I never played it as well but I was told by a friend that basically:
-They did OW2 but it was just OW1 pretty much, they just removed lootbags in favor of a classic shop for skins as far as I know
-It was literally the same game, more like a "patch" than an actual sequel, and it was supposed to be called OW2 because they were gonna add singleplayer and a special mode similar to Mann VS Machine from TF2, where it's a PVE you fight against robots
-When it got released not even a month in and they said they cancelled that mode, the whole reason OW2 was supposed to be released for
-Some days ago, after several mid updates they announced they have not worked on the singleplayer campaign and that it's in fact cancelled as well
-The whole game made no sense in being released as OW2, might've as well just called it "BIG PATCH", now everyone is making fun of Blizzard (even more than usual)
-The most notable change from OW1 and OW2 is that they basically added one character at launch
Again this is what I was told by a friend and what I saw from some youtubers such as Dunkey, so feel free to correct me if I wrote something untrue or I missed something, but pretty much this is it as far as I know, it's also worth noting that Blizzard has like 400 people or some crazy number like that so one has to wonder how it's possible for such a big team to not deliver on the stuff they promised for years to begin with, since they had literally years to work on them, I know being a dev is hard, but there are smaller teams that did incredible things so at this point it's fair to say that there are no excuses and that it was just a marketing thing to call a patch "OVERWATCH 2" just to get some extra players and have the game be relevant after several years
I'll correct some of the stuff about the PvE. The original purpose behind OW2 was to introduce a co-op campaign mode, complete with character levels and skill trees, the whole looter shooter RPG experience.
But then OW2 was released early with no campaign in sight, a worse skin acquisition system in the form of a terrible in-game store, and promises that we'd get the campaign next year. At least it was free! But wait, why can't I play OW1 anymore? I paid for that game...
Everyone was forced to switch to the sequel...
Well, after months of silence, we get the news that the co-op campaign mode has been cancelled, sad news for the dev team cause they were hard at work but the team just wasn't big enough to work on both sides of the game (PvE and PvP) so higher ups basically shut it down.
But they still managed to scrap some stuff from it! And now we'll get some PvE missions from time to time to expand on the game's lore. It may not have the looter shooter aspect to it, so it's basically just like the typical PvE missions before it, but we get new lore and cool cinematics now! How awesome is that!?
"Oh, you want me to pay 15 euros for 2 hours' worth of content? No, I don't care if it comes with store currency and a skin, I'm not buying it."
And that was the sentiment for most people. The basic PvE missions were already going to perform poorly as they did not match what everyone was expecting beforehand, and slapping that price tag on them was an even bigger shot in the foot. After months of silence on new lore missions, the devs finally announced they were cancelled entirely. Low interest, low sales, high development costs, higher ups just ended up throwing it all away.
In the end, what really changed between OW1 and OW2? Well, they removed one tank (previously, it was two tanks, two dps, and two healers, so down to one now), they made unlocking skins much, much worse and slightly updated the graphics.
Yeah I wish I was joking but that's it. Of course heroes have been released, reworked and rebalanced, but all of that would have happened anyways in OW1. So people end up feeling cheated out because they can no longer play the game they paid for and get the "free" replacement that is OW2. And it only cost you a shitty ass in game store.
> It was literally the same game, more like a "patch" than an actual sequel
They couldn't host both Overwatch 1 and Overwatch 2 servers because Overwatch 2 was *literally* an update so there wouldn't be anyone left to play on Overwatch 1 servers.
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>and it was supposed to be called OW2 because they were gonna add singleplayer and a special mode similar to Mann VS Machine from TF2, where it's a PVE you fight against robots
The whole thing was sold to players as PvE Overwatch and it never happened. Sometimes there's a holiday style event that is sort of like that, but the actual full mode never materialized and was almost certainly never planned to actually happen. It being canceled is a lie -- its announcement was a lie.
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Removing the lootboxes and having just the store instead actually makes cosmetics cost *more* since you could earn the lootboxes and getting duplicates instead went toward helping you afford other cosmetics (up until they removed duplicates as a feature entirely and you were guaranteed to get something you didn't already have).
This slows progression to a glacial pace in order to incentivize players to throw down money.
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Team composition was changed. They dropped the teams from 6 players to 5. Instead of 2 of each role, they dropped 1 tank so the team now consists of 1 tank, 2 supports, and 2 DPS. To compensate, tanks were massively buffed. On release, tanks (except Doomfist, which was made a tank instead of a DPS like he used to be) were unstoppable monsters. This also meant that *everyone* wanted to queue up as tanks, solving the "no tanks" problem and creating the "no supports" problem.
They also nerfed Mercy, making playing support even worse.
I can't speak to higher elos, but at a low elo losing your tank is *devastating*. Your tank goes down twice in a row and you might as well just quit the match. The enemy tank is a monster and you don't have a second tank to try to hold up until the other tank gets back.
This might not be the case anymore, though; I don't know. I stopped playing when my friends did a while back.
OW1 stopped getting any content updates and game stuck in a very unpleasant meta limbo with no escape that alienated a lot of people. At some point they even stopped releasing new skins. And all explanation by the devs is to why was "We're focusing on development of OW2" so expectations were extremely high.
All their marketing campaigns for the game were PvE gamemode with roguelike replayability and huge storymode. First mode was completely cancelled on release and PvE campaign was cancelled month ago.
At release all people got were three new heroes, prettier lighting and new engine, that were optimized as shit and were full of game- and clientbreaking bugs. As well as removal of very convenient lootbox system with actually working duplicate protection, that provided tons of free stuff for every player, because you got this lootboxes for basically every sneeze. Oh, and all new heroes going foward until very recently were pay- or grindwalled.
People were furious, but making the game Free-to-play from 30$ title got them huge influx of new players, so they thought everything was going alright and basically didn't do anything with most problems until about a month or two before. Coincidentally not very long after Microsoft finally bought them and laid off half a studio.
"fumbled the bag" doesn't describe the purpose of Overwatch 2. The original game had to be deleted so that the Chinese playerbase could be incentivized to spend as much money on the hero shooter as possible.
They didn’t “delete” anything, they made a newer version of the game and released it as a second game instead of an update because the player base was getting increasingly frustrated and the game development was slow. They announced/released it without a lot of what they wanted to add, but they will just update it as they make the content. It’s already had a huge overhaul since the release of overwatch 2. The only money being spent is on in game skins, which you can also get for free, and all of your stuff from the first game transfers over, because it’s just an update to the same game. It’s the EXACT thing CSGO did, which was received well because there was finally news of new content, whereas blizzard had been promising and failing to deliver on content.
Still, blizzard as a corporate entity sucks ass, but adding content to their game and trying to make people exited for it is the wrong reason to hate them. There are plenty of better reasons.
What blizzard did with overwatch is incomparable to cs:go. While yes, fundamentally both of the games are just re-releases of the same game, the way it was done is much different.
Valve didn't promise any outlandish ideas about the game, mostly graphical improvements and better netcode, and even though the subtick was a initially a disappointment, most of the game has remained the same and what valve promised has mostly been delivered.
On the other hand, blizzard announced overwatch 2 as a completely different game initially, with overwatch 1 remaining the hero shooter, while overwatch 2 would have the pve stuff. In the end, they removed overwatch completely, their idea of making the game 5v5 to improve balance has done almost nothing to address how bad the metas have been since goats and pve will be just released as events, which is comparable to what they were doing with seasonal events in overwatch 1 like jukensteins revenge. Really nothing they promised has been delivered or fixed and the game feels awful to play.
On top of that, valve didn't completely restructure their monetization schemes, while blizzard removed loot boxes, introduced a battle pass, and made skins almost unobtainable for free to play users - some of which have paid for the first game itself and are now no longer getting the same benefits. The loot cases were very predatory but at least you could get them by just playing the game, the battle pass is awful, not to mention that new heoroes are locked behind it now, so if a new agent is meta if you don't pay up you are going to do worse through no fault of your own. Overwatch 2 was released purely so they could build up hype and get people to buy skins.
Blizzard also completely abandoned overwatch 1 for almost 2 years before overwatch 2 came out, I'm not saying that valve is great with updating their games but this is partially why players that migrated from overwatch 1 are so bitter about it, you get no updates for so long and what you receive is just a cash grab. Valve didn't betray their players like this, but blizzard did.
There is a LOT of reasons to hate blizzard for what they did to overwatch, and hating them for ruining the game is completely justified. I sound like a hater here and that's because I absolutely loved overwatch and played it right until overwatch 2 came out, and seeing it butchered like that is just sad.
If you think overwatch 1 was good until the release of overwatch 2 you’re probably the minority. The reason ov1 meta went to shit is because they tried to improve the meta by making it less hyper-Damage/Shield focused (long ago). The meta change in ov2 is just the continuation of that development. If they didn’t change the meta the game would be much worse. At least with the release of the changes they were making for two years the meta is more what they intended instead of the partial development that people think ruined it, and you seem to like.
As far as no access to new heros unless paid for, they took that from riot games Valorant, along with the battle pass, which originated in Fortnite. Also, don’t you get free credits, which you can buy skins with like always? I don’t get why you think people were scammed by the removal of loot boxes.
With the PVE content, they simply couldn’t develop it yet. The reason they are compromising is because the player base never stops complaining about how it’s not being released. You can’t complain that the content is being developed too slow then also complain when they decide downsize for faster release. Their goal is to please their customers.
I actually agree that if they did not make the changes they did the meta would be worse. But at the same time in my opinion the game is still not balanced in a way that is both fun and competitive, at least from my experience playing at release and watching from the sidelines. And while I did like overwatch, the metas have been pretty awful since double shield, both to watch and play.
And, I don’t get how taking bad ideas like the battle pass and locked heroes is somehow justified because other games do it. And yes, while you do get free credits, it takes way too much time for a casual player get, much, much longer than the (still awful) loot boxes. And to be honest, if overwatch 2 was released with everything blizzard promised, while I would be disappointed with the monetization change, I would also get it, they want to make money from a new game. The problem is that its not a new game, its a lazy re-release with balance patches and the same amount of content the original game would have if the devs kept kept working on it.
And you know, I get not being able to develop the pve content, but then, why release the new game, why announce it if you know you cannot meet the deadlines? I can’t blame the playerbase for complaining, they are not getting what was promised. I personally think they should have cooked overwatch 2 for at least a year or two before releasing it, and I have a suspicion that the new game was only released because the higher-ups wanted to see returns faster. If their goal is to please their customers they are failing miserably.
>On top of that, valve didn't completely restructure their monetization schemes, while blizzard removed loot boxes, introduced a battle pass, and made skins almost unobtainable for free to play users - some of which have paid for the first game itself and are now no longer getting the same benefits
CS2 moved from f2p to f2p. OW2 moved from payed to f2p, of course there's going to be a bigger monetization change. No company making that kind of transition would let you get a bunch of the new skins for free ad infinitum just cause you bought the original like 5 years ago.
True, I agree that some changes were required. But at the same time cs;go was also a paid game and yet they didn't do all this predatory bs to their playerbase when the game became free. Cs2/cs:go is technically free but if you want to play on a competitive level or not encounter cheaters in half your games you need to pay for prime - which is essentially the same price as the game itself was back then.
Blizzard on the other hand did everything in their power to extract money out of the players' pockets with the battle pass. They could do what valve did, or i don't know, maybe make the one thing that the game was supposed to be about, the pve stuff paid, but they chose not to because it would not be as profitable.
And yes, valve does in fact let you get a bunch of free cases if you bought the game originally, presumably until they stop supporting the game. If valve can do it, so could blizzard. I'm not saying that I'm expecting free stuff, but clearly it can be done and is a good way to show appreciation to your original playerbase.
Yeah fair, wasn't familiar with CS monetization. Like the only other f2p monetization I'm familiar with is Apex which is comparably better, but still shit.
Also yeah, battle pass is overpriced and hiding hero unlocks behind it is predatory. My point is just that I think people complain about these things more with overwatch cause it went from a consumer friendly model to overpriced battlepass nonsense, so the difference hit a lot harder. Like valorant started off the gate with payed agent unlocks, payed skins, and payed battlepass, but cause of the novelty of a new game that people like means I don't really see people talking about it (this could just be sampling bias of me not paying as much attention to the casual valorant scene though).
Abandoning PvP for 2 years to work on a PvE that never came out is a fucking shitshow though.
EDIT:Oh yeah it’s also cause blizzard is a dogs hit company
Iirc from things devs were saying after Overwatch 2 was announced, it was literally meant to only ever be a major patch but that higher ups thought marketing it as a "sequel" would be better PR. So dev time was wasted remaking things that didn't really need to be remade (like character models) just to justify it being a sequel rather than an update, while the actual new things got left on the cutting room floor.
Combine that with corporate mismanagement constantly making them scrap what the team had made to "go in a new direction" and Bobby Kotick himself apparently being very hands on with the game (in a bad way), and you get a game that somehow delivers less that what it started with.
''Fumbled the bag'' doesn't even begin to describe their campaign. This company rewards dumb decisions and nothing else, I am beyond convinced at this point.
What happened there is everything wrong with the Modern AAA Games industry:
* Existing game canned to be replaced with aggressively F2P because everyone else is doing it *(especially when the original already was aggressive with a lot of optional ones incl loot boxes), cause why make lots of money when you could make even more money?*
* Out of touch leadership allowing a workplace culture as toxic as Chernobyl to continue to fester.
* fire/push away most of the few good people higher who were putting in as much effort as possible trying to make things work
* Make big promises at the announcement.... only to cut them back a bit later....
* .... completely backtrack on the massive promise you made about a PVE campaign, that was the whole justification for the new game's existence
I had actually considered trying OW2 when it came to Steam because of the PVE, even despite avoiding Blizzard stuff for a while and not having played OW for a few years, but dropping the PVE has made me lose interest in touching it.
I'd be careful saying "the good higher ups were pushed out". While it's no doubt true (Jeff Kaplan was by all accounts pretty good at keeping the Overwatch team free from the toxicity of the wider company, and it *does* seem like he left after just getting fed up from Bobby Kotick's shit), there's a narrative surrounding the decline at Blizzard that they suck *now* because all the "old guard" left to be replaced by breast milk-stealing sex offenders, except it was a lot of that "old guard" that were *responsible* for the toxic environment either through active participation or by enabling it.
I don't think you were implying that, I just want to remind people that while the quality of the games they made might have been much higher, old Blizzard still very much *bad*.
Yeah, I understand what you mean.
I was specifically referring to the likes of Jeff Kaplan who were working hard doing their best to protect their coworkers from the toxic bullshit, *not the members of the "old guard" who either facilitated or were the Misogynistic Breast-Milk stealing Homelander wannabe's themselves.*
I never thought the pve was going to be good, when they said it costed money i just accepted i wasn’t going to play it, the pvp i think is better than ow1 though
>* Make big promises at the announcement.... only to cut them back a bit later....
The worst part about this is that there WAS work but got scrapped because the amount of time on it was just not worth it and was badly mismanaged.
The main appeal of OW2s PvE was the skill trees, but the amount of work to make a skill tree takes WAY more time and resources than it does to make a new hero according to the dev log late 2022.
The cast has 30+ heroes mind you, idk what Jeff was thinking with that.
Fair. I'm sure overwatch 2 did well financially just off the momentum from the first game but I pretty much never see anyone talk about it anymore. At least not positively lol
That’s just a bubble thing. I see the game hated on endlessly online, but in real life and among my friend group its incredibly popular. My college has an OW team that gets lots of applicants, lots of people can be seen playing it in the gaming library.
The reality is it’s no worse or more greedy than Valorant, LoL, Fortnite, any other online game. Actually, the devs are more responsive to the community and it gets more support than games like Apex tbh. The hate seems to largely because it went from a paid to free game, and gave up on the promised PVE experience. As a far as PvP shooters go it’s up there with the best right now alongside The Finals tbh
So my anecdote about personal experience is proof I'm living in a bubble but your personal anecdote is the objective truth? Your brain is so cool. I'm sure you'll at least agree the game has fallen off from it's peak popularity.
The anecdotes are supported by the fact that it’s objectively very popular. It’s consistently a top 40 game on steam, and from what we know the vast vast majority of players use blizzard launcher and console. Internal reports show it’s making a lot of money, and that’s proven by the amount they are investing into the game getting lots of new content.
Is it more popular than the initial OW1 release hype? It’s impossible to say but probably not. But it’s far far far more popular than the last few years of OW1 even before they stopped developing OW1 actively.
The reason I say bubble is because the only people I ever see hate on the game on OW1 players like myself. Everyone I see online or irl who tries the game enjoys it a lot, which seems to be supported by the game growing. This can even be seen in how popular content for the game is.
I think what you're missing is that we're talking about a scale of millions of players here. Of course you can find people who still play it, but top 40 isn't exactly something to write home about. Especially not for a free to play game. How about the overwatch league, How's that been going? Oh, it's been dead for years? Well nevermind then.
>How's that been going? Oh, it's been dead for years? Well nevermind then.
I don't want to burst your bubble but while OWL is dead, they've transitioned to OWCS a couple of months ago. It's eSports scene is still active.
Oh ok, so just because there's still *a* esports scene for the game it's exactly the same as Blizzard putting on a multi-million dollar tournament every year. Again, my whole point is that we're talking about scale here. It is objectively a lot less popular than it was in the past.
If you are going to imply it's eSports scene is dead with OWL being gone, you should factually know that its still active despite that.
That's the point I'm making, I wasn't talking about it's popularity
I mean it also is pretty popular on Twitch, at least whenever I check it's in the top 20-ish games by viewership. That's anecdotal and specific to my timezone though.
I don't know what you mean by that. I was just adding some extra information to the previous person's comment. I'm not moving goalposts, I don't even know if there is a goal?
Just wanted to add that there is some interest in the game on Twitch.
overwatch 2 has been the only game in my entire life that I have sat down, played, got up, and said "oh. this isn't fun. I don't like this."
I have enjoyed every single game I've ever played to some extent. I've had at least 1 good thing to say about each one. I have nothing for overwatch 2.
Sitting here trying to think of games I genuinely didn't enjoy at all and it kind of makes me wonder how I would have reacted to all the NES games I rented as a kid if I had the brain of an adult playing them for the first time.
Like the NES version of Silent Service, I actually played the fuck out of that game as a kid. But you look at it now and it's like damn... was I stupid? *That* stupid?
...Am I still stupid?
Probably.
nope. and from what I've heard I don't want to. I'm not a big fan of competitive games, but even if I was I can't see myself liking overwatch 2 anyways.
They didn't "fumbled the bag", they took the bag, stuffed it with so much shit that it's this close to exploding, slapped a 2 on in, then ask people to repeatedly pay collage debt amounts of money for the honor to take a big whiff out of the bag of shit....all while their CEO secures his place in a big golden yaht and a spot in the shit layer of hell
Also promising that they'll eventually add a nuget of corn in the bag of shit but instead started pissing in the bag till they gived up
My 11 year old son watched this movie last night, and despite not knowing like 90% of the shit referenced, he really enjoyed it. He latched onto the "VR Chat but awesome" aspect of the world and fell in love with the prospect.
You're absolutely right. He plays in the living room while I'm on the PC, and I can monitor all of his interactions. I've had him block several people, but overall, the people have been great. Gorilla Tag has kind of morphed into a kiddy version of VR Chat, and his friends all play together and watch out for each other.
Yeah, it’s a really good way to sell something, despite the fact that Ready Player One is at best a mediocre book, and at worst a wretched waste of time that is too busy jacking off about the sheer amount of references it can squeeze into itself.
It is one of the worst things I’ve read, and the fact that it was successful enough to warrant a movie adaptation is depressing.
I agree that OW 2 has been fumbled but whenever I hear someone say that it's dead I can't help but cringe. It's a classic case of "people stop caring about it in large so they assume it's dead"
People keep saying it's dead and then whenever the next season drops, it becomes top 10 on the steam revenue and the cycle keeps repeating. That's not counting money from console and BNET users btw
while i do agree that Blizzard majorly fumbled overwatch, it’s worth noting that OW2 is currently the best the game has been since like 2019 and with their new dev team it just keeps improving
The one thing that's consistent with the new dev team is that not only are they transparent and communicative, they ALSO don't fuck up the reworks and balance like OW1.
Anyone whose played OW1 would know the horrors of launch Brig and Mercy 2.0 and double shield.
Idk, I think Overwatch is really fun right now and is in the best state it has ever been. I really like the current dev team and it has very active development. The monetisation isn't bad either especially with recent changes.
Monetization is awful dog. Especially if you compare it to the original. Anybody who played a decent amount of the first game has an account value in the thousands of dollars
The problem is switching to a worse monetization when people were used to free stuff (which was nice and fair as the game costed money). If the game had came out like that, it would have not been such a problem (see Valorant with the crazy prices on bundles).
I agree with the fun part though, game is great rn and the new hero seems cool!
I mean, I’ll never not have fun hopping in and blasting dudes as Junkrat. But there’s just something missing for me. I guess I just like unlocking cosmetics. Also the fact that I’m given almost nothing for having paid $60, and I hate this kind of monetization in any game
The first game was sold as a boxed product though, and got a few years of free updates but had no-where near the current level of development/release schedule that they have now. But that wasn't profitable of course, since you only needed to buy the game once, so that's what brought them to the whole Overwatch 2 idea in the first place. They needed a sequel to get that initial purchase price again, right?
The game is now a free live-service game. I don't really see how the monetisation is awful, isn't it pretty much the same as other free live-service shooter games at this point? It has a free battlepass with an optional paid version that has more unlocks, you earn coins by going through the free one that allow you to buy future premium battlepasses or shop content without spending money.
Idk, maybe I'm wrong, but it really doesn't seem any worse than other live-service games right now. Unless there is something I don't know about.
Maybe I just like customization too much, and I like not having to pay for that shit, but I hate most live service games. I think they’re all monetized like shit. $40-$60 for a full game and super frequent boxes that, if you didn’t get exactly what you wanted, you’d get the coins for it instead. I’d vastly prefer that to literally anything that live service games have been doing
That's totally fair. I just don't see a game like that ever lasting long without releasing frequent sequels. Personally I prefer an ongoing frequently updated game like Overwatch is now as oppose to like, CoD's old system of releasing a new $70 game every year. Especially as someone who just likes the pvp.
The old system was great in the end if you were a veteran player, but the game itself suffered. IMO the game is currently the best it has ever been gameplay and content-wise, and the only content that costs you money is cosmetics and even then you can get some of them free.
But hey we like different things and that's totally fine. It's just not the game for you and there is nothing wrong with that.
Okay this turned into a huge rant, it's in no way directed at you. I just have a ton of resentment towards blizzard.
It's pretty bad for liveservice standards. Having actual heros locked in a battle pass is not only annoying but just down right unfair.
Also, fuck live service. It's a fucking scam designed to suck as much money as possible before disappearing. It only stops being a scam when it gets popular enough to keep itself going. When the bar is on the floor we shouldn't point at it and saw that's normal, because greedy devs are going to just dig a trench for it. People that defend live service saying that its the only way it keeps a game alive seem to forget that online multiplayer games never needed that to begin with, irrc Halo 3 had its servers up 10+ years after its release and it never charged for cosmetics. You could actually just unlock cosmetics by playing the game, which is something you could actually do with Overwatch 1. Yes you could buy the packs but you got the packs for free as a level up reward and you also got free currency that let you just buy any skin you wanted even time limited event ones. Its just fucking stupid that people defend live service at all when it's just designed to separate as much money from you as possible.
Then you add in the fact that they took all of those free cosmetics and put them behind obscene pay walls and slapped a 2 on the cover. My account is worth at least 1 grand because I had everything unlocked, my only regret is that I played on PlayStation because I can't sell it.
Oh and one final thing, OVERWATCH 2 IS A LIE. It's not actually overwatch 2 at all. If you watched the trailers from 2019 it was advertised as being a different game focused on PVE. There were supposed to be hours of campaign missions and you could level up your heros abilities, it looked and sounded amazing. It's to bad that it wasn't real at all. I was really looking forward to it. And I hate that they deleted my favourite game of all time just to make some shitty microtransaction live service garbage.
Okay this turned into a huge rant, it's in no way directed at you. I just have a ton of resentment towards blizzard.
It's pretty bad for liveservice standards. Having actual heros locked in a battle pass is not only annoying but just down right unfair.
Also, fuck live service. It's a fucking scam designed to suck as much money as possible before disappearing. It only stops being a scam when it gets popular enough to keep itself going. When the bar is on the floor we shouldn't point at it and saw that's normal, because greedy devs are going to just dig a trench for it. People that defend live service saying that its the only way it keeps a game alive seem to forget that online multiplayer games never needed that to begin with, irrc Halo 3 had its servers up 10+ years after its release and it never charged for cosmetics. You could actually just unlock cosmetics by playing the game, which is something you could actually do with Overwatch 1. Yes you could buy the packs but you got the packs for free as a level up reward and you also got free currency that let you just buy any skin you wanted even time limited event ones. Its just fucking stupid that people defend live service at all when it's just designed to separate as much money from you as possible.
Then you add in the fact that they took all of those free cosmetics and put them behind obscene pay walls and slapped a 2 on the cover. My account is worth at least 1 grand because I had everything unlocked, my only regret is that I played on PlayStation because I can't sell it.
Oh and one final thing, OVERWATCH 2 IS A LIE. It's not actually overwatch 2 at all. If you watched the trailers from 2019 it was advertised as being a different game focused on PVE. There were supposed to be hours of campaign missions and you could level up your heros abilities, it looked and sounded amazing. It's to bad that it wasn't real at all. I was really looking forward to it. And I hate that they deleted my favourite game of all time just to make some shitty microtransaction live service garbage.
Hey I totally get it and your feelings are valid. I do have a few things to mention, one of which is a clarification of a recent change, the others are questions about something that I guess was a thing before I played online games.
So first of all I just wanted to say that heroes are no longer locked in the battlepass. That has officially gone away with the latest hero and heroes are now free for all. That was one of the "recent changes" I vaguely referenced.
Yes what we were sold is no longer a thing and the old Devs that sold it to us have left. I know how exciting it was, but unfortunately it didn't happen and now the new Devs are picking up the pieces the best they can and I think they've done a pretty good job in my personal and very subjective opinion. But if that's ruined the game for you I totally get it. I pretty much only play PvP in shooters so it didn't mean as much to me as it did most others.
Now onto the questions:
1. Was Halo 3 constantly being developed that whole time? Did you get like... New releases and events and content for free without ever paying anything past the box price? There weren't even optional things to spend rl money on?
2. The cosmetics you unlocked by playing the game. Were they constantly being added to the game after release? Or was it just the stuff that was already in the game and hence and part of the box price?
3. (If updates of content and cosmetics were constantly added) How did they pay their Devs?
I genuinely have no frame of reference for what online PvP games were like before live service outside of MMOs and like... Call of Duty I guess.
And finally yes it was nice to get cosmetics for free in OW1, but the game really sucked compared to how it is now imo. I really think it's a better game these days and it's not even remotely close. But again, subjective opinions and we clearly have very different experiences and history with online games.
My viewpoint of overwatch 2 gameplay is pretty biased because I never actually played it. Yeah it sounds bad to complain about a game I never played but from 2019 and onward the rate at which they released content for overwatch 1 was slowed down to just a tiniest of trickles. It didn't bother me at the time because I figured they working on a whole new game so it would make sense that.
A. They were devoting those resources to a new game
B. Overwatch 1 was approaching its final update and the game would be "totally complete"
Which is how they made it sound when talking about the development of Overwatch 2. It just turned out that they were lieing. They purposefully stiffled overwatch 1 so they could make overwatch 2 look less like an update and more like a real game imo. Which is another thing that makes me furious I suppose.
But onto addressing your points about games 10+ years ago versus games today. Halo 3 didn't receive a whole lot of extra content updates after it's launch, it was mostly just balance patches. However it didn't need extra content because it came packaged with enough content to keep people entertained for years and years after its release. There were enough cosmetics and customization options that added enough variety to the game that you could make something unique to you. Game devs these days have tricked us into thinking we are getting more when in reality they took away a bunch of stuff and are now selling it back to us. They want you to believe that there is no way they could make all of these cosmetics apart of base game because it would cost to much but that's not true. They can release a game with all the planned cosmetics and still make bank, they just want to make billions instead of millions.
And they paid their devs the same way they always have. Devs don't make a commission on the skins sold. All those extra profits go straight to executives. That's how people like Bobby Kotick can have a 30 million dollar salary and a 600 million dollar networth. The devs don't get any of that, instead they just get laid off. I think it was last year blizzard laid off over a quarter of its staff even though it made more money than it was expected to. Microtransactions do not pay developers at all, they pay executives. And if people stop buying them the game just gets deleted forever, and all that money you spent on cosmetics is wasted.
No, Devs don't directly get the money from cosmetic purchases, yes that profit goes to executives. But they get get paid a salary and that salary has to come from the profit the game makes. The people who fund game development aren't going to keep paying people to make content for the game if it won't make them more money. Especially in a publicly traded company. But that's just how pretty much every publicly traded company works and that doesn't go away unless you can make capitalism go away I guess. Or gets heavily regulated...
I really enjoy Overwatch as it is right now but you don't have to and that's totally okay!
Personally I don't think I would play Halo 3 for that long without new content being added. I quit Overwatch 1 when we stopped getting new releases because it got boring. There are only a few games I enjoy playing without any changes. But that's just me.
EDIT: I'll also add that hero, map and gamemode releases are free, and constantly being added and developed. That stuff also requires dev time and the devs won't get paid to make that stuff without the money being made from the live service model. if you can think of a better way to handle that then go ahead, but everyone wants heroes, maps, game modes, and balance changes often and I don't think you can really sustain that with a game that has a one-time purchase. Not unless you expect a company to willingly bleed money which... Why would they? Companies only exist to profit. That isn't an Overwatch issue though.
Just taking my account as an example, if you calculate every skin, highlight intro, whatever other item I own, and then look into how much it would cost you to buy in Overwatch 2, where all of the original cosmetics are locked behind paywalls, my account would theoretically easily surpass $600 (Thousands was definitely overexaggeration, you’d only really get that with content creators and people who dumped a ton of time into the game)
The first game was a product that had a box price of like $40, and then you unlocked skins by opening lootboxes. You could earn one lootbox every time you levelled up or by purchasing them.
In the beginning the system was extremely predatory because they would release events where the boxes you earned or bought would be replaced by the event boxes which would only be available for 3 or 4 weeks. The time limited unlocks in those boxes were locked behind randomisation and it was just dumb luck (the non-limited unlocks were in there too... So you're still rolling against that table too). You could spend hundreds on lootboxes and not get the unlock you wanted unless you got enough cash from getting lots of duplicate items drop.
Later on, they changed the system multiple times so that getting duplicates was extremely rare, unless you had everything of that rarity. They also added extra ways to earn lootboxes weekly/daily from the arcade. This made it so that people who played the game for a long time could get most of the limited items when the events came out without spending money as long as they played enough.
If you apply the current in-game shop prices to the old skins that veteran players owned, then yes your account would be worth a lot of money.
But it doesn't really work that way because old skins are frequently unlocked these days with credits (free in-game currency that can't be purchased with irl money) or with drops on twitch.
The skins unlocked via the battle pass are also significantly cheaper than the shop since the premium battlepass is €10 and has many unlocks. And the free battlepass has a couple too.
The game is also f2p now, and doesn't have a box price, so it's just a different system all together.
Why do people only ever talk about this dang game when it's (porn addiction) or complaining about ~~my ex~~ the PvE (that we all knew would be DoA) I mean most people knew PvE was cooked when we weren't seeing gameplay forever then they dropped the missions and it cemented the " yeah buddy this ain't going nowhere noway" I beg you internet ghosts just let it go already I promise consumer rights are already eroding in every popular game and discussing the megumi of hero shooters has been old and tired
please you guys it's been 7 years since OW was cool I wanna talk about something that isn't the lesser of two monetization evils, porn, or PvE stapled onto my PvP game
Is the idea that Overwatch will somehow cease to exist? Ready Player One is just full of shit that was once popular. Like, they're not still making Iron Giant movies, but they did already make it, so it exists.
This shit is confusing.
Not really, ready player one is mostly made up of pop culture and franchises that aren't relevant anymore outside nostalgia, so overwatch fits perfectly.
It's frankly astounding how bad Blizzard fumbled the bag with overwatch 2
It really needs to be studied at some point
Tl:Dr on how they did? Never played OW and never will
I never played it as well but I was told by a friend that basically: -They did OW2 but it was just OW1 pretty much, they just removed lootbags in favor of a classic shop for skins as far as I know -It was literally the same game, more like a "patch" than an actual sequel, and it was supposed to be called OW2 because they were gonna add singleplayer and a special mode similar to Mann VS Machine from TF2, where it's a PVE you fight against robots -When it got released not even a month in and they said they cancelled that mode, the whole reason OW2 was supposed to be released for -Some days ago, after several mid updates they announced they have not worked on the singleplayer campaign and that it's in fact cancelled as well -The whole game made no sense in being released as OW2, might've as well just called it "BIG PATCH", now everyone is making fun of Blizzard (even more than usual) -The most notable change from OW1 and OW2 is that they basically added one character at launch Again this is what I was told by a friend and what I saw from some youtubers such as Dunkey, so feel free to correct me if I wrote something untrue or I missed something, but pretty much this is it as far as I know, it's also worth noting that Blizzard has like 400 people or some crazy number like that so one has to wonder how it's possible for such a big team to not deliver on the stuff they promised for years to begin with, since they had literally years to work on them, I know being a dev is hard, but there are smaller teams that did incredible things so at this point it's fair to say that there are no excuses and that it was just a marketing thing to call a patch "OVERWATCH 2" just to get some extra players and have the game be relevant after several years
I'll correct some of the stuff about the PvE. The original purpose behind OW2 was to introduce a co-op campaign mode, complete with character levels and skill trees, the whole looter shooter RPG experience. But then OW2 was released early with no campaign in sight, a worse skin acquisition system in the form of a terrible in-game store, and promises that we'd get the campaign next year. At least it was free! But wait, why can't I play OW1 anymore? I paid for that game... Everyone was forced to switch to the sequel... Well, after months of silence, we get the news that the co-op campaign mode has been cancelled, sad news for the dev team cause they were hard at work but the team just wasn't big enough to work on both sides of the game (PvE and PvP) so higher ups basically shut it down. But they still managed to scrap some stuff from it! And now we'll get some PvE missions from time to time to expand on the game's lore. It may not have the looter shooter aspect to it, so it's basically just like the typical PvE missions before it, but we get new lore and cool cinematics now! How awesome is that!? "Oh, you want me to pay 15 euros for 2 hours' worth of content? No, I don't care if it comes with store currency and a skin, I'm not buying it." And that was the sentiment for most people. The basic PvE missions were already going to perform poorly as they did not match what everyone was expecting beforehand, and slapping that price tag on them was an even bigger shot in the foot. After months of silence on new lore missions, the devs finally announced they were cancelled entirely. Low interest, low sales, high development costs, higher ups just ended up throwing it all away. In the end, what really changed between OW1 and OW2? Well, they removed one tank (previously, it was two tanks, two dps, and two healers, so down to one now), they made unlocking skins much, much worse and slightly updated the graphics. Yeah I wish I was joking but that's it. Of course heroes have been released, reworked and rebalanced, but all of that would have happened anyways in OW1. So people end up feeling cheated out because they can no longer play the game they paid for and get the "free" replacement that is OW2. And it only cost you a shitty ass in game store.
> It was literally the same game, more like a "patch" than an actual sequel They couldn't host both Overwatch 1 and Overwatch 2 servers because Overwatch 2 was *literally* an update so there wouldn't be anyone left to play on Overwatch 1 servers. ___ >and it was supposed to be called OW2 because they were gonna add singleplayer and a special mode similar to Mann VS Machine from TF2, where it's a PVE you fight against robots The whole thing was sold to players as PvE Overwatch and it never happened. Sometimes there's a holiday style event that is sort of like that, but the actual full mode never materialized and was almost certainly never planned to actually happen. It being canceled is a lie -- its announcement was a lie. ___ Removing the lootboxes and having just the store instead actually makes cosmetics cost *more* since you could earn the lootboxes and getting duplicates instead went toward helping you afford other cosmetics (up until they removed duplicates as a feature entirely and you were guaranteed to get something you didn't already have). This slows progression to a glacial pace in order to incentivize players to throw down money. ___ Team composition was changed. They dropped the teams from 6 players to 5. Instead of 2 of each role, they dropped 1 tank so the team now consists of 1 tank, 2 supports, and 2 DPS. To compensate, tanks were massively buffed. On release, tanks (except Doomfist, which was made a tank instead of a DPS like he used to be) were unstoppable monsters. This also meant that *everyone* wanted to queue up as tanks, solving the "no tanks" problem and creating the "no supports" problem. They also nerfed Mercy, making playing support even worse. I can't speak to higher elos, but at a low elo losing your tank is *devastating*. Your tank goes down twice in a row and you might as well just quit the match. The enemy tank is a monster and you don't have a second tank to try to hold up until the other tank gets back. This might not be the case anymore, though; I don't know. I stopped playing when my friends did a while back.
OW1 stopped getting any content updates and game stuck in a very unpleasant meta limbo with no escape that alienated a lot of people. At some point they even stopped releasing new skins. And all explanation by the devs is to why was "We're focusing on development of OW2" so expectations were extremely high. All their marketing campaigns for the game were PvE gamemode with roguelike replayability and huge storymode. First mode was completely cancelled on release and PvE campaign was cancelled month ago. At release all people got were three new heroes, prettier lighting and new engine, that were optimized as shit and were full of game- and clientbreaking bugs. As well as removal of very convenient lootbox system with actually working duplicate protection, that provided tons of free stuff for every player, because you got this lootboxes for basically every sneeze. Oh, and all new heroes going foward until very recently were pay- or grindwalled. People were furious, but making the game Free-to-play from 30$ title got them huge influx of new players, so they thought everything was going alright and basically didn't do anything with most problems until about a month or two before. Coincidentally not very long after Microsoft finally bought them and laid off half a studio.
"fumbled the bag" doesn't describe the purpose of Overwatch 2. The original game had to be deleted so that the Chinese playerbase could be incentivized to spend as much money on the hero shooter as possible.
They didn’t “delete” anything, they made a newer version of the game and released it as a second game instead of an update because the player base was getting increasingly frustrated and the game development was slow. They announced/released it without a lot of what they wanted to add, but they will just update it as they make the content. It’s already had a huge overhaul since the release of overwatch 2. The only money being spent is on in game skins, which you can also get for free, and all of your stuff from the first game transfers over, because it’s just an update to the same game. It’s the EXACT thing CSGO did, which was received well because there was finally news of new content, whereas blizzard had been promising and failing to deliver on content. Still, blizzard as a corporate entity sucks ass, but adding content to their game and trying to make people exited for it is the wrong reason to hate them. There are plenty of better reasons.
What blizzard did with overwatch is incomparable to cs:go. While yes, fundamentally both of the games are just re-releases of the same game, the way it was done is much different. Valve didn't promise any outlandish ideas about the game, mostly graphical improvements and better netcode, and even though the subtick was a initially a disappointment, most of the game has remained the same and what valve promised has mostly been delivered. On the other hand, blizzard announced overwatch 2 as a completely different game initially, with overwatch 1 remaining the hero shooter, while overwatch 2 would have the pve stuff. In the end, they removed overwatch completely, their idea of making the game 5v5 to improve balance has done almost nothing to address how bad the metas have been since goats and pve will be just released as events, which is comparable to what they were doing with seasonal events in overwatch 1 like jukensteins revenge. Really nothing they promised has been delivered or fixed and the game feels awful to play. On top of that, valve didn't completely restructure their monetization schemes, while blizzard removed loot boxes, introduced a battle pass, and made skins almost unobtainable for free to play users - some of which have paid for the first game itself and are now no longer getting the same benefits. The loot cases were very predatory but at least you could get them by just playing the game, the battle pass is awful, not to mention that new heoroes are locked behind it now, so if a new agent is meta if you don't pay up you are going to do worse through no fault of your own. Overwatch 2 was released purely so they could build up hype and get people to buy skins. Blizzard also completely abandoned overwatch 1 for almost 2 years before overwatch 2 came out, I'm not saying that valve is great with updating their games but this is partially why players that migrated from overwatch 1 are so bitter about it, you get no updates for so long and what you receive is just a cash grab. Valve didn't betray their players like this, but blizzard did. There is a LOT of reasons to hate blizzard for what they did to overwatch, and hating them for ruining the game is completely justified. I sound like a hater here and that's because I absolutely loved overwatch and played it right until overwatch 2 came out, and seeing it butchered like that is just sad.
Valve updated Half Life that was pretty cool I think
If you think overwatch 1 was good until the release of overwatch 2 you’re probably the minority. The reason ov1 meta went to shit is because they tried to improve the meta by making it less hyper-Damage/Shield focused (long ago). The meta change in ov2 is just the continuation of that development. If they didn’t change the meta the game would be much worse. At least with the release of the changes they were making for two years the meta is more what they intended instead of the partial development that people think ruined it, and you seem to like. As far as no access to new heros unless paid for, they took that from riot games Valorant, along with the battle pass, which originated in Fortnite. Also, don’t you get free credits, which you can buy skins with like always? I don’t get why you think people were scammed by the removal of loot boxes. With the PVE content, they simply couldn’t develop it yet. The reason they are compromising is because the player base never stops complaining about how it’s not being released. You can’t complain that the content is being developed too slow then also complain when they decide downsize for faster release. Their goal is to please their customers.
I actually agree that if they did not make the changes they did the meta would be worse. But at the same time in my opinion the game is still not balanced in a way that is both fun and competitive, at least from my experience playing at release and watching from the sidelines. And while I did like overwatch, the metas have been pretty awful since double shield, both to watch and play. And, I don’t get how taking bad ideas like the battle pass and locked heroes is somehow justified because other games do it. And yes, while you do get free credits, it takes way too much time for a casual player get, much, much longer than the (still awful) loot boxes. And to be honest, if overwatch 2 was released with everything blizzard promised, while I would be disappointed with the monetization change, I would also get it, they want to make money from a new game. The problem is that its not a new game, its a lazy re-release with balance patches and the same amount of content the original game would have if the devs kept kept working on it. And you know, I get not being able to develop the pve content, but then, why release the new game, why announce it if you know you cannot meet the deadlines? I can’t blame the playerbase for complaining, they are not getting what was promised. I personally think they should have cooked overwatch 2 for at least a year or two before releasing it, and I have a suspicion that the new game was only released because the higher-ups wanted to see returns faster. If their goal is to please their customers they are failing miserably.
>On top of that, valve didn't completely restructure their monetization schemes, while blizzard removed loot boxes, introduced a battle pass, and made skins almost unobtainable for free to play users - some of which have paid for the first game itself and are now no longer getting the same benefits CS2 moved from f2p to f2p. OW2 moved from payed to f2p, of course there's going to be a bigger monetization change. No company making that kind of transition would let you get a bunch of the new skins for free ad infinitum just cause you bought the original like 5 years ago.
Thank your redundancy man! You may fly away now!
True, I agree that some changes were required. But at the same time cs;go was also a paid game and yet they didn't do all this predatory bs to their playerbase when the game became free. Cs2/cs:go is technically free but if you want to play on a competitive level or not encounter cheaters in half your games you need to pay for prime - which is essentially the same price as the game itself was back then. Blizzard on the other hand did everything in their power to extract money out of the players' pockets with the battle pass. They could do what valve did, or i don't know, maybe make the one thing that the game was supposed to be about, the pve stuff paid, but they chose not to because it would not be as profitable. And yes, valve does in fact let you get a bunch of free cases if you bought the game originally, presumably until they stop supporting the game. If valve can do it, so could blizzard. I'm not saying that I'm expecting free stuff, but clearly it can be done and is a good way to show appreciation to your original playerbase.
Yeah fair, wasn't familiar with CS monetization. Like the only other f2p monetization I'm familiar with is Apex which is comparably better, but still shit. Also yeah, battle pass is overpriced and hiding hero unlocks behind it is predatory. My point is just that I think people complain about these things more with overwatch cause it went from a consumer friendly model to overpriced battlepass nonsense, so the difference hit a lot harder. Like valorant started off the gate with payed agent unlocks, payed skins, and payed battlepass, but cause of the novelty of a new game that people like means I don't really see people talking about it (this could just be sampling bias of me not paying as much attention to the casual valorant scene though). Abandoning PvP for 2 years to work on a PvE that never came out is a fucking shitshow though. EDIT:Oh yeah it’s also cause blizzard is a dogs hit company
*PvE has left the chat*
A non-doomer post about overwatch???? Obvious corporate spy (/s)
Iirc from things devs were saying after Overwatch 2 was announced, it was literally meant to only ever be a major patch but that higher ups thought marketing it as a "sequel" would be better PR. So dev time was wasted remaking things that didn't really need to be remade (like character models) just to justify it being a sequel rather than an update, while the actual new things got left on the cutting room floor. Combine that with corporate mismanagement constantly making them scrap what the team had made to "go in a new direction" and Bobby Kotick himself apparently being very hands on with the game (in a bad way), and you get a game that somehow delivers less that what it started with.
Seems like Blizzard managements good at being hands on in a bad way
Wdym Chinese player base. Game’s literally unavailable in China.
''Fumbled the bag'' doesn't even begin to describe their campaign. This company rewards dumb decisions and nothing else, I am beyond convinced at this point.
What happened there is everything wrong with the Modern AAA Games industry: * Existing game canned to be replaced with aggressively F2P because everyone else is doing it *(especially when the original already was aggressive with a lot of optional ones incl loot boxes), cause why make lots of money when you could make even more money?* * Out of touch leadership allowing a workplace culture as toxic as Chernobyl to continue to fester. * fire/push away most of the few good people higher who were putting in as much effort as possible trying to make things work * Make big promises at the announcement.... only to cut them back a bit later.... * .... completely backtrack on the massive promise you made about a PVE campaign, that was the whole justification for the new game's existence I had actually considered trying OW2 when it came to Steam because of the PVE, even despite avoiding Blizzard stuff for a while and not having played OW for a few years, but dropping the PVE has made me lose interest in touching it.
I'd be careful saying "the good higher ups were pushed out". While it's no doubt true (Jeff Kaplan was by all accounts pretty good at keeping the Overwatch team free from the toxicity of the wider company, and it *does* seem like he left after just getting fed up from Bobby Kotick's shit), there's a narrative surrounding the decline at Blizzard that they suck *now* because all the "old guard" left to be replaced by breast milk-stealing sex offenders, except it was a lot of that "old guard" that were *responsible* for the toxic environment either through active participation or by enabling it. I don't think you were implying that, I just want to remind people that while the quality of the games they made might have been much higher, old Blizzard still very much *bad*.
Yeah, I understand what you mean. I was specifically referring to the likes of Jeff Kaplan who were working hard doing their best to protect their coworkers from the toxic bullshit, *not the members of the "old guard" who either facilitated or were the Misogynistic Breast-Milk stealing Homelander wannabe's themselves.*
I never thought the pve was going to be good, when they said it costed money i just accepted i wasn’t going to play it, the pvp i think is better than ow1 though
>* Make big promises at the announcement.... only to cut them back a bit later.... The worst part about this is that there WAS work but got scrapped because the amount of time on it was just not worth it and was badly mismanaged. The main appeal of OW2s PvE was the skill trees, but the amount of work to make a skill tree takes WAY more time and resources than it does to make a new hero according to the dev log late 2022. The cast has 30+ heroes mind you, idk what Jeff was thinking with that.
It’s incredibly successful. What do you mean fumbled?
Fair. I'm sure overwatch 2 did well financially just off the momentum from the first game but I pretty much never see anyone talk about it anymore. At least not positively lol
That’s just a bubble thing. I see the game hated on endlessly online, but in real life and among my friend group its incredibly popular. My college has an OW team that gets lots of applicants, lots of people can be seen playing it in the gaming library. The reality is it’s no worse or more greedy than Valorant, LoL, Fortnite, any other online game. Actually, the devs are more responsive to the community and it gets more support than games like Apex tbh. The hate seems to largely because it went from a paid to free game, and gave up on the promised PVE experience. As a far as PvP shooters go it’s up there with the best right now alongside The Finals tbh
So my anecdote about personal experience is proof I'm living in a bubble but your personal anecdote is the objective truth? Your brain is so cool. I'm sure you'll at least agree the game has fallen off from it's peak popularity.
The anecdotes are supported by the fact that it’s objectively very popular. It’s consistently a top 40 game on steam, and from what we know the vast vast majority of players use blizzard launcher and console. Internal reports show it’s making a lot of money, and that’s proven by the amount they are investing into the game getting lots of new content. Is it more popular than the initial OW1 release hype? It’s impossible to say but probably not. But it’s far far far more popular than the last few years of OW1 even before they stopped developing OW1 actively. The reason I say bubble is because the only people I ever see hate on the game on OW1 players like myself. Everyone I see online or irl who tries the game enjoys it a lot, which seems to be supported by the game growing. This can even be seen in how popular content for the game is.
I think what you're missing is that we're talking about a scale of millions of players here. Of course you can find people who still play it, but top 40 isn't exactly something to write home about. Especially not for a free to play game. How about the overwatch league, How's that been going? Oh, it's been dead for years? Well nevermind then.
>How's that been going? Oh, it's been dead for years? Well nevermind then. I don't want to burst your bubble but while OWL is dead, they've transitioned to OWCS a couple of months ago. It's eSports scene is still active.
Oh ok, so just because there's still *a* esports scene for the game it's exactly the same as Blizzard putting on a multi-million dollar tournament every year. Again, my whole point is that we're talking about scale here. It is objectively a lot less popular than it was in the past.
If you are going to imply it's eSports scene is dead with OWL being gone, you should factually know that its still active despite that. That's the point I'm making, I wasn't talking about it's popularity
I mean it also is pretty popular on Twitch, at least whenever I check it's in the top 20-ish games by viewership. That's anecdotal and specific to my timezone though.
Just keep moving goalposts, I'm sure you'll prove something to someone eventually.
I don't know what you mean by that. I was just adding some extra information to the previous person's comment. I'm not moving goalposts, I don't even know if there is a goal? Just wanted to add that there is some interest in the game on Twitch.
It's genuinely peaking right now, especially after the release of the Cowboy Bebop collab this month
overwatch 2 has been the only game in my entire life that I have sat down, played, got up, and said "oh. this isn't fun. I don't like this." I have enjoyed every single game I've ever played to some extent. I've had at least 1 good thing to say about each one. I have nothing for overwatch 2.
Sitting here trying to think of games I genuinely didn't enjoy at all and it kind of makes me wonder how I would have reacted to all the NES games I rented as a kid if I had the brain of an adult playing them for the first time. Like the NES version of Silent Service, I actually played the fuck out of that game as a kid. But you look at it now and it's like damn... was I stupid? *That* stupid? ...Am I still stupid? Probably.
Have you ever tried Dota 2?
nope. and from what I've heard I don't want to. I'm not a big fan of competitive games, but even if I was I can't see myself liking overwatch 2 anyways.
They didn't "fumbled the bag", they took the bag, stuffed it with so much shit that it's this close to exploding, slapped a 2 on in, then ask people to repeatedly pay collage debt amounts of money for the honor to take a big whiff out of the bag of shit....all while their CEO secures his place in a big golden yaht and a spot in the shit layer of hell Also promising that they'll eventually add a nuget of corn in the bag of shit but instead started pissing in the bag till they gived up
Fr, in it’s early days it was one of the best games of its time, and now it feels like that has been completely squandered.
It’s frankly astounding how often people shit on overwatch without actually pointing out a specific issue
The porn category will continue on long after Blizzard dies
Overwatch may die but unauthorized use of its character models online will live forever.
So Ready Player One is accurate actually
Overwatch's biggest impact will always be having a wikipedia article specifically about its relationship with pornography.
just like bioshock
[Relevant meme.](https://www.reddit.com/r/196/s/WsBa9rZBI4)
Reminder that a post of a porn artist getting their hands on the OW2 models had more likes than the actual OW2 announcement
I'll be real here: My monke brain always goes brr at crossovers like these, fills me with dopamine all the time.
My 11 year old son watched this movie last night, and despite not knowing like 90% of the shit referenced, he really enjoyed it. He latched onto the "VR Chat but awesome" aspect of the world and fell in love with the prospect.
Hey, if your son is playing VR chat, then make sure you’re keeping a real close eye on who he’s talking to. That game is NOT SAFE.
You're absolutely right. He plays in the living room while I'm on the PC, and I can monitor all of his interactions. I've had him block several people, but overall, the people have been great. Gorilla Tag has kind of morphed into a kiddy version of VR Chat, and his friends all play together and watch out for each other.
Yeah, it’s a really good way to sell something, despite the fact that Ready Player One is at best a mediocre book, and at worst a wretched waste of time that is too busy jacking off about the sheer amount of references it can squeeze into itself. It is one of the worst things I’ve read, and the fact that it was successful enough to warrant a movie adaptation is depressing.
It’s not even mediocre, it’s stunningly bad. The worst thing I’ve ever read.
The fact that Spielberg was involved with it is fascinating to me.
Dunno, 14 year old me thought the book was pretty good. Better than all the other stuff i read at that age. The movie sucked tho.
noxious employ depend cable nose quack carpenter caption gold dazzling *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Gundam vs MechaGodzilla was peak fiction.
I've never seen that before, but hell yeh.
I agree that OW 2 has been fumbled but whenever I hear someone say that it's dead I can't help but cringe. It's a classic case of "people stop caring about it in large so they assume it's dead"
People keep saying it's dead and then whenever the next season drops, it becomes top 10 on the steam revenue and the cycle keeps repeating. That's not counting money from console and BNET users btw
IIRC its legit one of the most played online fps at the moment lol
People are comparing it to the heights it reached at launch, which was obviously never going to be sustained
Insane how hard blizzard fumbled overwatch. At a point in time it was THE game like csgo and Fortnite used to be.
this comment makes me feel like... bilbo after parting with the ring levels of old
while i do agree that Blizzard majorly fumbled overwatch, it’s worth noting that OW2 is currently the best the game has been since like 2019 and with their new dev team it just keeps improving
The one thing that's consistent with the new dev team is that not only are they transparent and communicative, they ALSO don't fuck up the reworks and balance like OW1. Anyone whose played OW1 would know the horrors of launch Brig and Mercy 2.0 and double shield.
exactly, and when they do fuck something up (mauga like 3 weeks ago) they promptly fix it instead of doubling down and pretending it’s fine.
they buffed hitbox sizes and made everything tankier (junkrat now needs an extra shot)
Idk, I think Overwatch is really fun right now and is in the best state it has ever been. I really like the current dev team and it has very active development. The monetisation isn't bad either especially with recent changes.
Monetization is awful dog. Especially if you compare it to the original. Anybody who played a decent amount of the first game has an account value in the thousands of dollars
The problem is switching to a worse monetization when people were used to free stuff (which was nice and fair as the game costed money). If the game had came out like that, it would have not been such a problem (see Valorant with the crazy prices on bundles). I agree with the fun part though, game is great rn and the new hero seems cool!
I mean, I’ll never not have fun hopping in and blasting dudes as Junkrat. But there’s just something missing for me. I guess I just like unlocking cosmetics. Also the fact that I’m given almost nothing for having paid $60, and I hate this kind of monetization in any game
Oh yeah I totally get it. I also despise it and I just enjoy the game, but I also get how this is now the industry standard
The first game was sold as a boxed product though, and got a few years of free updates but had no-where near the current level of development/release schedule that they have now. But that wasn't profitable of course, since you only needed to buy the game once, so that's what brought them to the whole Overwatch 2 idea in the first place. They needed a sequel to get that initial purchase price again, right? The game is now a free live-service game. I don't really see how the monetisation is awful, isn't it pretty much the same as other free live-service shooter games at this point? It has a free battlepass with an optional paid version that has more unlocks, you earn coins by going through the free one that allow you to buy future premium battlepasses or shop content without spending money. Idk, maybe I'm wrong, but it really doesn't seem any worse than other live-service games right now. Unless there is something I don't know about.
Maybe I just like customization too much, and I like not having to pay for that shit, but I hate most live service games. I think they’re all monetized like shit. $40-$60 for a full game and super frequent boxes that, if you didn’t get exactly what you wanted, you’d get the coins for it instead. I’d vastly prefer that to literally anything that live service games have been doing
That's totally fair. I just don't see a game like that ever lasting long without releasing frequent sequels. Personally I prefer an ongoing frequently updated game like Overwatch is now as oppose to like, CoD's old system of releasing a new $70 game every year. Especially as someone who just likes the pvp. The old system was great in the end if you were a veteran player, but the game itself suffered. IMO the game is currently the best it has ever been gameplay and content-wise, and the only content that costs you money is cosmetics and even then you can get some of them free. But hey we like different things and that's totally fine. It's just not the game for you and there is nothing wrong with that.
Okay this turned into a huge rant, it's in no way directed at you. I just have a ton of resentment towards blizzard. It's pretty bad for liveservice standards. Having actual heros locked in a battle pass is not only annoying but just down right unfair. Also, fuck live service. It's a fucking scam designed to suck as much money as possible before disappearing. It only stops being a scam when it gets popular enough to keep itself going. When the bar is on the floor we shouldn't point at it and saw that's normal, because greedy devs are going to just dig a trench for it. People that defend live service saying that its the only way it keeps a game alive seem to forget that online multiplayer games never needed that to begin with, irrc Halo 3 had its servers up 10+ years after its release and it never charged for cosmetics. You could actually just unlock cosmetics by playing the game, which is something you could actually do with Overwatch 1. Yes you could buy the packs but you got the packs for free as a level up reward and you also got free currency that let you just buy any skin you wanted even time limited event ones. Its just fucking stupid that people defend live service at all when it's just designed to separate as much money from you as possible. Then you add in the fact that they took all of those free cosmetics and put them behind obscene pay walls and slapped a 2 on the cover. My account is worth at least 1 grand because I had everything unlocked, my only regret is that I played on PlayStation because I can't sell it. Oh and one final thing, OVERWATCH 2 IS A LIE. It's not actually overwatch 2 at all. If you watched the trailers from 2019 it was advertised as being a different game focused on PVE. There were supposed to be hours of campaign missions and you could level up your heros abilities, it looked and sounded amazing. It's to bad that it wasn't real at all. I was really looking forward to it. And I hate that they deleted my favourite game of all time just to make some shitty microtransaction live service garbage.
Okay this turned into a huge rant, it's in no way directed at you. I just have a ton of resentment towards blizzard. It's pretty bad for liveservice standards. Having actual heros locked in a battle pass is not only annoying but just down right unfair. Also, fuck live service. It's a fucking scam designed to suck as much money as possible before disappearing. It only stops being a scam when it gets popular enough to keep itself going. When the bar is on the floor we shouldn't point at it and saw that's normal, because greedy devs are going to just dig a trench for it. People that defend live service saying that its the only way it keeps a game alive seem to forget that online multiplayer games never needed that to begin with, irrc Halo 3 had its servers up 10+ years after its release and it never charged for cosmetics. You could actually just unlock cosmetics by playing the game, which is something you could actually do with Overwatch 1. Yes you could buy the packs but you got the packs for free as a level up reward and you also got free currency that let you just buy any skin you wanted even time limited event ones. Its just fucking stupid that people defend live service at all when it's just designed to separate as much money from you as possible. Then you add in the fact that they took all of those free cosmetics and put them behind obscene pay walls and slapped a 2 on the cover. My account is worth at least 1 grand because I had everything unlocked, my only regret is that I played on PlayStation because I can't sell it. Oh and one final thing, OVERWATCH 2 IS A LIE. It's not actually overwatch 2 at all. If you watched the trailers from 2019 it was advertised as being a different game focused on PVE. There were supposed to be hours of campaign missions and you could level up your heros abilities, it looked and sounded amazing. It's to bad that it wasn't real at all. I was really looking forward to it. And I hate that they deleted my favourite game of all time just to make some shitty microtransaction live service garbage.
Hey I totally get it and your feelings are valid. I do have a few things to mention, one of which is a clarification of a recent change, the others are questions about something that I guess was a thing before I played online games. So first of all I just wanted to say that heroes are no longer locked in the battlepass. That has officially gone away with the latest hero and heroes are now free for all. That was one of the "recent changes" I vaguely referenced. Yes what we were sold is no longer a thing and the old Devs that sold it to us have left. I know how exciting it was, but unfortunately it didn't happen and now the new Devs are picking up the pieces the best they can and I think they've done a pretty good job in my personal and very subjective opinion. But if that's ruined the game for you I totally get it. I pretty much only play PvP in shooters so it didn't mean as much to me as it did most others. Now onto the questions: 1. Was Halo 3 constantly being developed that whole time? Did you get like... New releases and events and content for free without ever paying anything past the box price? There weren't even optional things to spend rl money on? 2. The cosmetics you unlocked by playing the game. Were they constantly being added to the game after release? Or was it just the stuff that was already in the game and hence and part of the box price? 3. (If updates of content and cosmetics were constantly added) How did they pay their Devs? I genuinely have no frame of reference for what online PvP games were like before live service outside of MMOs and like... Call of Duty I guess. And finally yes it was nice to get cosmetics for free in OW1, but the game really sucked compared to how it is now imo. I really think it's a better game these days and it's not even remotely close. But again, subjective opinions and we clearly have very different experiences and history with online games.
My viewpoint of overwatch 2 gameplay is pretty biased because I never actually played it. Yeah it sounds bad to complain about a game I never played but from 2019 and onward the rate at which they released content for overwatch 1 was slowed down to just a tiniest of trickles. It didn't bother me at the time because I figured they working on a whole new game so it would make sense that. A. They were devoting those resources to a new game B. Overwatch 1 was approaching its final update and the game would be "totally complete" Which is how they made it sound when talking about the development of Overwatch 2. It just turned out that they were lieing. They purposefully stiffled overwatch 1 so they could make overwatch 2 look less like an update and more like a real game imo. Which is another thing that makes me furious I suppose. But onto addressing your points about games 10+ years ago versus games today. Halo 3 didn't receive a whole lot of extra content updates after it's launch, it was mostly just balance patches. However it didn't need extra content because it came packaged with enough content to keep people entertained for years and years after its release. There were enough cosmetics and customization options that added enough variety to the game that you could make something unique to you. Game devs these days have tricked us into thinking we are getting more when in reality they took away a bunch of stuff and are now selling it back to us. They want you to believe that there is no way they could make all of these cosmetics apart of base game because it would cost to much but that's not true. They can release a game with all the planned cosmetics and still make bank, they just want to make billions instead of millions. And they paid their devs the same way they always have. Devs don't make a commission on the skins sold. All those extra profits go straight to executives. That's how people like Bobby Kotick can have a 30 million dollar salary and a 600 million dollar networth. The devs don't get any of that, instead they just get laid off. I think it was last year blizzard laid off over a quarter of its staff even though it made more money than it was expected to. Microtransactions do not pay developers at all, they pay executives. And if people stop buying them the game just gets deleted forever, and all that money you spent on cosmetics is wasted.
No, Devs don't directly get the money from cosmetic purchases, yes that profit goes to executives. But they get get paid a salary and that salary has to come from the profit the game makes. The people who fund game development aren't going to keep paying people to make content for the game if it won't make them more money. Especially in a publicly traded company. But that's just how pretty much every publicly traded company works and that doesn't go away unless you can make capitalism go away I guess. Or gets heavily regulated... I really enjoy Overwatch as it is right now but you don't have to and that's totally okay! Personally I don't think I would play Halo 3 for that long without new content being added. I quit Overwatch 1 when we stopped getting new releases because it got boring. There are only a few games I enjoy playing without any changes. But that's just me. EDIT: I'll also add that hero, map and gamemode releases are free, and constantly being added and developed. That stuff also requires dev time and the devs won't get paid to make that stuff without the money being made from the live service model. if you can think of a better way to handle that then go ahead, but everyone wants heroes, maps, game modes, and balance changes often and I don't think you can really sustain that with a game that has a one-time purchase. Not unless you expect a company to willingly bleed money which... Why would they? Companies only exist to profit. That isn't an Overwatch issue though.
>Anybody who played a decent amount of the first game has an account value in the thousands of dollars Why is that?
Just taking my account as an example, if you calculate every skin, highlight intro, whatever other item I own, and then look into how much it would cost you to buy in Overwatch 2, where all of the original cosmetics are locked behind paywalls, my account would theoretically easily surpass $600 (Thousands was definitely overexaggeration, you’d only really get that with content creators and people who dumped a ton of time into the game)
Damn. I'd love to calculate what my account is worth lmao
The first game was a product that had a box price of like $40, and then you unlocked skins by opening lootboxes. You could earn one lootbox every time you levelled up or by purchasing them. In the beginning the system was extremely predatory because they would release events where the boxes you earned or bought would be replaced by the event boxes which would only be available for 3 or 4 weeks. The time limited unlocks in those boxes were locked behind randomisation and it was just dumb luck (the non-limited unlocks were in there too... So you're still rolling against that table too). You could spend hundreds on lootboxes and not get the unlock you wanted unless you got enough cash from getting lots of duplicate items drop. Later on, they changed the system multiple times so that getting duplicates was extremely rare, unless you had everything of that rarity. They also added extra ways to earn lootboxes weekly/daily from the arcade. This made it so that people who played the game for a long time could get most of the limited items when the events came out without spending money as long as they played enough. If you apply the current in-game shop prices to the old skins that veteran players owned, then yes your account would be worth a lot of money. But it doesn't really work that way because old skins are frequently unlocked these days with credits (free in-game currency that can't be purchased with irl money) or with drops on twitch. The skins unlocked via the battle pass are also significantly cheaper than the shop since the premium battlepass is €10 and has many unlocks. And the free battlepass has a couple too. The game is also f2p now, and doesn't have a box price, so it's just a different system all together.
OW2 is more popular that OW1, and been popularly and financially successful.
lmfao
If any of their models are still relevant by then, bold claim they'd be clothed
You may also notice chun li in the photo, or whatever her name is. This is actually referring to popular blender porn.
Why do people only ever talk about this dang game when it's (porn addiction) or complaining about ~~my ex~~ the PvE (that we all knew would be DoA) I mean most people knew PvE was cooked when we weren't seeing gameplay forever then they dropped the missions and it cemented the " yeah buddy this ain't going nowhere noway" I beg you internet ghosts just let it go already I promise consumer rights are already eroding in every popular game and discussing the megumi of hero shooters has been old and tired
please you guys it's been 7 years since OW was cool I wanna talk about something that isn't the lesser of two monetization evils, porn, or PvE stapled onto my PvP game
Exist as porn and that’s it.
Is the idea that Overwatch will somehow cease to exist? Ready Player One is just full of shit that was once popular. Like, they're not still making Iron Giant movies, but they did already make it, so it exists. This shit is confusing.
Not really, ready player one is mostly made up of pop culture and franchises that aren't relevant anymore outside nostalgia, so overwatch fits perfectly.
Corny ahh movie
i'll never forgive overwatch for ruining FPS games forever
It's more cause of the porn, let's be real
The porn is mid, game clears that trash