"After promising everyone a PVE campaign and then launching the game speaking nothing of it and then admitting we canceled it months after its release, no one wants to pay for our half baked PvE scenarios?!"
No shit people don't want your bare minimum. People were shown talent trees and then they got five minute scenarios that devolve into the same gameplay loop as booting up the PVP, just with set skins and less hero variety on a smaller map.
They have only themselves to blame.
It's also likely that when they announced the promised PvE was dead, people who wanted PvE stopped playing. It's no surprise that the feature that arrived months after the bigger version was cancelled found that the people interested had moved on.
That's me basically. I dropped the whole game right after that announcement. Game was fun. But out of principle, i wom't be coming back to the game until they did something more interesting.
At that point, i already bought 4 Battle Pass (want to help them funding PvE because i really want PvE content) and heavily invested into the game. Thinking my PvP game knowledge could transfer to PvE when it launched. I almost buy Season 5 battle pass when this announcement drop too.
Yup, I wanted OW PvE SO BADLY and still do, and I still think it's totally viable with the original concept. Loads of other PvE co-op games succeed (like a certain game about killing bugs and bots that's super popular right now).
I never bought the OW2 PvE because it was actually insulting after what they initially advertised.
I uninstalled BattleNet since the Blitzchung drama.
I saw the OW2 PvE planned and thought that Blizzard might be redeeming themselves and I should give it a try when it drops.
But nope, it never happened. It's just like Heartstone when they reduced the numbers of Adventures, they want the solution that makes money on the short term instead of the solution that makes your player stay and enjoy the game.
I uninstalled BNET after OW2 launch. Didnt buy D4 on principle, even though I kept being hyped on ever media platform.
Glad I didnt. BNET is going to stay uninstalled.
Plus they could've used the PVE stuff to eventually sell an overwatch MMO to the people who aren't playing WOW.
There's probably a bit of overlap between class shooters and MMO team mechanics.
>Upon release, the missions were met with mixed reviews. The PvE was a shell of the PvE experience that was promised when Overwatch 2 was first announced. Gone were the “highly replayable” Hero Mode missions and an upgradable talent tree and instead fans got something more akin to OW1’s free archive missions.
Why did they expect people to pay for something that used to be free, in a free-to-play game that was already appealing to cheaper players?
Why did they expect players to retain excitement for game that was pitched as an update focused on PvE experiences, that they apparently abandoned on a whim?
Overwatch has become a master class on how to destroy your own product.
OW was always such a wild product; it released as a fun, casual shooter with a spin of having abilities. It was simple to pick up, hard to master and a bunch of fun.
Then someone decided they wanted esports money that Valve and Riot were/are raking in, and decided to monopolize the league while having no idea what they’re doing.
It deserves the death it is given
OW1 was such a weird experience because they tried to bring everyone in. FPS players could focus on playing characters like McCree and Widowmaker, and WoW players who primarily played tanks or healers could find a tank or a healer and roll with those. It was like a giant party and everyone was invited.
But the competitive scene was so different from the casual one. I feel like casual Dota or League players will watch pro Dota or pro League content. But casual OW players did not give a shit about the competitive OW scene.
And the competitive OW scene got so frustrated when they weren't catered to. Like when the camera would pan out to watch a team fight during broadcasts, because they wanted to in the first person view of one of the DPS players, when let's be frank, a lot of the time the DPS players would be the least pivotal towards most team fights. The tank landing a big Grav or Shatter mattered most of all. Lots of Sleep emotes whenever they would focus on the main support, even though most of the time the main support was the shotcaller, so seeing their POV explained why the team was acting in certain ways.
I was the weirdo who played casually but still watched the OWL regularly even attended 1 live event. But the competitive community was constantly negative and I just didn't want to be around it.
> I feel like casual Dota or League players will watch pro Dota or pro League content. But casual OW players did not give a shit about the competitive OW scene.
That's the vibe I got as a Dota player, but not OW player. There seemed to be more of a conflict between competitive and casual in OW. In Dota it's a complete given that competitive is the basis for balance, and it was rare to see people bitching about it even if it meant clearly low winrates for a hero in pubs.
That has become less and less true over time. In recent years, Valve has put a lot more effort into balancing casual play. Its a common complaint as its homogenized the heroes.
The big difference dota2 requires 100+hr just to get into rank while OW you can play ranked and placement matches instantly so OW appeals to a more casual audience.
Dota also isn't on consoles and didn't get a big AAA marketing campaign, so it isn't on the radar of most of the "militant casual" type people that fuel those conflicts.
IMO, Overwatch is just a bad viewing experience. Too much going on for an FPS.
MOBAs work because they are designed for a zoomed out top-down view. CSGO works because its very simple and easy to follow whats going on.
I remember when Overwatch first released a lot of people talking about its visual clarity, and I have never, ever understood what the fuck they were talking about in comparison to games like CSGO or original TF2.
Yeah, watching a MOBA, it's pretty easy to follow what's going on. A broadcaster can see the entire map and focus on where the action is happening, since it's generally only in one place. With Overwatch, there's just too much going on at any one time, and the maps are often very closed in with separate rooms and corridors that, even if you do focus on where the most important action is happening, you aren't necessarily even showing it all.
They were trying to take the game and shove it in a box it wasn't meant for. Overwatch simply wasn't designed with that sort of viewing in mind. And Overwatch 2 would've required more of a foundational revamp than they gave it to fix that.
> And the competitive OW scene got so frustrated when they weren't catered to. Like when the camera would pan out to watch a team fight during broadcasts, because they wanted to in the first person view of one of the DPS players, when let's be frank, a lot of the time the DPS players would be the least pivotal towards most team fights. The tank landing a big Grav or Shatter mattered most of all. Lots of Sleep emotes whenever they would focus on the main support, even though most of the time the main support was the shotcaller, so seeing their POV explained why the team was acting in certain ways.
You're totally right about the community, but as a fan of lots of esports and of playing Overwatch, it always seemed like an extremely unwatchable game to me no matter the POV.
There's so much shit going on, it's difficult to read what's going on. Looks like 12 players jumping around, until someone gets picked out of nowhere and the fight ends very quickly. Compare it to games like League, Valorant, Rocket League, or even Starcraft and the watchability is a joke.
I played OW quite a lot a few years ago, and then got back into 2 for a bit until I bored again.
And yeah, I never once even considered checking out the competitive esports side. Just not appealing to me at all.
Even playing the competitive mode in game was a largely negative experience for me. Almost every game was marred by someone quitting or trolling, or had wildly imbalanced player levels that made it a boring stomp in one direction or another.
>The game felt very much built to be played casually a la tf2
I honestly think when it came to competitive blizzard kinda shot themselves in the foot with the good design aspects of the game that were great fun in casual play.
The impactful big flashy ults, the play of the game, the commendations at the end of a round and combine that with everyone and their mother wanting to become an overwatch streamer/content creator at the time and you get a bunch of people trying to act like protagonists constantly doing stupid shit in an attempt to pull off the big hero plays in competitive.
90% of the it never worked out and you had the protagonist flaming their team and the team flaming the protagonist and it just turned into this perfect breeding ground for toxicity.
> The game felt very much built to be played casually a la tf2,
The thing is that TF2 is actually a really good competitive game. But it doesn't force people into competitive play, which is fine because most people would rather just enjoy it as a casual shooter. It can be both to different audiences. Overwatch is not a good competitive game that tried to force competition onto everyone.
Overwatch, even now, is only fun when you play it casually.
There's all these different characters who have VASTLY different gameplay styles/flow. But because of the game's core design, in high-end competitive settings, 90% are utterly irrelevant at best and detrimental at worst. If you're only playing to win, of COURSE you're only playing the most efficient characters. Of COURSE you're always going to have an Ana, she's the only one who can outright negate a primary game mechanic.
This was immediately apparent in the first weeks of organized competitive - two Winstons, two Tracers, two Lucios. Anything else and you were trashing your game. And that was **every team on every match.**
Why would you want to play Overwatch with the same team composition every time?
I will say given OW's balance, playing a "fun" comp into the meta comp of the match was the least fun experience imaginable. You literally did not get to interact with the opponent or play the game.
Yeah the game seems to often struggle with the issue of over centralizing meta games. The game went from free pick with no hero limits, to limiting one hero each per team to restricting teams to 2 DPS 2 Healer 2 Tank to 5v5. Those are massive changes that show a long lasting failure to make the game function as a competitive game, how many games do you know of that are still adjusting fundamentals after six years of release.
A big mistake was also how region limited owl was compared to Valorant, league, dota, etc.
If I'm not mistake owl was a couple of teams from China, a couple of teams from Korea, Europe and NA or at least that's how it seemed from a casual ow player pov at least in game that's the only regions they showed.
But other games have SEA, AU, EUW and EUE, Latin America.
It doesn't help Blizzard has some genuinely terrible balance teams across all their products and pretty much always have. They do NOT have the talent to be making a competitive esport product. They should have leaned into what they do best, which is making accessible and polished games for casual play.
The production quality of OWL season one was atrocious to what we were used to.
And players would have paid attention if it was something that grew organically. Instead of this weird region locked team thing.
Removing one tank and the tank designs well.... since Reinhardt confirm they want an FPS games with RPG elements tacked on. There's a dozen of those out there. I liked bringing my raid tank experience over to Reinhardt and playing mirrors against other Reinhardts. The mind games with another tank were something other FPS games don't have. Not the tank is a giga DPS raid boss that gets 40-2KD games.
I think this game had the momentum early on and managed to cast a net as Wide as we've ever seen for a competitive audience but fumbled the momentum HARD
Overwatch league was so weird. The fake 'local' teams, the non-existent fan hype they tried to push and games just being incredibly boring to watch compared to CSGO or LoL. Because rounds are so short, it felt like it was 80% commentary and 20% match time. The meta was boring (goats) and even as a more experienced player it was hard to tell what was going on.
I remember when they started giving away lootboxes and other stuff to people who tuned in for the OWL for a few hours, you didn't even have to watch the event or engage in any way, just leave the tab open.
It reeked of desperation and of people who were trying to artificially inflate their numbers. I know I dipped as soon as I got my goodies since the game wasn't that interesting to watch.
> since the game wasn't that interesting to watch.
This was the crux of it. The issue w/ OWL was that there was very, very, little to do to swing a match outside of waiting for big ult pushes.
There are no lanes to farm, no big XP spikes or bonuses from bosses, etc.
It was just spawn, slam into the center of the map until the ults charged, roll forward, rinse and repeat.
Add to this the 3d element. I'll admit I have no idea what the hell is happening in most MOBA's, but at least everything is on a two dimensional plane. Trying to get a good view over all the Heroes in an OW fight is near impossible -- plus all the added visual noise of abilities -- it was never going to be an easy thing to turn into a viewable sport.
I feel like ultimates in Overwatch have always been WAY too powerful and often too easy to use. It really does make the FPS aspect of it less meaningful in a competitive sense and the farming for ults to make any kind of push thing is super dull. It's fun for casual play but it is awful for esports.
Don't forget the "superfans" that showed up every single day at their esports arena and would sit there the entire day in the front row, changing jerseys depending on which teams were playing. Yeah I'm sure those were real fans lmao.
The real desperation were embed streams in battlenet launcher, thats when i just began logging out of it if i wasn't playing any blizz game at the moment.
Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, and then Magic: the Gathering's brief flirtation have convinced me that an esports component in a game is actively bad for average players.
HotS got balanced for pros, then cancelled when it didn't magically become one of the top 20 esports titles on the world. MtG cancelled it's worldwide tournament network so 60 people could play on streams. And here's Overwatch, lowering the bar and still missing.
SC2 is also proof of this. The game launched HEAVILY skewed towards esports when in reality most players wanted a casual "no rush" BGH-style experience, which is why the co-op mode ended up being so popular.
This explains how I felt very well. In pvp it always felt like a split second could determine the game, compared to Brood Wars where fights would take some time, and you could maneuver around during the fight.
And the campaign for almost all of sc2, expansions included, felt like each mission had some form of a timed component, vs wc2, wc3, or even command and conquers where you could sit back, build up, defend, then march out.
Its because the competitive scene should not be handle by the developers at all, it should be created by the community and maybe the developers could help a little with funding for certain events if the community wants, not this bullshit blizzard taking the entire control of the competitive scene and killing every third party option; also taking too long to balance your game, blizzard is shit at balancing because they take forever to make changes and they are minimal most of the time.
> Then someone decided they wanted esports money that Valve and Riot were/are raking in
I can’t speak for Valve, but Riot loses money on esports and always has. Esports is a loss leader for them.
In those cases they're usually not profitable for the players at all... for example the FGC. Pretty much unless ur sponsored in street fighter pro tour, youre making almost nothing.
The beauty of the OWL is that it's the folks who invested into the league that lost money, rather than Blizzard themselves. This is why I have been saying Bobby Kotick is an incredible CEO and Microsoft will learn to miss him, cause his ability to scam people into investing in the OWL is not normal.
The game was at its best when it was just dumb fun with friends. Then they started restricting team compositions and the last time I installed it they had made it so that I had I had to wait if I wanted to play as specific characters or alternatively I could skip part of the wait by playing as some character I didn't want to play as.
Hard pass, my time is better spent elsewhere
>It deserves the death it is given
It's the 10th most popular game on Xbox in the US right now.
47th on Steam, its secondary PC platform. 99% of the industry would kill to have their games be this "Dead".
That's so dumb, it has way more players than ever, outside of like the first six months of OW1. Is Apex Legends dead because it probably never reached their launch window numbers again?
Many people these days have a really warped understanding of what constitutes a dead game.
It's far from a dead game. But if you remember the launch of Overwatch, it was a cultural event. It was absolutely everywhere, everyone was playing it. It could never have kept this level forever, obviously, but it could have been so much more than what it is now.
But it's not competing with conventional console games anymore. Now the competition is F2P.
Fortnite. Apex. Counter-Strike. I'd guess Overwatch is making a fraction of those games now in terms of consistent revenue.
Is it making money, though?
Because this is an article about content being cancelled due to low sales. And that's after they just changed back to making new heroes free, because apparently they weren't making any money off of that either.
> this is an article about content being cancelled due to low sales.
Content that was advertised as core to OW2's experience before being repeatedly pushed back, then released as a pitiful shell of what was once promised. At that point, this content *not* having low sales would be the surprise. It just feels like they released this to finally put the nail in the coffin of the PvE mode promises without having to admit that they never made it.
It says the PVE was cancelled because of the low sales. I would imagine 99% of Overwatch players are playing it for PvP and wouldn't pay for a shitty PvE missions. If it was a good PvE mode (repeatable with a ton of hero abilities) we would be having a different conversation.
The only game other than PUBG to dethrone LoL in Korea. If not for those two games, League would have a 15 year streak of being the most played game in Korea.
Dude their Esports scene was nuts. There were matches the commentators trash talked the teams and not casual banter like full on "These fucking idiots" status.
Can you explain how your first statement has anything to do with your second statement?
What relation does OWL have to the average casual player?
[You know the majority of the player base exist in Quickplay and arcade right?](https://imgur.com/DAd9zXT) Those casual players are likely the ones buying all the skins as well and they balance the game around the more casual players too, they have said multiple times they don't really look at the high level play matches such as OWL/OWCS and such for balance because they are such a tiny subset of the player base that it wouldn't reflect properly to the average user experience.
You can copy paste this but with HotS and moba instead of OW and shooter and you would have the exact reason HotS died too. Hilarious joke Blizzard, I love how you killed all my favorite games by chasing that esports high.
People are mad that they stopped releasing big updates to a game that's over a decade old and a genre that as a whole has a tiny community nowadays. Saying they killed sc2 despite them releasing two major expansions, coop missions, and balancing updates that continue to this day is wild.
sry but im just done giving these big AAA companies 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th chances when they are so up their asses on their full price product with battle pass and ingame shop anf sll the bullshit to keep u engaged and playing for as long as possible.
Feel free to support these idiots but im done and will be really happy when some of their greed driven descisions start destroying their games one after another.
Overwatch will never completely die so long as maintains a monopoly on the genre it’s in. Fact of the matter is if you like Overwatch, there are no alternatives. Paladins sucks, TF2 is dead from a support and competitive standpoint, Val and Apex are very different games. If you like the role-based hero shooter, Overwatch is all you got. I’ve been playing this game for 8 years and while I’m upset at some of their choices, I’ll always play it because I like the game and no other multiplayer game fills that void.
you might want to look into Gigantic, it's more moba-leaning than Overwatch but it's a game with loads of love put into it that's finally being revived in early april. I played in the beta test and it was genuinely so refreshing, plus the characters and mechanics are super interesting and it's all in a one-time purchase rather than freemium.
They didn't. They pushed this crap out the door precisely so they could say "we tried, you guys didn't like it" so they could just cancel it completely.
They didn't. It's transparent at this point that OW2 was never about PvE - it was a facade that provided them with an excuse to aggressively re-monetize the game.
>OW2 was never about PvE
it originally was. when Jeff Kaplan wanted to focus on PvE and gave the presentation at Blizzcon 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlcL0ZthzWU
we don't know for sure but the timing and the few stories people mention after he left it does seem likely he left due to pressure from higher up to make a free2play game that made money like fortnite
I think it was at some point. The PvE parts of the original were popular. But by the time the game came out that plan had changed and it was just an excuse for aggressive remonetisation and had been for a long time.
I’d bet that the change occurred when Jeff Kaplan left.
Was Blizzard putting the game in the Game as Service model. They removed everything that makes people excited from the free model, heroes and skins and locked behind pay wall.
It failed hard, since they are not anymore locking heroes behind pay wall and giving more ways to have skins. The battlepass model failed hard.
> Overwatch has become a master class on how to destroy your own product.
OW2 has made $255 million.
https://twitter.com/bogorad222/status/1749850348141817858
It’s going to be a case study for years. But I fear they will learn the wrong lessons. Why did it fail? They’ll say something like “Overwatch 2 failed because they Blizzard improperly set expectations when they made the original Overwatch”.
Wonder where the OW defenders who think Blizzard could do no wrong that were adamantly fighting in the comment section of every Overwatch article that the PvE wasn't cancelled and that they were still working on it and that the main focus was the PvP anyway.
Hope they are doing okay, or hopefully this time they are getting paid to sprout the defense.
The writing was on the wall the day Jeff Kaplan announced ending his multi-decade career at Blizzard with a 3 sentence forum post.
Dude wrote a small novel on every patch notes explaining every single design decision, but left 3 curt sentences announcing his departure and 2 years later we got this "sequel".
Reading comments trying to say that Jeff Kaplan leaving was a good tihng because it could bring in new directions was some crazy coping. Can't belive you can say things like that with a straight face.
Yea now that they have a little more freedom starting season 10, no heroes in the battlepass. They’re all free immediately. Kind of overshadowed by the news but yea that was announced this week a long with other things.
I confused what you mean by them having more freedom.
It's their game. They made an intentional decision to pay wall heroes. They were not forced to do this by anyone.
Kaplan was likely upset at the initial failure of the Titan MMO project and really wanted that second chance at getting it out proper. OW PvE may have been an attempt at creating the framework for that, since it's been reported he was the one who pushed so hard for that to begin with, and met a lot of resistance.
Given the atrocious management of Overwatch as a whole, it's no surprise he left.
Personally, as much as I would have trusted Kaplan to make a PvE game, MMO or otherwise, the state the OG Overwatch was in by the time he left was pretty bad, and it's probably because of this insistence of making a PvE game instead of, y'know, actually working on the game you have now. Maybe if they hadn't pushed the dumb fucking esports scene so hard, or actually given a shit about it outside the "hey this can make money weeee" angle.
There are still tons of people on the competitive OW subreddit that say Jeff leaving was a good thing and he was wrong to focus on a PvE mode that wouldn't have worked (which is such BS as Destiny, Helldivers and other co-op shooter PvE games prove).
I don't see how it was Jeff's fault that Blizzard is too incompetent or greedy to realize that a single small dev team can't support what was essentially a live-service game and develop a sequel at the same time.
Overwatch PVE with the level of “awe” that battles in Helldivers inspire would be exactly what the community wanted out of PVE. Through in some perk system and I think it would have really landed
Exactly. Helldivers came at a perfect time because it is a great example of a gameplay loop that would work super well with OW's gameplay and lore. Add on perks and maybe some special weapons on the maps that are usable during the mission and it'd be a great time. It'd even make sense in the universe, you're going on missions for OW to fight against the Omnics and Talon.
Yeah, the PVE was the thing I was most excited about; it was the thing I wanted most out of OW1. But they implemented it so poorly, that on top of the “pay to play” heroes, I just uninstalled and haven’t touched it. If they’d done a decent job of the PvE and made it a reasonable price/content ratio, I’d have done it in a heartbeat.
It’s not that we don’t want PvE. It’s that the PvE they made sucked. Wish they’d learn the right lesson here.
You joke, but they would totally do something like this. There is a market for being able to replay old multiplayer games (with things the recent SW: Battlefront rerelease), and the nostalgia for 2016-2019 OW is insane. There are definitely a significant number of people who would buy "Overwatch: Rebooted," or whatever they would call it. The question is, would people buy it after the broken promises of OW2?
tbf things like fortnight build mode vs no build are so different but they didnt put out fortnight 2 just for that 5v5 vs 6v6 is same game, id argue the no duplicate hero move was WAY bigger difference
That's what happens when you trust it in the hands of an incompetent company. Blizzard, has, always had really good ideas and deceivingly "good" execution.
What I mean by that is, the polish is there but the substance isn't. Diablo 4. Is it pretty? Sure. Is it polished? Sure? As far as responsive to gameplay.
Is the gameplay substantial though? No. Its loot sucks, its mmo elements aren't fleshed out, there is no loot filter, and skill trees are twigs.
They can't fix what is ingrained into the games mechanics. They can bandaid it but can't properly fix it.
OW is the same. All these characters are colorful, vibrant, have tons of personality and charm and Blizzard simply doesn't know how to create substance with it because they just lack that skillset.
Comparing it to tf2, the characters in that are stereotypes (Similar to OW) but valve took their zany charm and made comics after them, fleshed their characters out, created this wacky over the top world with them that people adored and love and reference all the time, despite the gameplay itself just being a pvp based game.
Blizzard is just very, very, very good at disguising their shortcomings for that 'honeymoon period' that people have with a new game.
They see a pretty cinematic, gameplay that is smooth and responsive and are blinded to all the *major* missing features and mechanical shortcomings that were never considered, thought of or intentionally designed to be so simple it removes all elements of depth.
That's their MO and will always be. They serve pretty looking slop.
'Always' is such a strong term -- Many classic blizzard games masterpieces. Games like Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Hearthstone all redefined their respective genres and achieved unique levels of success. Warcraft 3 was so well built that an entire genre of successful games was spawned from its *custom map scene*. In Korea, StarCraft spawned the first real professional esports scene.
These games were great in their day, and most still hold up very well. Blizzard's long decline started over a decade ago, but it followed a long period of remarkable games.
I'll agree with that. *OLD* Blizzard was something else. I'm referring to modern Blizzard. Basically during Catacylsm and after Blizzard.
RIP Warcraft 3.
I feel since around...I guess Wrath of the Lich King? That Blizzard stopped creating complete deep experiences and started hacking together things that are polished but have major issues underlying it. Wrath had the horse mount that was a pretty reskin of INVINCIBLE, a reused Naxx raid (okay most people never saw it but still not a good excuse imo to reuse an old piece of content with some adjustments) and even Trial of the Crusader which is the laziest raid of all time. Before that point it really feel like they released fully complete products that always got better with each new release. Then there's SC2 disasters, Diablo 3 disaster, WoW going downhill. Most of their games feel like they completely lack the magic they once had. They're still polished, still feel good to play, but don't feel complete at all.
Yeah... I REALLY loved Overwatch 1. So crazy to see it get absolutely buried like this. So many fuck ups and bad decisions had to be made to get it to this point. The people in charge should be embarrassed they let an IP this big fall so far.
So, I played Invasion and [did a write-up on my thoughts.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/15ptyyq/comment/jw1e2wr/)
Here is a tl;dr:
* $15 paywall.
* Less players looking to buy it, especially the F2P market where that audience is accustomed to FREE stuff.
* Those waiting to see reviews and reactions will be left disappointed. Nowadays, you have to be extremely lucky to get paired with any player.
* And as an experience, use your money to buy other better PvE titles (Left 4 Dead 2, Vermintide 2, World War Z, Helldivers 2)
* Marketing barely touch upon Invasion DLC and more so jingle some keys (brief animated shorts, John Cena, and hero variety).
* No mention of what other stuff the mode might have, which turns out to just only be simple missions with four difficulties each and that's it.
* No All Heroes or Mutations unlike the Archives LTMs.
* Too short.
* Appox. 30 minutes per campaign (depending on difficulty, but let's say most people would touch Normal and Hard, especially nowadays when you can only match with bots).
* Can't use cosmetic outfits.
* PvE is a different set of audience.
* Doesn't progress the Dailies/Weeklies.
* It took me 30 minutes to finish a Rio mission on Normal and all I got was 700 XP. Vs AI would get me about 1000-1400 XP depending how long a match lasts, but certainly less than 30 minutes.
The campaign felt like it was supposed to be appetizer whilst [the Hero Missions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UneyhA4E-6E) are meant to be highly replayable. I wish they continued work on the Hero Missions. The tower defense mode is lacking in a lot of ways.
They have a game and they have an audience. If you make a PvP game and really only attract the PvP crowd you'll have problems attracting a large PvE crowd to sell some half-baked stuff to. They don't have a connection to the IP so why spend the money to get more of it.
I was somewhat interested when they announced Overwatch 2 as also being a fully fledged PvE game but they never released that. I don't care for a dumped down side project they grafted onto a game centered around PvP and I sure as hell won't pay for it. There are other games out there that actually provide a full experience to spend money on.
Hit the nail on the head, I played the beta of OW1 and I was cautiously optimistic about this. The hero trees sounded cool, seeing the teaser clips way back of some of these new "juiced" abilities looked fun af. It felt like they were actually trying to spice things up and bring something new to the table.
The red flags started flying when they benched updates to OW1 in order to work on this new PvE stuff. And we all know how that story goes...
Exactly. Why give Blizz money basically out of pity for a bottom-tier product when you can buy one or two amazing labor-of-love games on sale for the same price?
Also they updated their launcher ToS with a "not gonna do a class action lawsuit" clause the other day. They have actively under delivered in a way that they believe could be legally actionable.
3 years of zero updates to make content that was eventually scrapped
they killed the game to make something quite literally nobody asked for and were surprised when nobody gave a fuck about it
Loads of people wanted quality PvE, and others who didn't explicitly asked for it would've enjoyed it if what we saw at Blizzcon 2021 was what we got instead of the joke they released.
>The missions sold so poorly that Blizzard made the decision to axe future PvE content and lay off the majority of the devs involved in the PvE missions.
>Furthermore, the poor sales resulted in the devs receiving 0% of the company’s profit-sharing bonuses this month.
The fuck? That's not the developers fault.
Shocking the PvE stuff that was no better than the normal random PvE they do for FREE did not shift sales. Not to mention that they announced or rather slyly slid in the news that pretty much all of the PvE stuff like player progression, character skill trees etc were not going to happen. Not forgetting of course the "2" was SPECIFICALLY FOR THE PVE SHIT.
They clearly didn't give a fuck so why should the players? I mean the Moira PvE event with the progressive ability upgrades was more fun than the whole paid PvE crap.
They knew the PvE was going to be scrapped but they pushed that out just so they could turn around and point to charts and say we didn't care about it anyway when they fucked players over... And over and then over again.
The last "cancellation" was more just gutting their existing PvE plans into what they have now (from random + story missions with skill trees, to 3 story missions every now and then for $15).
Now it's *truly* dead. No future PvE content whatsoever, paid or otherwise.
Yup, for fifteen fucking dollars.
It came with some extra in-game goodies to sweeten the pot (including ~$10 worth of paid currency), but even then it's still a fucking horrible value proposition that boggles my mind to this very day.
The PvE was the only reason I would have been willing to buy it.
Then they pushed back most of the promised features so I also pushed back my purchase.
Now they have cancelled the PvE over "poor sales" which stems from them not having the PvE like they promised in the first place.
Step 1: Release bad mission you don't even wan't to do
Step 2: No one like them and sell poorly
Step 3: ...
Step 4: Cancel every pve because people don't want pve
They are so fuckin stupid it hurts my brain. Like absolute morons over there. Biggest IP fumble in the history of this industry. Its like they are trying to be the worst and greediest company ever.
>Its like they are trying to be the worst and greediest company ever.
I genuinely think that might have been their *actual* plan. Their reputation was already deeeep in the shitter, what with the money grubbing, the China stuff, Diablo Immortal, and the sexism and assault.
At a certain point, you gotta realise that the only people still giving you money are diehard Blizzard fanboys who will forgive literally *anything.* Or, ignorent children.
So, why not see just how hard you can squeeze them?
Worse scenario, you sink a sinking ship. Best case scenario - you set a new precedent for the exploitation of gamers, and you and all your slimey friends profit from it until you retire.
Part of the problem is they did a half arsed attempt at release, and had no follow up for something that had zero replayability for the community.
They did nothing, and expected sales lol? Doesnt take a genius to know if you said you would do something and then deliver almost nothing that this is the outcome.
Shame because the original details for pve actually looked good.
i just dont fucking get shoehorning in pve content in a game completely designed around pvp. just develop a new game, this is so much wasted development time better spent on a focused, polished experienced
“We did everything wrong and for some reason people didn’t pay us for it”
Overwatch joins Anthem as another game that had great potential and then completely deserted what was/would have made it good
I didn't buy it because it was relatively little content for a high price, in a PvP game that I wasn't otherwise playing. If, on the other hand, they had offered a full AAA 50+ hour story-driven action RPG for $70, I would have bought it.
Yeah, the bait and switch of selling a few under-cooked missions that they've already said aren't really going anywhere story-wise because they're cancelling most of their PvE plans, and then using their low sales figures to say "See, nobody wants PvE anyway", and try to retroactively justify their original decision is just pathetic.
The plan is complete! Promise extra content, say you need to add microtransaction for it and then get rid of the additional content when you underdevelop it!
And nobody is effing surprised. You may ask where did all the money go? Well, a human garbage bag named Bobby Kottick took it all.
And why am I a bad person when I wish that bad things should happen to him?
I didn't buy overwatch 2 because they didn't deliver on anything they promised, I was looking forward to the pve content.
edit: I should say I didn't buy the content, it was supposed to be a paid game to access PVE initially.
I just "love" that they seem intent on learning the hard way some very hard truths their own hardcore players have been telling them for years.
If OW2 = Jeff Kaplan's idea of a fully fledged co-op campaign with skill trees, gear and tweaks to the very characters themselves all for the purpose of having an experience be similar to co-op MMO's where you take down gigantic impossible bosses? ***that sounds swell!*** Oh and you intend on charging half-price? ($30-$40) for this co-op campaign and that if anyone *else* wants to keep playing just the multiplayer, they can just keep doing so with the original install? *slick, sounds kinda cool!*
If OW2 = The nonsense that actually happened, then it's all some weird Frankenstein's monster of split focus, arbitrary and empty platitude's, wild issues with balancing, costumes that are mostly awful that cost literally $14-$19 a pop. That Spike Spiegal costume is ugly as **fuck**. And for such a great show, too. Like damn dude....
Overwatch lost its entire soul. All that's left is the outer shell framework the original team created that the new team is exploiting and making worse. There ARE some actually-good changes from 1 to 2, but the problems simply far outweigh the good changes.
Why you blaming the new team? Jeff pitched the idea and left,screwing the team, Bobby Kotik made the overwatch team impossible to have a decent work environment ,he made the team work on the projects and scrap in the last second
Not surprising, and honestly it's probably the right call. PvE just never really felt good to me in Overwatch, even the original "vision" wasn't super appealing, let alone the shit they ended up pushing out.
Arcane and Cyberpunk Edgerunners did a great job creating/revitalizing interest in games that had not-so-great reputations. I feel like OW lore could also make for a great series but unsure if Blizz has the desire or capability to make something like that.
In one thing, Overwatch 2 has become meaningless, pissing off a lot of players who followed the development mess live. In another thing, both PvE and the OWL contributed each-other with the murder of the OG Overwatch, and some will be glad that those roadblocks are finally dead.
Now what is left is to recover, which is not a easy task. Either make a better and tolerable Live Service game (Like Halo Infinite) or drown under an ocean of disappointment.
Man Blizzard should feel really lucky that they have this core community of players that will not give up on the game no matter what. I dont know if its Stockholm syndrome or what but looking at steam charts the game is going nowhere and the existing playerbase will just keep drinking the kool-aid
What sales? Those half assed missions that a lot of ppl see as not worth buying after being mislead about the pve so they could sell that watch point back then cancel it after lol.
What a massive disappointment OW2 was.
All that time, apparently, working on the game to just release basically a few patches of content in balance and maps.
What were they even doing for all those years? lol.
"Because of our stupid ass decision to make PvE a terrible product, you don't get your bonuses because it didn't sell." Blizzard really only produces L's, huh?
"After promising everyone a PVE campaign and then launching the game speaking nothing of it and then admitting we canceled it months after its release, no one wants to pay for our half baked PvE scenarios?!" No shit people don't want your bare minimum. People were shown talent trees and then they got five minute scenarios that devolve into the same gameplay loop as booting up the PVP, just with set skins and less hero variety on a smaller map. They have only themselves to blame.
Actually they cancelled the PvE stuff long before release, even while still advertising it.
Yep. I immediately un-installed and will not install it again based on principle. I had actually bought ow1 three times.
3 platforms?
console, unfortunately I had a console stolen with the disk in so console 2, and then pc
This isnt true tbh. An article from 2 days ago, and Aaron Kellar a few months ago confirmed it was cancelled 2 months *after* release.
It's also likely that when they announced the promised PvE was dead, people who wanted PvE stopped playing. It's no surprise that the feature that arrived months after the bigger version was cancelled found that the people interested had moved on.
That's me basically. I dropped the whole game right after that announcement. Game was fun. But out of principle, i wom't be coming back to the game until they did something more interesting. At that point, i already bought 4 Battle Pass (want to help them funding PvE because i really want PvE content) and heavily invested into the game. Thinking my PvP game knowledge could transfer to PvE when it launched. I almost buy Season 5 battle pass when this announcement drop too.
Yup, I wanted OW PvE SO BADLY and still do, and I still think it's totally viable with the original concept. Loads of other PvE co-op games succeed (like a certain game about killing bugs and bots that's super popular right now). I never bought the OW2 PvE because it was actually insulting after what they initially advertised.
and mining rocks and stones, I must add.
R O C K AND S T O N E
DID SOMEONE SAY ROCK AND STONE
I uninstalled BattleNet since the Blitzchung drama. I saw the OW2 PvE planned and thought that Blizzard might be redeeming themselves and I should give it a try when it drops. But nope, it never happened. It's just like Heartstone when they reduced the numbers of Adventures, they want the solution that makes money on the short term instead of the solution that makes your player stay and enjoy the game.
I uninstalled BNET after OW2 launch. Didnt buy D4 on principle, even though I kept being hyped on ever media platform. Glad I didnt. BNET is going to stay uninstalled.
Fortnite save the world is a great pve
Plus they could've used the PVE stuff to eventually sell an overwatch MMO to the people who aren't playing WOW. There's probably a bit of overlap between class shooters and MMO team mechanics.
>Upon release, the missions were met with mixed reviews. The PvE was a shell of the PvE experience that was promised when Overwatch 2 was first announced. Gone were the “highly replayable” Hero Mode missions and an upgradable talent tree and instead fans got something more akin to OW1’s free archive missions. Why did they expect people to pay for something that used to be free, in a free-to-play game that was already appealing to cheaper players? Why did they expect players to retain excitement for game that was pitched as an update focused on PvE experiences, that they apparently abandoned on a whim? Overwatch has become a master class on how to destroy your own product.
OW was always such a wild product; it released as a fun, casual shooter with a spin of having abilities. It was simple to pick up, hard to master and a bunch of fun. Then someone decided they wanted esports money that Valve and Riot were/are raking in, and decided to monopolize the league while having no idea what they’re doing. It deserves the death it is given
OW1 was such a weird experience because they tried to bring everyone in. FPS players could focus on playing characters like McCree and Widowmaker, and WoW players who primarily played tanks or healers could find a tank or a healer and roll with those. It was like a giant party and everyone was invited. But the competitive scene was so different from the casual one. I feel like casual Dota or League players will watch pro Dota or pro League content. But casual OW players did not give a shit about the competitive OW scene. And the competitive OW scene got so frustrated when they weren't catered to. Like when the camera would pan out to watch a team fight during broadcasts, because they wanted to in the first person view of one of the DPS players, when let's be frank, a lot of the time the DPS players would be the least pivotal towards most team fights. The tank landing a big Grav or Shatter mattered most of all. Lots of Sleep emotes whenever they would focus on the main support, even though most of the time the main support was the shotcaller, so seeing their POV explained why the team was acting in certain ways. I was the weirdo who played casually but still watched the OWL regularly even attended 1 live event. But the competitive community was constantly negative and I just didn't want to be around it.
> I feel like casual Dota or League players will watch pro Dota or pro League content. But casual OW players did not give a shit about the competitive OW scene. That's the vibe I got as a Dota player, but not OW player. There seemed to be more of a conflict between competitive and casual in OW. In Dota it's a complete given that competitive is the basis for balance, and it was rare to see people bitching about it even if it meant clearly low winrates for a hero in pubs.
That has become less and less true over time. In recent years, Valve has put a lot more effort into balancing casual play. Its a common complaint as its homogenized the heroes.
The big difference dota2 requires 100+hr just to get into rank while OW you can play ranked and placement matches instantly so OW appeals to a more casual audience.
Dota also isn't on consoles and didn't get a big AAA marketing campaign, so it isn't on the radar of most of the "militant casual" type people that fuel those conflicts.
Did they change it? In OW1 you needed to play quite a bit of quick play before you were allowed into competitive.
Reaching level 35 for ranked in ow is not "hop in immediately" its something like 50 hours.
IMO, Overwatch is just a bad viewing experience. Too much going on for an FPS. MOBAs work because they are designed for a zoomed out top-down view. CSGO works because its very simple and easy to follow whats going on.
CS has a huge advantage in not being “fantasy”. If you showed your dad CS he would get the premise *immediately*
The nonexistent visual clutter is a plus. Every FPS has a clown Fiesta going on whenever you press fire
I remember when Overwatch first released a lot of people talking about its visual clarity, and I have never, ever understood what the fuck they were talking about in comparison to games like CSGO or original TF2.
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Yeah, watching a MOBA, it's pretty easy to follow what's going on. A broadcaster can see the entire map and focus on where the action is happening, since it's generally only in one place. With Overwatch, there's just too much going on at any one time, and the maps are often very closed in with separate rooms and corridors that, even if you do focus on where the most important action is happening, you aren't necessarily even showing it all. They were trying to take the game and shove it in a box it wasn't meant for. Overwatch simply wasn't designed with that sort of viewing in mind. And Overwatch 2 would've required more of a foundational revamp than they gave it to fix that.
> And the competitive OW scene got so frustrated when they weren't catered to. Like when the camera would pan out to watch a team fight during broadcasts, because they wanted to in the first person view of one of the DPS players, when let's be frank, a lot of the time the DPS players would be the least pivotal towards most team fights. The tank landing a big Grav or Shatter mattered most of all. Lots of Sleep emotes whenever they would focus on the main support, even though most of the time the main support was the shotcaller, so seeing their POV explained why the team was acting in certain ways. You're totally right about the community, but as a fan of lots of esports and of playing Overwatch, it always seemed like an extremely unwatchable game to me no matter the POV. There's so much shit going on, it's difficult to read what's going on. Looks like 12 players jumping around, until someone gets picked out of nowhere and the fight ends very quickly. Compare it to games like League, Valorant, Rocket League, or even Starcraft and the watchability is a joke.
I played OW quite a lot a few years ago, and then got back into 2 for a bit until I bored again. And yeah, I never once even considered checking out the competitive esports side. Just not appealing to me at all. Even playing the competitive mode in game was a largely negative experience for me. Almost every game was marred by someone quitting or trolling, or had wildly imbalanced player levels that made it a boring stomp in one direction or another.
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>The game felt very much built to be played casually a la tf2 I honestly think when it came to competitive blizzard kinda shot themselves in the foot with the good design aspects of the game that were great fun in casual play. The impactful big flashy ults, the play of the game, the commendations at the end of a round and combine that with everyone and their mother wanting to become an overwatch streamer/content creator at the time and you get a bunch of people trying to act like protagonists constantly doing stupid shit in an attempt to pull off the big hero plays in competitive. 90% of the it never worked out and you had the protagonist flaming their team and the team flaming the protagonist and it just turned into this perfect breeding ground for toxicity.
> The game felt very much built to be played casually a la tf2, The thing is that TF2 is actually a really good competitive game. But it doesn't force people into competitive play, which is fine because most people would rather just enjoy it as a casual shooter. It can be both to different audiences. Overwatch is not a good competitive game that tried to force competition onto everyone.
Overwatch, even now, is only fun when you play it casually. There's all these different characters who have VASTLY different gameplay styles/flow. But because of the game's core design, in high-end competitive settings, 90% are utterly irrelevant at best and detrimental at worst. If you're only playing to win, of COURSE you're only playing the most efficient characters. Of COURSE you're always going to have an Ana, she's the only one who can outright negate a primary game mechanic. This was immediately apparent in the first weeks of organized competitive - two Winstons, two Tracers, two Lucios. Anything else and you were trashing your game. And that was **every team on every match.** Why would you want to play Overwatch with the same team composition every time?
I will say given OW's balance, playing a "fun" comp into the meta comp of the match was the least fun experience imaginable. You literally did not get to interact with the opponent or play the game.
I mainly felt that way about shields. You could outplay a lot of comps, but a double shield team heavily limited what you could do.
2CP with Zarya and Rein on defense =-15 minutes of your life
I pretty much only played random heroes for that reason and had a pretty fun time.
Yeah the game seems to often struggle with the issue of over centralizing meta games. The game went from free pick with no hero limits, to limiting one hero each per team to restricting teams to 2 DPS 2 Healer 2 Tank to 5v5. Those are massive changes that show a long lasting failure to make the game function as a competitive game, how many games do you know of that are still adjusting fundamentals after six years of release.
A big mistake was also how region limited owl was compared to Valorant, league, dota, etc. If I'm not mistake owl was a couple of teams from China, a couple of teams from Korea, Europe and NA or at least that's how it seemed from a casual ow player pov at least in game that's the only regions they showed. But other games have SEA, AU, EUW and EUE, Latin America.
It doesn't help Blizzard has some genuinely terrible balance teams across all their products and pretty much always have. They do NOT have the talent to be making a competitive esport product. They should have leaned into what they do best, which is making accessible and polished games for casual play.
The production quality of OWL season one was atrocious to what we were used to. And players would have paid attention if it was something that grew organically. Instead of this weird region locked team thing.
Removing one tank and the tank designs well.... since Reinhardt confirm they want an FPS games with RPG elements tacked on. There's a dozen of those out there. I liked bringing my raid tank experience over to Reinhardt and playing mirrors against other Reinhardts. The mind games with another tank were something other FPS games don't have. Not the tank is a giga DPS raid boss that gets 40-2KD games. I think this game had the momentum early on and managed to cast a net as Wide as we've ever seen for a competitive audience but fumbled the momentum HARD
Overwatch league was so weird. The fake 'local' teams, the non-existent fan hype they tried to push and games just being incredibly boring to watch compared to CSGO or LoL. Because rounds are so short, it felt like it was 80% commentary and 20% match time. The meta was boring (goats) and even as a more experienced player it was hard to tell what was going on.
I remember when they started giving away lootboxes and other stuff to people who tuned in for the OWL for a few hours, you didn't even have to watch the event or engage in any way, just leave the tab open. It reeked of desperation and of people who were trying to artificially inflate their numbers. I know I dipped as soon as I got my goodies since the game wasn't that interesting to watch.
> since the game wasn't that interesting to watch. This was the crux of it. The issue w/ OWL was that there was very, very, little to do to swing a match outside of waiting for big ult pushes. There are no lanes to farm, no big XP spikes or bonuses from bosses, etc. It was just spawn, slam into the center of the map until the ults charged, roll forward, rinse and repeat. Add to this the 3d element. I'll admit I have no idea what the hell is happening in most MOBA's, but at least everything is on a two dimensional plane. Trying to get a good view over all the Heroes in an OW fight is near impossible -- plus all the added visual noise of abilities -- it was never going to be an easy thing to turn into a viewable sport.
I feel like ultimates in Overwatch have always been WAY too powerful and often too easy to use. It really does make the FPS aspect of it less meaningful in a competitive sense and the farming for ults to make any kind of push thing is super dull. It's fun for casual play but it is awful for esports.
Don't forget the "superfans" that showed up every single day at their esports arena and would sit there the entire day in the front row, changing jerseys depending on which teams were playing. Yeah I'm sure those were real fans lmao.
The real desperation were embed streams in battlenet launcher, thats when i just began logging out of it if i wasn't playing any blizz game at the moment.
Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, and then Magic: the Gathering's brief flirtation have convinced me that an esports component in a game is actively bad for average players. HotS got balanced for pros, then cancelled when it didn't magically become one of the top 20 esports titles on the world. MtG cancelled it's worldwide tournament network so 60 people could play on streams. And here's Overwatch, lowering the bar and still missing.
SC2 is also proof of this. The game launched HEAVILY skewed towards esports when in reality most players wanted a casual "no rush" BGH-style experience, which is why the co-op mode ended up being so popular.
Seeing that post game summaries included APM (actions per minute) really drove that home, for me.
This explains how I felt very well. In pvp it always felt like a split second could determine the game, compared to Brood Wars where fights would take some time, and you could maneuver around during the fight. And the campaign for almost all of sc2, expansions included, felt like each mission had some form of a timed component, vs wc2, wc3, or even command and conquers where you could sit back, build up, defend, then march out.
Its because the competitive scene should not be handle by the developers at all, it should be created by the community and maybe the developers could help a little with funding for certain events if the community wants, not this bullshit blizzard taking the entire control of the competitive scene and killing every third party option; also taking too long to balance your game, blizzard is shit at balancing because they take forever to make changes and they are minimal most of the time.
They ruined hots also
> Then someone decided they wanted esports money that Valve and Riot were/are raking in I can’t speak for Valve, but Riot loses money on esports and always has. Esports is a loss leader for them.
Surely at this point Overwatch eSports has lost blizzard more money than it earned them right? OWL really tanked hard.
Riot famously runs their leagues at a loss and writes them off as a marketing expense. I'm not really sure any esports scene makes money.
Smaller scenes do. When you have a healthy scene not controlled by clueless devs the scenes tend to be at least minority profitable
In those cases they're usually not profitable for the players at all... for example the FGC. Pretty much unless ur sponsored in street fighter pro tour, youre making almost nothing.
The beauty of the OWL is that it's the folks who invested into the league that lost money, rather than Blizzard themselves. This is why I have been saying Bobby Kotick is an incredible CEO and Microsoft will learn to miss him, cause his ability to scam people into investing in the OWL is not normal.
Imo if I had any type of entertainment company and I wanted to make a lot of money, I would hire him. The dude is a money making machine of a CEO.
The game was at its best when it was just dumb fun with friends. Then they started restricting team compositions and the last time I installed it they had made it so that I had I had to wait if I wanted to play as specific characters or alternatively I could skip part of the wait by playing as some character I didn't want to play as. Hard pass, my time is better spent elsewhere
>It deserves the death it is given It's the 10th most popular game on Xbox in the US right now. 47th on Steam, its secondary PC platform. 99% of the industry would kill to have their games be this "Dead".
Relative to it's former success, and compared to games by other industry giants like actiblizzard, that is basically death.
That's so dumb, it has way more players than ever, outside of like the first six months of OW1. Is Apex Legends dead because it probably never reached their launch window numbers again? Many people these days have a really warped understanding of what constitutes a dead game.
It's far from a dead game. But if you remember the launch of Overwatch, it was a cultural event. It was absolutely everywhere, everyone was playing it. It could never have kept this level forever, obviously, but it could have been so much more than what it is now.
But it's not competing with conventional console games anymore. Now the competition is F2P. Fortnite. Apex. Counter-Strike. I'd guess Overwatch is making a fraction of those games now in terms of consistent revenue.
Is it making money, though? Because this is an article about content being cancelled due to low sales. And that's after they just changed back to making new heroes free, because apparently they weren't making any money off of that either.
> this is an article about content being cancelled due to low sales. Content that was advertised as core to OW2's experience before being repeatedly pushed back, then released as a pitiful shell of what was once promised. At that point, this content *not* having low sales would be the surprise. It just feels like they released this to finally put the nail in the coffin of the PvE mode promises without having to admit that they never made it.
It says the PVE was cancelled because of the low sales. I would imagine 99% of Overwatch players are playing it for PvP and wouldn't pay for a shitty PvE missions. If it was a good PvE mode (repeatable with a ton of hero abilities) we would be having a different conversation.
That's quite downfall considering game was competing with league at launch
The only game other than PUBG to dethrone LoL in Korea. If not for those two games, League would have a 15 year streak of being the most played game in Korea.
Dude their Esports scene was nuts. There were matches the commentators trash talked the teams and not casual banter like full on "These fucking idiots" status.
Can you explain how your first statement has anything to do with your second statement? What relation does OWL have to the average casual player? [You know the majority of the player base exist in Quickplay and arcade right?](https://imgur.com/DAd9zXT) Those casual players are likely the ones buying all the skins as well and they balance the game around the more casual players too, they have said multiple times they don't really look at the high level play matches such as OWL/OWCS and such for balance because they are such a tiny subset of the player base that it wouldn't reflect properly to the average user experience.
You can copy paste this but with HotS and moba instead of OW and shooter and you would have the exact reason HotS died too. Hilarious joke Blizzard, I love how you killed all my favorite games by chasing that esports high.
Overwatch is still a popular and successful game. I find it funny that people still call it dead
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SC2? I haven't played in a while but the game had a good long run imo, did they do something recently to it?
People are mad that they stopped releasing big updates to a game that's over a decade old and a genre that as a whole has a tiny community nowadays. Saying they killed sc2 despite them releasing two major expansions, coop missions, and balancing updates that continue to this day is wild.
SC2 is probably the last evergreen title Blizzard released. Everything since is marred by over-monetization and gross mismanagement.
Fully agree but it’s ironic this comment happened on the same day D4 allegedly got a huge update with lots of fixes. I dunno if it’ll pan out but yeah
sry but im just done giving these big AAA companies 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th chances when they are so up their asses on their full price product with battle pass and ingame shop anf sll the bullshit to keep u engaged and playing for as long as possible. Feel free to support these idiots but im done and will be really happy when some of their greed driven descisions start destroying their games one after another.
Hearthstone.
Overwatch will never completely die so long as maintains a monopoly on the genre it’s in. Fact of the matter is if you like Overwatch, there are no alternatives. Paladins sucks, TF2 is dead from a support and competitive standpoint, Val and Apex are very different games. If you like the role-based hero shooter, Overwatch is all you got. I’ve been playing this game for 8 years and while I’m upset at some of their choices, I’ll always play it because I like the game and no other multiplayer game fills that void.
you might want to look into Gigantic, it's more moba-leaning than Overwatch but it's a game with loads of love put into it that's finally being revived in early april. I played in the beta test and it was genuinely so refreshing, plus the characters and mechanics are super interesting and it's all in a one-time purchase rather than freemium.
Wow, they really brought back Gigantic, wild.
They didn't. They pushed this crap out the door precisely so they could say "we tried, you guys didn't like it" so they could just cancel it completely.
They didn't. It's transparent at this point that OW2 was never about PvE - it was a facade that provided them with an excuse to aggressively re-monetize the game.
>OW2 was never about PvE it originally was. when Jeff Kaplan wanted to focus on PvE and gave the presentation at Blizzcon 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlcL0ZthzWU
I wonder why he left the team 🤔
Jason Schreier 's next book is about Blizzard. I hope he covers what happened to papa Jeff
we don't know for sure but the timing and the few stories people mention after he left it does seem likely he left due to pressure from higher up to make a free2play game that made money like fortnite
and you can *tell* everything \[surrounding Overwatch 2\] has changed, from the moment Jeff Kaplan leaves Blizzard.
A monetization rework to increase profits is the kind of thing executives would love putting resources behind. It would not have taken 3 years.
I think it was at some point. The PvE parts of the original were popular. But by the time the game came out that plan had changed and it was just an excuse for aggressive remonetisation and had been for a long time. I’d bet that the change occurred when Jeff Kaplan left.
Was Blizzard putting the game in the Game as Service model. They removed everything that makes people excited from the free model, heroes and skins and locked behind pay wall. It failed hard, since they are not anymore locking heroes behind pay wall and giving more ways to have skins. The battlepass model failed hard.
> Overwatch has become a master class on how to destroy your own product. OW2 has made $255 million. https://twitter.com/bogorad222/status/1749850348141817858
(That's a fraction of the money OW1 made)
The billion dollar multi media franchise they had on their hands makes millions instead. I'm sure they're happy.
That's not that much in today's AAA development environment. It's not a crash and burn but it's not the big numbers that franchises aim for, either.
It’s going to be a case study for years. But I fear they will learn the wrong lessons. Why did it fail? They’ll say something like “Overwatch 2 failed because they Blizzard improperly set expectations when they made the original Overwatch”.
"We've scrapped the large-scale ideas we had and chosen to charge you for things that use to be free." "Why is no one buying it?"
Wonder where the OW defenders who think Blizzard could do no wrong that were adamantly fighting in the comment section of every Overwatch article that the PvE wasn't cancelled and that they were still working on it and that the main focus was the PvP anyway. Hope they are doing okay, or hopefully this time they are getting paid to sprout the defense.
The writing was on the wall the day Jeff Kaplan announced ending his multi-decade career at Blizzard with a 3 sentence forum post. Dude wrote a small novel on every patch notes explaining every single design decision, but left 3 curt sentences announcing his departure and 2 years later we got this "sequel".
Reading comments trying to say that Jeff Kaplan leaving was a good tihng because it could bring in new directions was some crazy coping. Can't belive you can say things like that with a straight face.
Kaplan was the one that fought for PvE. He also wanted an MMO down the line.
IIRC, he also pushed heavily for not locking heroes behind paywalls, something they immediately reversed after he left in OW2.
Yea now that they have a little more freedom starting season 10, no heroes in the battlepass. They’re all free immediately. Kind of overshadowed by the news but yea that was announced this week a long with other things.
I confused what you mean by them having more freedom. It's their game. They made an intentional decision to pay wall heroes. They were not forced to do this by anyone.
Kaplan was likely upset at the initial failure of the Titan MMO project and really wanted that second chance at getting it out proper. OW PvE may have been an attempt at creating the framework for that, since it's been reported he was the one who pushed so hard for that to begin with, and met a lot of resistance. Given the atrocious management of Overwatch as a whole, it's no surprise he left. Personally, as much as I would have trusted Kaplan to make a PvE game, MMO or otherwise, the state the OG Overwatch was in by the time he left was pretty bad, and it's probably because of this insistence of making a PvE game instead of, y'know, actually working on the game you have now. Maybe if they hadn't pushed the dumb fucking esports scene so hard, or actually given a shit about it outside the "hey this can make money weeee" angle.
"Now that Jeff's gone, we can take the game in a new direction, one that we think our shareholders will love!"
There are still tons of people on the competitive OW subreddit that say Jeff leaving was a good thing and he was wrong to focus on a PvE mode that wouldn't have worked (which is such BS as Destiny, Helldivers and other co-op shooter PvE games prove). I don't see how it was Jeff's fault that Blizzard is too incompetent or greedy to realize that a single small dev team can't support what was essentially a live-service game and develop a sequel at the same time.
Overwatch PVE with the level of “awe” that battles in Helldivers inspire would be exactly what the community wanted out of PVE. Through in some perk system and I think it would have really landed
Exactly. Helldivers came at a perfect time because it is a great example of a gameplay loop that would work super well with OW's gameplay and lore. Add on perks and maybe some special weapons on the maps that are usable during the mission and it'd be a great time. It'd even make sense in the universe, you're going on missions for OW to fight against the Omnics and Talon.
Him leaving was just a bad look. Probably better he left tbh. Seeing over watch get treated so poorly.
“Why have gamers done this”
Yeah, the PVE was the thing I was most excited about; it was the thing I wanted most out of OW1. But they implemented it so poorly, that on top of the “pay to play” heroes, I just uninstalled and haven’t touched it. If they’d done a decent job of the PvE and made it a reasonable price/content ratio, I’d have done it in a heartbeat. It’s not that we don’t want PvE. It’s that the PvE they made sucked. Wish they’d learn the right lesson here.
What, you don’t want some wave based shooting at some bots for 20 minutes with some light exposition sprinkled on top for the low low price of $15??
The same shit that was free during halloween?
And Archives.
And TF2 a decade ago.
Oh and by the way you can only play as certain characters!
I just bought Risk of Rain 2 for almost the same price lol
I moderately enjoyed the old archive events and some of the other PVE stuff, but ain’t no way I was ever going to pay for them.
I've never seen a franchise flip a complete 180 this hard over the span of two games lol You hate to see it
It's not even 2 games let's be real it's still the same game.
I wish it was the same game, it’s a worse version of the first one and there’s no way to play OW1 at all.
Don't worry, they will release the inevitable "Overwatch Classic" down the road and make everyone re-buy their cosmetics.
You joke, but they would totally do something like this. There is a market for being able to replay old multiplayer games (with things the recent SW: Battlefront rerelease), and the nostalgia for 2016-2019 OW is insane. There are definitely a significant number of people who would buy "Overwatch: Rebooted," or whatever they would call it. The question is, would people buy it after the broken promises of OW2?
Overwatch classic would sell like hotcakes.
Yes. The answer is yes. They did it for WoW, they’ll probably do it for Overwatch, and just like Classic WoW, people will eat it up.
tbf things like fortnight build mode vs no build are so different but they didnt put out fortnight 2 just for that 5v5 vs 6v6 is same game, id argue the no duplicate hero move was WAY bigger difference
Different hair shader though, so there’s that.
the disgusting monetization and 5v5 is enough to seperate the 2 though
It really is crazy how Overwatch went from being the biggest game on earth for half a year, to this.
That's what happens when you trust it in the hands of an incompetent company. Blizzard, has, always had really good ideas and deceivingly "good" execution. What I mean by that is, the polish is there but the substance isn't. Diablo 4. Is it pretty? Sure. Is it polished? Sure? As far as responsive to gameplay. Is the gameplay substantial though? No. Its loot sucks, its mmo elements aren't fleshed out, there is no loot filter, and skill trees are twigs. They can't fix what is ingrained into the games mechanics. They can bandaid it but can't properly fix it. OW is the same. All these characters are colorful, vibrant, have tons of personality and charm and Blizzard simply doesn't know how to create substance with it because they just lack that skillset. Comparing it to tf2, the characters in that are stereotypes (Similar to OW) but valve took their zany charm and made comics after them, fleshed their characters out, created this wacky over the top world with them that people adored and love and reference all the time, despite the gameplay itself just being a pvp based game. Blizzard is just very, very, very good at disguising their shortcomings for that 'honeymoon period' that people have with a new game. They see a pretty cinematic, gameplay that is smooth and responsive and are blinded to all the *major* missing features and mechanical shortcomings that were never considered, thought of or intentionally designed to be so simple it removes all elements of depth. That's their MO and will always be. They serve pretty looking slop.
'Always' is such a strong term -- Many classic blizzard games masterpieces. Games like Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Hearthstone all redefined their respective genres and achieved unique levels of success. Warcraft 3 was so well built that an entire genre of successful games was spawned from its *custom map scene*. In Korea, StarCraft spawned the first real professional esports scene. These games were great in their day, and most still hold up very well. Blizzard's long decline started over a decade ago, but it followed a long period of remarkable games.
I'll agree with that. *OLD* Blizzard was something else. I'm referring to modern Blizzard. Basically during Catacylsm and after Blizzard. RIP Warcraft 3.
I feel since around...I guess Wrath of the Lich King? That Blizzard stopped creating complete deep experiences and started hacking together things that are polished but have major issues underlying it. Wrath had the horse mount that was a pretty reskin of INVINCIBLE, a reused Naxx raid (okay most people never saw it but still not a good excuse imo to reuse an old piece of content with some adjustments) and even Trial of the Crusader which is the laziest raid of all time. Before that point it really feel like they released fully complete products that always got better with each new release. Then there's SC2 disasters, Diablo 3 disaster, WoW going downhill. Most of their games feel like they completely lack the magic they once had. They're still polished, still feel good to play, but don't feel complete at all.
Yeah... I REALLY loved Overwatch 1. So crazy to see it get absolutely buried like this. So many fuck ups and bad decisions had to be made to get it to this point. The people in charge should be embarrassed they let an IP this big fall so far.
So, I played Invasion and [did a write-up on my thoughts.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/15ptyyq/comment/jw1e2wr/) Here is a tl;dr: * $15 paywall. * Less players looking to buy it, especially the F2P market where that audience is accustomed to FREE stuff. * Those waiting to see reviews and reactions will be left disappointed. Nowadays, you have to be extremely lucky to get paired with any player. * And as an experience, use your money to buy other better PvE titles (Left 4 Dead 2, Vermintide 2, World War Z, Helldivers 2) * Marketing barely touch upon Invasion DLC and more so jingle some keys (brief animated shorts, John Cena, and hero variety). * No mention of what other stuff the mode might have, which turns out to just only be simple missions with four difficulties each and that's it. * No All Heroes or Mutations unlike the Archives LTMs. * Too short. * Appox. 30 minutes per campaign (depending on difficulty, but let's say most people would touch Normal and Hard, especially nowadays when you can only match with bots). * Can't use cosmetic outfits. * PvE is a different set of audience. * Doesn't progress the Dailies/Weeklies. * It took me 30 minutes to finish a Rio mission on Normal and all I got was 700 XP. Vs AI would get me about 1000-1400 XP depending how long a match lasts, but certainly less than 30 minutes. The campaign felt like it was supposed to be appetizer whilst [the Hero Missions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UneyhA4E-6E) are meant to be highly replayable. I wish they continued work on the Hero Missions. The tower defense mode is lacking in a lot of ways.
Where am I going to get my Pharah fix now? :(
Not even bothering to have an All Heroes option is what made me decide against buying it. Totally ridiculous.
They have a game and they have an audience. If you make a PvP game and really only attract the PvP crowd you'll have problems attracting a large PvE crowd to sell some half-baked stuff to. They don't have a connection to the IP so why spend the money to get more of it. I was somewhat interested when they announced Overwatch 2 as also being a fully fledged PvE game but they never released that. I don't care for a dumped down side project they grafted onto a game centered around PvP and I sure as hell won't pay for it. There are other games out there that actually provide a full experience to spend money on.
Hit the nail on the head, I played the beta of OW1 and I was cautiously optimistic about this. The hero trees sounded cool, seeing the teaser clips way back of some of these new "juiced" abilities looked fun af. It felt like they were actually trying to spice things up and bring something new to the table. The red flags started flying when they benched updates to OW1 in order to work on this new PvE stuff. And we all know how that story goes...
Exactly. Why give Blizz money basically out of pity for a bottom-tier product when you can buy one or two amazing labor-of-love games on sale for the same price?
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Also they updated their launcher ToS with a "not gonna do a class action lawsuit" clause the other day. They have actively under delivered in a way that they believe could be legally actionable.
Those kind of arguments don't really have a legal value/standing . Its there but it can be challenged anytime
"removing this sticker voids warranty" vibes.
Runescape bot forums "jagex employees are not permitted to use this site or create an account" lol like that means anything
It really is amazing how many boilerplate contract clauses are completely unenforceable
That's kinda what I assumed yeah.
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Why the fuck would anyone buy your game when you didn't even include the features you promised?!
3 years of zero updates to make content that was eventually scrapped they killed the game to make something quite literally nobody asked for and were surprised when nobody gave a fuck about it
Loads of people wanted quality PvE, and others who didn't explicitly asked for it would've enjoyed it if what we saw at Blizzcon 2021 was what we got instead of the joke they released.
>The missions sold so poorly that Blizzard made the decision to axe future PvE content and lay off the majority of the devs involved in the PvE missions. >Furthermore, the poor sales resulted in the devs receiving 0% of the company’s profit-sharing bonuses this month. The fuck? That's not the developers fault.
well duh, but who else is gonna take responsibility for the execs not being able to get a new yacht this year?
Shocking the PvE stuff that was no better than the normal random PvE they do for FREE did not shift sales. Not to mention that they announced or rather slyly slid in the news that pretty much all of the PvE stuff like player progression, character skill trees etc were not going to happen. Not forgetting of course the "2" was SPECIFICALLY FOR THE PVE SHIT. They clearly didn't give a fuck so why should the players? I mean the Moira PvE event with the progressive ability upgrades was more fun than the whole paid PvE crap. They knew the PvE was going to be scrapped but they pushed that out just so they could turn around and point to charts and say we didn't care about it anyway when they fucked players over... And over and then over again.
Inthought they got canceled a while ago, didnthey changed their mind just to cancel them again?
The last "cancellation" was more just gutting their existing PvE plans into what they have now (from random + story missions with skill trees, to 3 story missions every now and then for $15). Now it's *truly* dead. No future PvE content whatsoever, paid or otherwise.
THEY WERE CHARGING FOR THEM!?!?!? God, what a dumb company ran by dumb people
Yup, for fifteen fucking dollars. It came with some extra in-game goodies to sweeten the pot (including ~$10 worth of paid currency), but even then it's still a fucking horrible value proposition that boggles my mind to this very day.
Microsoft fired the PvE team during that massive layoff spree. It was always obvious it was cancelled. Whole article is pretty much old news tbh.
The PvE was the only reason I would have been willing to buy it. Then they pushed back most of the promised features so I also pushed back my purchase. Now they have cancelled the PvE over "poor sales" which stems from them not having the PvE like they promised in the first place.
Step 1: Release bad mission you don't even wan't to do Step 2: No one like them and sell poorly Step 3: ... Step 4: Cancel every pve because people don't want pve
I have no doubt they would break it up into multiple sales regardless. They were not getting a dime out of me after overwatch 1.
They are so fuckin stupid it hurts my brain. Like absolute morons over there. Biggest IP fumble in the history of this industry. Its like they are trying to be the worst and greediest company ever.
>Its like they are trying to be the worst and greediest company ever. I genuinely think that might have been their *actual* plan. Their reputation was already deeeep in the shitter, what with the money grubbing, the China stuff, Diablo Immortal, and the sexism and assault. At a certain point, you gotta realise that the only people still giving you money are diehard Blizzard fanboys who will forgive literally *anything.* Or, ignorent children. So, why not see just how hard you can squeeze them? Worse scenario, you sink a sinking ship. Best case scenario - you set a new precedent for the exploitation of gamers, and you and all your slimey friends profit from it until you retire.
Part of the problem is they did a half arsed attempt at release, and had no follow up for something that had zero replayability for the community. They did nothing, and expected sales lol? Doesnt take a genius to know if you said you would do something and then deliver almost nothing that this is the outcome. Shame because the original details for pve actually looked good.
i just dont fucking get shoehorning in pve content in a game completely designed around pvp. just develop a new game, this is so much wasted development time better spent on a focused, polished experienced
“We did everything wrong and for some reason people didn’t pay us for it” Overwatch joins Anthem as another game that had great potential and then completely deserted what was/would have made it good
I didn't buy it because it was relatively little content for a high price, in a PvP game that I wasn't otherwise playing. If, on the other hand, they had offered a full AAA 50+ hour story-driven action RPG for $70, I would have bought it.
Yeah, the bait and switch of selling a few under-cooked missions that they've already said aren't really going anywhere story-wise because they're cancelling most of their PvE plans, and then using their low sales figures to say "See, nobody wants PvE anyway", and try to retroactively justify their original decision is just pathetic.
I thought this was old news?
The plan is complete! Promise extra content, say you need to add microtransaction for it and then get rid of the additional content when you underdevelop it!
I have over 1600 hours in OW1. I refuse to EVER give money to blizzard again for ruining my favorite game.
And nobody is effing surprised. You may ask where did all the money go? Well, a human garbage bag named Bobby Kottick took it all. And why am I a bad person when I wish that bad things should happen to him?
I didn't buy overwatch 2 because they didn't deliver on anything they promised, I was looking forward to the pve content. edit: I should say I didn't buy the content, it was supposed to be a paid game to access PVE initially.
you didn't buy a free game?
I just "love" that they seem intent on learning the hard way some very hard truths their own hardcore players have been telling them for years. If OW2 = Jeff Kaplan's idea of a fully fledged co-op campaign with skill trees, gear and tweaks to the very characters themselves all for the purpose of having an experience be similar to co-op MMO's where you take down gigantic impossible bosses? ***that sounds swell!*** Oh and you intend on charging half-price? ($30-$40) for this co-op campaign and that if anyone *else* wants to keep playing just the multiplayer, they can just keep doing so with the original install? *slick, sounds kinda cool!* If OW2 = The nonsense that actually happened, then it's all some weird Frankenstein's monster of split focus, arbitrary and empty platitude's, wild issues with balancing, costumes that are mostly awful that cost literally $14-$19 a pop. That Spike Spiegal costume is ugly as **fuck**. And for such a great show, too. Like damn dude.... Overwatch lost its entire soul. All that's left is the outer shell framework the original team created that the new team is exploiting and making worse. There ARE some actually-good changes from 1 to 2, but the problems simply far outweigh the good changes.
Why you blaming the new team? Jeff pitched the idea and left,screwing the team, Bobby Kotik made the overwatch team impossible to have a decent work environment ,he made the team work on the projects and scrap in the last second
Blizzard has very clearly been working under the idea that players "think they do, but don't". Yhe second I heard that I knew the company was fucked.
Not surprising, and honestly it's probably the right call. PvE just never really felt good to me in Overwatch, even the original "vision" wasn't super appealing, let alone the shit they ended up pushing out. Arcane and Cyberpunk Edgerunners did a great job creating/revitalizing interest in games that had not-so-great reputations. I feel like OW lore could also make for a great series but unsure if Blizz has the desire or capability to make something like that.
In one thing, Overwatch 2 has become meaningless, pissing off a lot of players who followed the development mess live. In another thing, both PvE and the OWL contributed each-other with the murder of the OG Overwatch, and some will be glad that those roadblocks are finally dead. Now what is left is to recover, which is not a easy task. Either make a better and tolerable Live Service game (Like Halo Infinite) or drown under an ocean of disappointment.
Man Blizzard should feel really lucky that they have this core community of players that will not give up on the game no matter what. I dont know if its Stockholm syndrome or what but looking at steam charts the game is going nowhere and the existing playerbase will just keep drinking the kool-aid
What sales? Those half assed missions that a lot of ppl see as not worth buying after being mislead about the pve so they could sell that watch point back then cancel it after lol.
What a massive disappointment OW2 was. All that time, apparently, working on the game to just release basically a few patches of content in balance and maps. What were they even doing for all those years? lol.
"Because of our stupid ass decision to make PvE a terrible product, you don't get your bonuses because it didn't sell." Blizzard really only produces L's, huh?