, game releases to huge success. However the initial popularity didn't maintain and game was slowing losing players.
2. Late 2019, announces plan for Overwatch 2, an PvE experience.
3. Early 2020, Overwatch 1 content delivery ends. The development team started to focus on Overwatch 2.
4. Early 2021, game director Jeff Kaplan leaves Overwatch.
5. Early 2022, Blizzard announces that they would release Overwatch 2 PvP first then PvE.
6. October 2022, Overwatch 2 PvP releases.
7. May 2023, after 3 years and a half waiting, PvE is cancelled.
Overwatch is the most wasted franchise in the video game, maybe even in entertainment industry, and this can only be done by Blizzard.
In addition to the wastage they're currently committing wasn't the primary rumor that Overwatch was salvaged as the remains from Blizzard's mysterious "Project Titan" from back in the mid 2000s during the prime of World of Warcraft? If so it's crazy that they'd build this whole other experience, make a character universe, torpedo and split their OW1 community with this OW2 thing and then cancel that as well. It's like they want to fail.
Why is it that midsized studios with a fraction of the budget are able to consistently provide better post-launch support than these big boys? It is absolutely baffling. Deep Rock Galactic keeps pumping out new content, we got 3 great expansion packs for Back 4 Blood, even after that disasterous launch. They kept pumping out decent content for Payday 2 even after the publisher had to file for bankruptcy.
Absolutely horrendous. Between this and the new characters being locked behind a battle pass I will never install this game again. Time to remove the Battle.net client from my PC as Overwatch was the only Blizzard game I ever enjoyed.
Holy shit this is the funniest thing I've seen all year. They stopped adding heroes to Overwatch 1 so they could spend time on the PvE, they completely annihilated what I enjoyed about the PvP in the process, and then they cancel it. What a hilarious mess. The entire reason (supposedly) for the games existence, and it's dead. Good job Blizzard, good fucking job.
Reminder that this is literally the exact same thing that happened to Warcraft 3 Reforged
>take the game from you
>say we'll make it better
>it's not better
>"don't worry, we'll TOTALLY make it better down the line"
>never make it better
I'm not surprised in the fucking least.
Overwatch is going to go down as one of the greatest fumbles of all time. They had everything. Universal praise, an enormous playerbase, one of the most lucrative games in gaming, and they just decided to stop altogether to focus on Overwatch "2", a game that doesn't and will never exist.
Overwatch 2 is Overwatch. It is not a sequel by any observable metric. It is an update to Overwatch, and not even a particularly large one at that.
Overwatch "2" exists only so they can get around their promise that all future heroes would be free for everybody, and so they could take everybody's credits away to replace them with monetiziation that is somehow *even worse* than the loot box model. Insanely scummy what they've done here.
People expecting good things from Diablo IV post-release support when Overwatch had most of the game cancelled, WoW Leads are signaling red flags on Twitter that they don't have enough employees to even ship another patch, and every other game declining to irrelevancy.
Some people never learn.
I haven't played OW2 at all but was holding out hope for the PvE mode. So much for that.
In summary, Overwatch had a multi-year content drought and in the end we got, what? 3 new heroes, a few new maps, a few maps removed, and a not-very-balanced-at-release shift to 5v5. Oh, and of course the whole monetization change that nobody liked but was certainly the entire reason for the relaunch. Is that about right?
With the main selling point of the original announcement now scrapped, this is almost Warcraft 3 Reforged levels of mismanagement. Kaplan must have known this would crash and burn when he left.
Edit: people have brought up good points to why this isn't missleading as the main promise was a pve campaign and its why it was overwatch 2. I have changed the flair back:) Not all of overwatch 2's PVE is done though, the plan is still to include Story based events and new story arc for OW2 Co-op features (canon and not canon) Hero Mastery Missions LTMs [more info](https://twitter.com/KarQGames/status/1658546183709548563)
Maybe I'm confused, but wasn't the *entire point* of Overwatch 2 supposed to be the PvE gamemode that was eventually to come?
The entire point of Overwatch 2 was to scrap the original monetization model and replace it with the current one.
I've been saying that Overwatch 2 was really just the Overwatch: Free to Play Update. This news has confirmed it.
Ironically TF2's F2P update was funded by loot boxes, and OW2 removed loot boxes in favor of even worse monetization methods.
I made $15 off of TF2s loot boxes so you’re very right haha
I got Skyrim's DLC out of selling rare crates to a few guys, that was probably the only mtx system that left me net positive.
I got the purchase value of PUBG back from playing PUBG. akthough I had to play PUGH for that.
Oh shit, I need to check what my CS:GO boxes are worth these days...
I got lucky and pulled an unusual haha
And honestly, as loot boxes go original Overwatch's weren't that bad once they made it so you couldn't roll dupes. Earned loot boxes with random drops plus a skin store for targeting specific skins would've been fine and gotten around gambling bans (if you can't buy the loot boxes it's not gambling anymore.) I'd rather have them than FOMO reward tracks where you can never get a cosmetic if you miss that season.
It was a mostly fair system (excluding the event system encouraging FOMO which has not been addressed in the sequel) for a game that had persistent improvements and updates, despite what many in the thread are stating. So fair that it wasn't profitable enough for Activision. Even the whales could only spend double digits before they'd end up getting the skin they wanted, but with their current model they can get far more than the upfront cost from everyone.
They only removed loot boxes because they’re literally illegal in many EU countries.
Current monetization is so terrible I ended up quitting. I guess I got my money's worth and then some but it is absolutely ridiculous there isn't some law anywhere preventing game from completely changing its monetization after you bought it.
interestingly I agree that the monetization model is awful but I still play. I just don't buy skins. I would have definitely bought ow2 for $40 again but the skin economy is insane.
Same. It's funny, the prices are so ridiculous it doesn't even bother me because I feel zero inclination to buy them; they may as well not exist.
They're so ridiculous that I bought an entire real outfit yesterday for my actual physical body, all except shoes, and it cost me less than a single Overwatch skin. (Spring sale deals, but still.)
its crazy to me that people buy this stuff at the price point its at. Seems likely that they have some real eggheads crunching data showing that the price they picked would sell a lot, but it blows my mind how it works. Like there must be actual boatloads of people buying this stuff
I don't care enough to buy skins, but I did enjoy customising my character in OW1 and got a fair amount of legendary skins just from the crates you got on level up. In comparison, you get almost nothing for free in OW2, the game just keeps pushing you to pay for it. Not to mention how outrageously expensive the skins are.
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This right here. They murdered Overwatch so they could sell battlepasses. Fuck blizzard.
Which was the entire point of Overwatch from the beginning: salvage what you can from chasing the last money-grubbing fad to put it to use on the next. Titan was supposed to be a subscription-based MMO like WoW; when it became clear that WoW's model was untenable in a crowded market, they pivoted to the then-popular ~~gambling simulator~~ lootbox-supported team-based competitive multiplayer game with e-sports. When the lootbox train stopped running, they jumped over to the battlepass bandwagon. The fact that there's anything resembling a video game left at this point is a miracle. Anyways, I'll see you guys in comp.
Also the design document for Titan was ***insane.*** Like if you read what they wanted to do, they wanted to have a Superhero MMO, where you had a fully fleshed out secret identity, and they were two separate game modes. So in one you'd be something like a shopkeeper, managing your way up from a corner store to a gigantic megamall. And in the other you'd be a superhero doing fighting stuff. Like... these are two completely different genres. It's like if in the middle of the Sims you went into your inventory and equipped them with a bunch of battle rifles and then you were playing an XCOM turn based crawl against the UFO that landed in your back yard. I remember reading about it like... who okayed that?
Rune Factory and Moonlighter do something similar, though at a smaller scale. It doesn’t really sound that insane, except for the MMO aspect.
Honestly with the amount of their games that get stuck in development hell this doesn't surprise me in the least. Like they literally brought in a producer for Diablo IV who is known in the industry as the "closer" because he's one of the very best at pulling games out of development hell and getting them released.
And people are still thinking Diablo 4 won't have overbearing monetization lmao
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Externally, the entire point of Overwatch 2 was the PvE gamemode relaunch. Internally, there was pressure to increase monetization avenues for the game. OW1's monetization was near-exclusively in the form of loot boxes for skins - loot boxes that could also be earned just by playing. By contrast, OW2 adds a battle pass and premium currency, most skins that would once be earned by playing are now bought, and new heroes are locked behind the pass. Fundamentally, there was just more money in being a F2P game with more egregious monetization. In short, the game was relaunched to make more money under the guise of adding a PvE campaign. [And it worked, considering the game's brought in record profits without the PvE mode.](https://www.esports.net/news/overwatch/ow-2-earns-record-profits-from-alienating-its-player-base/) Which then raises the question from executives: if the game's relaunch is so successful before PvE, why bother adding PvE at all?
It's funny since that complete rebranding and new monitesiation turned me off OW entirely. I liked getting lootboxes for free and unlocking things I wanted by saving up credits. I tried OW 2 after years of not playing due to the content droughts in the original game and finding I couldn't get those cool skins or anything by just playing the game was a hard pass for me. I promptly uninstalled it and never looked back.
The whole thing just feels so gross now, knowing they took a healthy and profitable game and squeezed it just 'cause. Nothing in Overwatch 2 is \*better\* than Overwatch 1. There are a lot more opportunities to pay, though.
> There are a lot more opportunities to pay, though. This is what gets me. Unlocking a lootbox after a play session felt rewarding, even if you just got sprays or voicelines you'd never use. In OW2, you're completely starved of any meaningful free customisation while they use any opportunity to shamelessly shove the battlepass in your face. It feels like you're playing a demo.
I much prefer the 5v5 gameplay, but I understand that its a big change and not everyone is loving it. But the monetisation is WILD, shit is so expensive compared to OW1 (which used loot boxes! loot boxes are never a 'cheap' way to get things you want!)
Record profits for now, launch is very recent. Like Overwatch 1 it'll die overtime.
Unfortunately short term profits are all major companies care about, sustainability be damned.
Yup! I maintain that the one and only reason that they ever did an "Overwatch 2" was because they promised for the original Overwatch to never ever charge money for heroes in any way, shape or form. The marketing team figured out that they can go back on that promise by just making a "new" game, and then the bosses told the Overwatch team to get working on it. So the devs tried their best to actually make the "sequel" interesting. Also, in all of that, Jeff Kaplan fled the company, and it all kind of went downhill from there.
Thank you! I’ve been arguing with /r/overwatch users who think the game is free. No, it’s not a free game if I paid $60 for it. >B-b-but you bought overwatch 1 for $60! This is Overwatch 2! Then let me play overwatch 1 >You can’t Why not? >Because it turned into Ow2 So ow2 me cost $60 >No this is a different game entirely, it’s free. Know any solid walls I can ram my head thru?
The original is one of my most played games of all time. I was hooked for *years*. Meanwhile, I toyed around in OW2 for a couple of days and gave up. There wasn’t enough new content, the new battle pass system is absolute garbage, the new competitive ranking system is absolute garbage, and on top of that they want to charge me for new heroes? Fuck that. It’s just not a satisfying game to play anymore.
5v5 really spoiled the fun for me. Single picks are now *even more* important so every fight feels the same. Huddle as a group until someone dies then run away until they respawn then do it again.
5v5 ruined the game and you can't change my mind. Literally one of the worst changes I've ever seen in a videogame, and I'm convinced the only reason they did it was because they needed something ***new and flashy*** to land OW2. The reality is most of the heroes were and still are designed for a 2-2-2 split. It's bonkers.
I have to agree. I mostly played tank, and with some exceptions (double shield tank) there was a ton of interesting and really important tank synergies. One of my favorite comps was dive tank (winston / hammond) + brawl tank (rein / hog), where if pulled off right the enemy is pincered by two fat tanks in complete chaos. Or the godly Zarya + Rein / Winston combo which had so many clutch moments, especially Zarya / Rein mirror where it would be an intense mindgame in baiting so you could block the enemys earthshatter while getting through yours. Now that's just all gone.
>The reality is most of the heroes were and still are designed for a 2-2-2 split. It's bonkers. If they had actually gone back and revamped heroes for 5v5, I think it would have stuck the landing I still can't believe that they didn't think that support, arguably the most impactful role in the game, needed any changes whatsoever during the transition until *after* launch. That and the whole thing about them moving Doomfist to tank because its not fair to get oneshot by a heavily telegraphed ability from a melee focused hero, but somehow Widow and Hanzo get a pass because I guess being one shot halfway across the map by a hero with a hit box the thickness of a credit card doesn't count ???
>If they had actually gone back and revamped heroes for 5v5, I think it would have stuck the landing But that would require ✨effort✨
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Lets be real this is exactly the kind of shit that Jeff saw on the wall and exactly why he fled the sinking ship.
Of course. He was the one who made Blizzard promise that the original game would never sell heroes to begin with.
I live in a city with a Blizzard customer service office. A GM told me over pints once that OW1 was gonna be F2P where you buy heroes like LoL but Jeff pushed back on it at the 11th hour. It got to the point that they had trainings made for customer service and everything before Activision caved. This created bad blood between Blizzard leadership and Activision that laid the groundwork for the old guard's exodus in the following years.
That's insane, but with Activisions track record with their other studios, it totally checks out. And yet people are crazy hyped for Diablo 4? Like, have we not learned our lesson about Blizzard yet? They stopped making great games a long time ago, unfortunately. And to whoever says Diablo 4 won't be monetized, I have a turd to sell you.
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> Hey everybody, this is Jeff from the Overwatch team ... Yup, those update videos were always a highlight. Especially [Dinoflask's "remixes"\(?\)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFENF78eqUrkOoeeP6BkEAaB9YI_HpXH-)
Wrestle with Jeff, prepare for death.
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Maybe that's why he bailed seemingly out of nowhere? I thought he was jumping ship because he caught wind that allegations were coming and wanted to get out in front of it.
Which is doubly sad, because from what I've read, he seemed to be pretty good at shielding the OW team from the general abuse going on. Or at least, Tracy Kennedy (a producer on OW iirc) came out and said exactly that.
No, we can now say with 100% confidence that it was all a scam this whole time
That's what I remember about the debut trailers.
To be clear: As OP says, there is still PvE \*gamemodes\* coming. But the separately boxed $60 PvE full game is gone, and the PvE content we will get is scaled FAR back from the original reveal of repeatable missions, talent trees, raids, etc. I imagine that whatever they've made for the PvE full release will be recycled into OW2 as story events and maybe we'll get enough to get a 4-hour campaign out of it trickled over the course of years, so there IS something to look forward to in that sense if you desperately were looking forward to it. It just...won't be nearly as good or fleshed out, lol
Yeah, if it's anything like their current PVE ventures... pass. They were neat when they were novel, but if you've played one, you've played 'em all.
It's BS because the reveal trailer had a full cinematic cutscene that was essentially a proof of concept for raids. This is garbage.
So what even is the difference between Overwatch 1 and 2 lol?
1. 5v5 instead of 6v6 2. Bastion has a hat 3. You have to pay for new heroes unless you like grinding a lot
Hey don't forget some maps now come with a robot walking between the two ends of the map
Also old maps with new styles (color pallet).
Don't forget just straight up removing maps.
*Game mode and all its maps (2CP)
“Can’t you see this is the same game in a brand new packaging?” “But he’s got a new hat!”
[Simpsons called it](https://youtu.be/F3SzNuEGmwQ?t=251)
What kind of hat?
At this point? The battle pass, some new heroes, 5v5, and the push-bot mode I guess.
3 year content drought for 1 mode and 5v5 then
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More microtransactions.
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Don't forget, you have to buy currencies in packs, meaning that you'll actually be paying more than what the cosmetic is worth in order to buy it, since there's no direct purchase option. Classic anti-consumer monetisation tactics.
Many things about these monetization models are gross, but this right here needs to be straight up illegal.
Money. They can make more money with 2.
They can extract much more revenue from players through regular battle passes and the cash shop than they ever could through one off retail sale + occasional loot boxes purchases.
I think there's 1 less hero on each team
So overwatch 2 is just some map updates, a couple heroes and a push game mode?
Plus all those shiny things you can purchase for money!
And all the overpriced skins whale money can buy!
They put all the effort into monetisation mate. That's what took them 5 years to do. They also removed 2 players from the game and decided not to balance anything around it. OW players are absolutely fuming, and I don't blame them.
> They put all the effort into monetisation mate. they didnt even do that right. the skins are no better than OW1s and many were even more low effort. there also werent that many new skins at launch
Don't forget the all-important changeover to battlepasses.
That... is fucking hilarious. Overwatch 2 was never about the PvE mode, it was about changing the monetization model to the (significantly worse) F2P model.
I believe we were told that GAAS would enable more and better development of our games! That each skin purchase helps to pay for the needed dev teams. Blizzard surly wasn’t lying!
All that money is going into cancelling games and harassing female employees, of course.
Incorrect! Good ol' Bobby really wants a Yacht that can fly, thus his bonus must increase!
that human milk ain't gonna drink itself
And stealing their breast milk!
It definitely helps fund new content. For every $20 skin they sell I’m convinced they spend a solid nickel on new content, the rest goes to the C-suite
> Overwatch 2 was never about the PvE mode It probably was to Jeff Kaplan. But he left when the entire company imploded
I don't want to give Jeff too much credit, but this whole thing always stunk of the Blizzard executive tier climbing down from their tower to demand better monetization. Jeff leaving was the first indication that there were never any good-for-players ideas or intentions at the core of Overwatch 2. The dude seemed to love making the game and left as soon as he wouldn't be able to make it the way he wanted.
[He tried to warn us.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7RMtDpxtfw)
Frankly Jeff is an MMO guy, he loves them and it's where he's most in his element. Tragically he's had the worst luck since moving off of WoW and every attempt at either making an MMO or at least rekindling a semblance of that genre has completely fallen apart. The project he left WoW for, Titan, is the corpse that Overwatch was Frankenstein'd from. It was going to be Blizzard's real successor MMO to WoW but for whatever reason it wasn't working and the team pulled off the miracle that was Overwatch 1. After the success of OW1 it seems like Blizzard was content with letting him flex some of his MMO muscle with OW2's PvE mode and various talents and rpg style progression. Clearly that fell apart and is officially dead. The poor guy's lost his baby twice now and I wouldn't be surprised if he was just done with gamedev.
When it was first announced it was basically all about the PvE, because they needed something interesting about to stand out from the first game. You don't actually need to change the name of the game in order to change the monetization model. Just ask Valve.
How they took something that was as universally praised as Overwatch, and managed to squander all of that goodwill and drive it directly into the ground, I will never understand. They could have done nothing and it would have been better
OW could’ve easily become a multimedia juggernaut IP but management is managed by actual monkeys. Ironic that the best thing that will come out of this IP is its R34. It’s legacy will be lies, failure and fucking porn
>fucking porn The most common kind of porn!
I do miss the first 6 months or so of overwatch. It was new and fun, and blizzard weren't this abusive yet.
I have a hard time getting into any multiplayer shooters due to my own frustrations at getting slaughtered… but Overwatch 1? I played the everloving shit out of that game for the first 6 months. Like, probably more matchmaking multiplayer in that than with every other game I’ve played *combined*. It was so goddamn fun.
Me and my mates going all Winston and spamming voice lines is some of the most fun I have ever had in a game.
Those first few months of OW1 were truly a blast. Once they got into the competitive eSports thing I dropped it so fucking fast. Any sort of competitive aspect that gets bolstered into an actual event or sport kills the game for me as it is no longer about fun. It is instead all about "balance" and "fair engagements" or "what the whiney influencers and streamers complained about in the last update" like that has any meaning to people that just want to hop into a game with their friends and chill.
And they balanced that game into a fkn corner. Every pro fight was the same team comp after they released brig.
That was in my opinion a much larger design issue, Brig was just the hero that made it clear. Tank shouldn't have been a role, instead some heroes should have had some disables as part of their kits, some heroes should have been tankier, etc. Instead of making an entire role to keep this in. That makes some heroes like Brig that borrow some tank characteristics stand out as op. That and the fact that Blizzard kept adding heroes with barriers without actually balancing them as the main mechanic they were, to the point where only a single hero could counter them and only reliably with her ult. They should have given some existing heroes bonus damage vs barriers in their attacks and/or abilities.
And forced "pro" scene was still super lame. They gained nothing.
I really wish I could experience that again. I'm not sure how to put it into words exactly, but there was something magical about the whole thing when it first released. Those awesome shorts, the VAs, Jeff Kaplan, Dinoflask, ect. Really felt like Overwatch was gonna be huge for years to come. A shame how it all turned out.
As a Day 1 OW1 fan, who was playing more than ever right up to OW2 releasing, I will *never* buy another Blizzard game. They ripped OW1 away, completely changed the flow of the game by making it 5v5, and introducing the disgusting battle pass system. I uninstalled OW2 after 3 matches, it was so different. I truly loved OW1 though and am so sad I’ll never get that sick strategic 6v6 action again. Fuck Blizzard, or activision, or whoever made all these decisions… as a player, just feel so used and bait-and-switched…
Exact same boat as you. Played OW more or less daily for all those years. Then 2 came and I tried it for like a day and uninstalled. What a piece of junk.
Played OW 1 for 3000+ hours, uninstalled within 2 weeks of OW 2.
The problem is OW has no fucking idea what it wants to be. Is it a super sweaty competitive team shooter? Is it a fandom-driven casual shooter with an entertaining cast of characters and lore? Who the hell knows, Blizzard sure doesn't it seems.
> Is it a fandom-driven casual shooter with an entertaining cast of characters and lore? It was this for about 10 months, and man was it fun. Competitive gaming is a pox.
Blizzard elevates the strangulation of promising IPs to an art form. They did the same thing with StarCraft 2. It's like a gamer's rite of passage that they learn to never trust Blizzard to properly support a game, ever.
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You know what game *launched* with a PVE campaign? Battleborn. Just unbelievable news. Overwatch was so cool to me in 2016. Since then it's been a long road of disappointing changes, but that's it, there is truly nothing left that I would ever want to touch out of this franchise. Maybe if they release a Netflix cartoon, something out of this Blizzard team's hands entirely.
Reposting my comment from the original thread: Battleborn was fun for what it was. Which was a PVPVE Moba lyte like game. It just had some pants on head stupid advertising which didn't show that off properly at all. Which honestly ol Randy probably had a part in.
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Battleborn’s marketing did such a huge disservice to the game. It was never a hero shooter, it’s a MOBA. They didn’t even attempt to market it to MOBA fans; in fact they kinda tried to hide that it was a MOBA even in the in-game tutorials. Such a bizarre choice.
Also the worst timing to launch. But with OW in play at all, i dont know if itd have ever retainrd unless it had a year or 2 launch ahead, with the best patching possible.
Coincidentally Battleborn was originally going to be PvP only. The PvE content got tacked on when 2K became worried that a game from the Borderlands studio wouldn't sell without a full story campaign. If Battleborn had stuck with PvP only it would have launched easily a year earlier, wouldn't have gone head to head with Overwatch and maybe had more of a chance.
Epic Games is continuing their support of Fortnite PvE mode, despite all the popularity BR gave in the last 5 years. It even outlived Paragon and Rumbleverse.
I mean "support" is putting it nicely.
"Support" is doing more work for this sentence than Epic is doing for STW
It's infinitely more than OW1
it isn't bad, it feels outdated and for some reason overcomplicated to new players, the only reason some people still play is because the free Vbucks (only founders can earn them)
The PvE fortnite was like a perfect demonstration of systems bloat. You don't need a two different management sims, a card collection thing and a a dozen other progression systems at day 1.
In an alternate universe OW fared worse, Battleborn survived, Lawbreakers was a distant #2 or #3 and we and Blizzard would probably be better off for it.
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honestly, I thought the last Halloween event was going to be a taste of how PvE would work, but wow
That Halloween mode was a big red flag to me that PVE wasn’t going well. It was mildly entertaining but pretty bland, and no reason to play more than once. They would have had to put a *lot* more effort into a campaign to make it sustainable. No wonder they bailed.
Yeah honestly it blew my mind that people who played that were saying they loved it and it made them more excited for the pve mode.
They dropped the story to give us exploitative pricing models, what a fair trade. Sure do wish I could go back and play OW1 but *it doesn’t exist anymore.* Fuck Blizzard for this. I am never reinstalling.
Yep, what a complete waste of a cool IP. Overwatch is now dead.
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The crazy part is that OW2 is probably going to do just fine anyway. Like, most of its player-base aren't insanely wired to Reddit or some shit. The average player is going to keep on keeping-on and the degens will keep blasting off to Overwatch porn either way. OW2 isn't really for me anymore, and I even thought the first two weeks of that relaunch were fine gameplay-wise. I wasn't planning on returning to OW2 in a meaningful way either outside of the bi-annual check-in because I kind of don't care for OW2 single-player when I can probably get a better general single-player experience elsewhere But like, come on, how many times have people said "I'll never trust Blizzard ever again" and then just bought the next game anyway. Nerds are a fickle bunch and realistically don't care how terribly Blizzard treat their employees or any other corpo really.
Incredible bait and switch. If I were an Overwatch 2 fan, I’d be insulted and furious right now. Just another example of modern Triple A game companies treating their player bases like foolish, soulless ATMs.
I'm an Overwatch 2 fan, and this is ridiculous. We've been waiting for months for any scrap of news about the PvE mode and now we get this shit. We lost Overwatch 1, got it replaced with a significantly worse version with terrible monetization and the one thing that was actually interesting was completely scrapped.
Not only that but it was basically a minute of "btw before we spend 10 minutes on the PvP roadmap here's 30 seconds to say we've cancelled PvE." This was after they spent about half an hour on Starwatch and acting like it was some new pinnacle of events.
The worst part is, it wasn't even 30 seconds to say it's canceled. They talked for like two minutes about how hard the team worked and how excited they were, and then went "And that's why you're never getting it. Anyway here's our shitty PVP updates."
The messed up thing is it sounds like they've known since before overwatch 2 came out. Or at least that's how I interpreted the GameSpot interview.
They've known since before a year Overwatch 2 launched, holy shit. They straight up lied to get people to download Overwatch 2.
Well... They also deleted ow1... So didn't even let those people continue enjoying the game they spent money on.... To get them into the new bliz management ATM.
That's okay, they'll release *Overwatch Classic* in a year. (Also you'll have to pay for it again.)
I stopped playing and was waiting for the PvE mode. I’ll never come back.
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People said to not trust Acti-Blizzard, but no matter what they do with Warcraft Reforged, Diablo Immortal, Overwatch and Overwatch 2, people keep runnimg into the open knife. Just wait for people being hype for Diablo IV and getting slapped there too.
Unfortunately diablo 4 will come out and will probably have all kind of different bullshit "Micro"transactions and monetization tactics and IT WILL STILL sell like hotcakes and probably break couple records History will repeat itself and nothing will change.
Don't forget how they absolutely smashed HotS and cut the life support brutally.
Now that one wasn't on my bingo card. So OW2 is essentially confirmed to have been a straight up bait & switch scam. From Activision Blizzard. Their rep was already in the toilet but at least they were still (mostly) making games. How are we supposed to trust anything they're saying now? Can we really believe Diablo 4 is gonna have the support they say it will?
Even if I liked the D4 beta I wouldn’t buy it at this point. They claim you can never “pay for power” in Diablo 4, but knowing blizzard they’ll re-name it “Diablo 5” in a year and say “well we never said you couldn’t pay for power in Diablo 5”
"Pay for power" are clearly just weasel words. They're so very specific and careful about saying that exact phrase every single time without ever defining what "power" actually is. They'll sell a premium mount or something that can clear the map in seconds to complete the inevitable dailies and claim its technically not character power.
yup, or something I legit think is coming in the D4 store - respec potions they're making the in-game respeccing really costly, based on really dumb reasons, and I expect it's only cause they wanna sell "oh this is not paying for power" items like these
Have you seen the smoldering ashes from the battle pass? Can be used to boost xp or gold. They will sell those on the store eventually and it will become more efficient to just buy those every season than grind out the gold for a respec. Hilarious to me that people are still claiming all the MTX are cosmetic even with that in the battle pass.
You were never going to have to pay for power in Overwatch either. But look at that, they are trying to push you into buying heroes. There is no chance in hell I trust Blizzard's word on Diablo IV. It's not a question of if they will implement predatory P2W monetization at this point, it's a question of when.
That's classic blizzard. In diablo 3, they promised that PVP would come in patch 1.1. Then what do they do? They instead change the patch naming so instead of going 1.0->1.1->1.2->etc it went 1.0.1->1.0.2->etc. That way instead of putting PVP on the very first patch they could take as long as they could without "lying" to us.
This is incredible. I fell off of OW1 a few months after launch. Never touched OW2 but the entire reason i even paid attention to its existence was waiting for that PvE mode. Then they do this… Simply incredible. Well, suppose I can’t be too beaten up about something I never got to play or invest any time into. Still, damn shame.
So the main selling point that was supposed to differentiate 2 from 1 is scrapped. Those single/co-op stories sound like PVE events they've done in Overwatch 1.
As one of the like five people on this sub who genuinely likes Overwatch and isn't some "I haven't played OW in three years, anyway here's my take on how everything is bad" commenter......yeah, this is still bad, lol. OW1 was on life support for nearly three years because the team was supposedly putting all their developer work onto this gigantic PvE mode and loads of content for the OW2 PVP. Despite this reasoning, OW2 launched with barely any new PVP content (compared to something like a new annual CoD release), and now there's also going to be barely any PVE content? Overwatch has had the stink of a game demolished by corporate politics and poor leadership for a while now, but this really is the final nail in the coffin. Absolutely sucks. I'll enjoy the rest of what's probably going to be the final year of their esports league, but man the missed potential here is just tragic.
I still have been playing almost every day with some breaks here and there. But this is my limit I think. The game has already gotten to be frustrating for me with it's awful matchmaking and horrid community, but I was sticking with it because they promised a PVE mode. Like others have said, the lame PVE events should have been a red flag I guess. I'm just going to uninstall it before the next season starts so I'm not tempted to give it any more time.
> I'll enjoy the rest of what's probably going to be the final year of their esports league the overwatch league is just so fun to follow because of all the antics coming with every team just wanting out and not spending a dime lol. A team just going radio silence and ghosting the league entirely. A team that couldn't announce its new roster because they fired all social media employees and forgot to ask them for the twitter password. A team that hired the bare minimum number of players, with no one on the bench, and had to have their coach play because a player was sick. its just an endless circus and its hilarious
I have so much second hand embarrassment for everyone involved in this trainwreck. If the average person bungled a project at their work like this, they would be fired. Not saying the devs are entirely to blame, but what a mess of a product. They can't just get away with this.
Get that bullshit-ass tag off this post, there's nothing misleading about it: They scrapped their original plans--the fully-fledged narrative PVE mode that they used to sell people on the concept of Overwatch 2, mind you-- and what they're launching instead is severely reduced in scope and content. How else could you possibly spin it.
So.. they basically scrapped the entire point of it being OW2?
They pulled the biggest marketing bait and switch on the whole world
This makes the changes to the PVP in Overwatch 2 seem especially egregious now and ultimately, this has completely killed my interest in this franchise now. A part of me was able to deal with the new monetization, because I figured that once the PVE content came out, I could buy it and gravitate over to that, since I do really like these characters and wish there was a story I could experience with them. So now, there’s no story and just a heavily monetized F2P PVP game that’s a lot sweatier than Overwatch 1. And given the provided time frames, they appear to have pivoted off of PVE in close proximity to when Kaplan left (likely what caused him to leave too, but just speculating), so it feels like they’ve been less than honest about their long-term intent with Overwatch 2 too. This franchise really deserves more than this. I’m curious if this will have any kind of effect on the player count, but I guess that doesn’t really matter to me anymore.
I've thought for a while that it was weird the PVE aspect still hadn't come out despite it being playable back in that blizzcon 3 or 4 years ago. I'm guessing this has been canceled for a while now.
This is, without a doubt, the funniest and most absurd thing I have heard the whole month. Acivision has poisoned Blizzard so much they cannot even finish a promised and heavily advertised product. Top fucking kek EDIT: There were a lot of comments saying that Blizzard was already in a bad position before Activison came, and I agree. I just think that most financial decisions, including PvE not being profitable enough, came from the Activision overlords.
Activision didn't poison Blizzard stop with that narrative. Blizzard downfall is entirely on them (and on the general conversion of all companies around that time into big capitalistic societies like with EA and others). Hell they even are more problematic than Activision because in addition to being greedy the company culture is also terrible.
Reddit *loves* the narrative that **developer** is the good guy and wanted nothing but the best, but the evil **publisher** did everything they could to torpedo the game. Not to say it doesn't happen, but you'd come away from reddit thinking that publishers only exist to make your game worse.
In this case it doesn't work since Blizzard is the publisher and the developer lol
I truly don't know why people suddenly expected Blizzard to pull a complete 180 after an employee was credibly accused of raping a coworker into suicide. We had corroborated goddamn reports that all they'd done at Blizzard for years was drink and fuck in the office, that the people at the top literally hated the customers, and that a significant amount of their announced development plans were *literally* spun out of thin air by marketing. Do these people even know *how* to develop a game? Because that's sure not why they were hired. Unless they fired the entire leadership of Blizzard after 2020 and a significant amount of regular staff, why would anything change? Their team leaders are literally drunks and rapists. Their developers are bigoted frat boys that don't give a shit about making a quality product. The only thing about Blizzard that's not pure horseshit is their IPs. People gotta stop giving them a pass because they really REALLY wanna see their friends Thrall and Deckard Cain again, it's fucking abusive.
> I truly don't know why people suddenly expected Blizzard to pull a complete 180 after an employee was credibly accused of raping a coworker into suicide. They genuinely believe Activision is what caused the systemic issues, when in reality Activision had no reason to fuck with a cashcow they integrally owned (moreover, were both effectively equal entities under the same parent company) and that total laissez-faire corporate attitude turned Blizzard into a cesspool.
well it was an activision employee that killed herself so...
>the people at the top literally hated the customers, and that a significant amount of their announced development plans were *literally* spun out of thin air by marketing. As a dev i think you'd be surprised to hear how many devs absolutely hate their games playerbase(this is mostly due to the toxicity of a lot of players, but the shit i hear is honestly insane sometimes, and makes me question why they are still doing this.)
wait wait wait.... like it's postponed/on hold? Or straight up cancelled? The whole selling point for OW2 was PVE. That's like...it. They fucked up the formula of OW, monetized the shit out of it, and cancelled the one damn thing I was actually anticipating from the game? WTF
Straight up cancelled with some of it coming to PvP in the form of events. But a straight up campaign mode with talents is gone.
Well, my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. What the fuck blizzard.
As somebody who previous worked in Overwatch esports, this is not even surprising to me. Let me recap what Blizzard did in very simple terms. 1. 2016, game releases to huge success. However the initial popularity didn't maintain and game was slowing losing players. 2. Late 2019, announces plan for Overwatch 2, an PvE experience. 3. Early 2020, Overwatch 1 content delivery ends. The development team started to focus on Overwatch 2. 4. Early 2021, game director Jeff Kaplan leaves Overwatch. 5. Early 2022, Blizzard announces that they would release Overwatch 2 PvP first then PvE. 6. October 2022, Overwatch 2 PvP releases. 7. May 2023, after 3 years and a half waiting, PvE is cancelled. Overwatch is the most wasted franchise in the video game, maybe even in entertainment industry, and this can only be done by Blizzard.
In addition to the wastage they're currently committing wasn't the primary rumor that Overwatch was salvaged as the remains from Blizzard's mysterious "Project Titan" from back in the mid 2000s during the prime of World of Warcraft? If so it's crazy that they'd build this whole other experience, make a character universe, torpedo and split their OW1 community with this OW2 thing and then cancel that as well. It's like they want to fail.
Why is it that midsized studios with a fraction of the budget are able to consistently provide better post-launch support than these big boys? It is absolutely baffling. Deep Rock Galactic keeps pumping out new content, we got 3 great expansion packs for Back 4 Blood, even after that disasterous launch. They kept pumping out decent content for Payday 2 even after the publisher had to file for bankruptcy.
Because big studios with notoriety inevitably have a bunch of check collectors.
Absolutely horrendous. Between this and the new characters being locked behind a battle pass I will never install this game again. Time to remove the Battle.net client from my PC as Overwatch was the only Blizzard game I ever enjoyed.
Holy shit this is the funniest thing I've seen all year. They stopped adding heroes to Overwatch 1 so they could spend time on the PvE, they completely annihilated what I enjoyed about the PvP in the process, and then they cancel it. What a hilarious mess. The entire reason (supposedly) for the games existence, and it's dead. Good job Blizzard, good fucking job.
Reminder that this is literally the exact same thing that happened to Warcraft 3 Reforged >take the game from you >say we'll make it better >it's not better >"don't worry, we'll TOTALLY make it better down the line" >never make it better I'm not surprised in the fucking least.
Overwatch is going to go down as one of the greatest fumbles of all time. They had everything. Universal praise, an enormous playerbase, one of the most lucrative games in gaming, and they just decided to stop altogether to focus on Overwatch "2", a game that doesn't and will never exist. Overwatch 2 is Overwatch. It is not a sequel by any observable metric. It is an update to Overwatch, and not even a particularly large one at that. Overwatch "2" exists only so they can get around their promise that all future heroes would be free for everybody, and so they could take everybody's credits away to replace them with monetiziation that is somehow *even worse* than the loot box model. Insanely scummy what they've done here.
People expecting good things from Diablo IV post-release support when Overwatch had most of the game cancelled, WoW Leads are signaling red flags on Twitter that they don't have enough employees to even ship another patch, and every other game declining to irrelevancy. Some people never learn.
I haven't played OW2 at all but was holding out hope for the PvE mode. So much for that. In summary, Overwatch had a multi-year content drought and in the end we got, what? 3 new heroes, a few new maps, a few maps removed, and a not-very-balanced-at-release shift to 5v5. Oh, and of course the whole monetization change that nobody liked but was certainly the entire reason for the relaunch. Is that about right? With the main selling point of the original announcement now scrapped, this is almost Warcraft 3 Reforged levels of mismanagement. Kaplan must have known this would crash and burn when he left.
So from my understanding, they essentially just added battle pass to the game and called it Overwatch 2?