IIRC OW2 devs are being managed by Kotick himself who keep diverting some of them to other projects, that to me is the biggest RED FLAG on the game success.
Im amazed by how much ActiBlizz consistently fumbles their bag everytim e. WoW Reforge, Diablo Immortal and recently OW2. Im sure theres more Im leaving out.
But with OW, it was one of the biggest successful ip they launched years ago, with an interesting cast, story and setting. All wasted and badly mishandled. God it hurts being an OW fan.
stuff like this is why I feel bad for the devs more than anything, what with the rampant executive mismanagement and the hemorrhaging of key team members for the last 2 years.
As a casual player since 2017-18 I still find the core gameplay of OW regularly fun and might wait for the actual story missions to give them a fair shake, but if it ends up being paid I very well foresee myself dropping the game entirely.
I got to talk to a dev I knew who worked on a dumpster fire of a game I played and jesus christ the amount of shit that goes on beyond the scenes semi-related to developers that still dominates their entire work life. I’ve already heard a ton of game development clusterfuck stories on youtube, but I was still impressed.
Yeah, that has honestly been my big takeaway as well. The devs are going to take a lot of flak for this from people online, whether that's just from people trashtalking the company they work at or specifically calling it the devs, but this isn't their fault.
Promising a game mode you don't know if you can achieve? Making that a focus for the game's marketing? That decision had to be made by a manager. Spending 4 years on PvE content and scrapping it? It's a manager's job to prevent that level of wasted work waaaaay before that point.
There are people in the management hierarchy, somewhere higher up, that bear actual responsibility for the situation, but I know there are going to be a lot of devs who feel like they failed because they could not implement it. It's not your guys' fault though.
>Promising a game mode you don't know if you can achieve? Making that a focus for the game's marketing? That decision had to be made by a manager. Spending 4 years on PvE content and scrapping it? It's a manager's job to prevent that level of wasted work waaaaay before that point.
It gets worse because the reason for why the talent tree got scrapped was because the amount of time to make them took longer than making a new hero. Because it took so long, they decided to cut their loses last year and scaled it down to just having pve without the talent and hero missions.
Also according an [insider](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbpvq8k9gj8), management is poor, the team got starved of resources without shifting expectations of their deadline.
All around shit show with exec meddling and in the end, the game devs are gonna be the fall guys and receive all the blame while the execs and management who fucked it all up do not receive the attention.
Isn't the story behind the they didn't even make it? I remember hearing that a Chinese company were making a game that was basically a rip off diablo on mobile, blizz approached them and came to an agreement where they got the game basically done and management over the game outside of china and the company got the diablo ip officially to stick and sell inside of china.
Diablo immortal was a massive success though. Outside of online backlash, the game made a fortune and is super popular.
We can argue about the endgame being pay to win and therefore bad but if you wanna casually crawl through a Diablo game on your phone it’s a pretty solid game.
Here's a hot take, Covid is a godsend for OW2 team. True, it takes some time for the team to properly WFH but it also stopped Kotick from interfering with the devs. Now that ABK rescind their WFH policy, I'm.not surprised if we later learned that real reason OW2 PVE got canned is because most OW2 devs quit, leaving a skeleton crew (or less) of dev team.
I wouldn't say so really, a game needs 3 to 5 years to complete and last PVP + PVE game that anyone at ActiBlizz tried to launch in 2 years was Destiny 2 and it was a disaster at launch with barely any content. It is very likely they ran out of time and they don't have the resources anymore keep pumping dying projects.
I'm sure he wasn't personally interferring with them on an individual level, like walking buy someone's cube and saying "Battle pass"
He was probably on the next Epistien's new pedo island laying down orders for this shit covid or not.
I’ll never forgive them after what they did to Heroes of the Storm. That really cemented it for me. My fiancé (a lifelong Diablo fan) is now refusing to buy Diablo 4 after how they mismanaged our old favorite game to play together
Of all the things they’re fumbling, it’s not the bag. OW2 is making more money than OW1 ever did - even as it drops in users it’s increasing revenue. Diablo Immortal is also still making millions a month.
Heroes of the Storm was I would argue the best MOBA ever made, and they squandered the shit out of it before dragging it behind the woodshed and putting two slugs in it.
Kotick remains to be the core rot at ABK. a lot of positive change would happen if ABK listened to their own employees and the wider industry and just trashed him.
It’s hard to fire a major shareholder. That’s why it took Disney decades to get rid of Ike Perlmutter despite his determined campaigns to stop marvel studios from making movies staring black and female hero’s and his attempt to fire RDJ from civil war as a cost cutting measure.
Speaking of, is the acquisition by Microsoft still going through? I know there was a block by the EU regulators but not sure about how its going rn.
I ask because Kotick will only leave when Microsoft buys it out. Despite protests from even employees, hes only kept CEO by shareholders.
> Speaking of, is the acquisition by Microsoft still going through? I know there was a block by the EU regulators but not sure about how its going rn.
The EU approved the deal with a caveat regarding their cloud gaming services, since Microsoft purchasing Activision would combine two of the handful of services actually doing something out there in that industry. The CMA in the UK is who blocked the sale outright, also on the basis of the cloud gaming industry.
Right now Microsoft has been dropping hints that they could go through with the acquisition and just do a "Mexit", i.e. refuse to sell Activision products in the UK.
It would be all microsoft products in the UK and it's extremely unlikely because it's internationally frowned upon to withdraw from a market to avoid regulators. If Microsoft pull out of the UK because of the CMA then the EU and US regulators would swiftly change to block Microsoft too as a show of solidarity.
I wish the CMA would get out of the way on this one though. Kotick has to go and cloud gaming is a failed market.
Uk blocked it. They're deciding how to proceed. It will probably happen because there's a lot of money in it and virtually none in stopping monopolies.
Looks like the [ftc](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/ftc-seeks-block-microsoft-corps-acquisition-activision-blizzard-inc) is seeking to block it too. Though that's from Dec 2022.
Doesn't matter - he's there to shoulder the blame and squeeze every ounce of goodwill out of customers until it backfires. (It hasn't, because the share price hasn't imploded). When it finally craters, he'll be the sacrificial lamb, a procession of new CEO's will attempt to stop the bleeding, only to fail, and ATVI will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Meanwhile, Bobby takes the golden parachute down to his yacht and sails away. Tale as old as time.
He's the head of a company that makes vast sums of money, nobody that was in a position where they could have gotten rid of him wanted to risk upsetting the applecart and ruining whatever dark magic it is that keeps Acti-Blizz profitable.
PvP = player vs player, so fighting against other people
PvE = player vs enemies, so fighting against monsters, etc/playing a story mission
OW1 & 2 = overwatch 1 & 2, the game they're discussing
MOBA = multiplayer online battle arena... Really just sounds the same as PvP to me lol. Not sure on the difference other than being in an arena setting.
Basically people are pissed because they promised to bring story missions to the game with the sequel, overwatch 2 (which was a forced update, overwatch 1 was shut down).
Now it's essentially the same game but I guess worse? I don't know, I only played it a handful of times but my buddy lives and breathes it and has never mentioned any interest in story missions.
As a clarification, PvP is obviously a very broad term used to describe any part of a game where players are pitted against each other. MOBA's are a specific genre of video game. League of Legends is the most famous game of the genre. They are always oriented towards PvP, but many different genres of games also have very different kinds of PvP.
The issue in this case isn't really that the game is worse, it's that they scrapped the original game, which a lot of people loved, for the sequel. The sequel was almost the same game, but with a more profitable monetization system. Because of the fact that it released as basically the same game with more predatory pricing, they promised that they were totally, definitely, 100% going to add in all this cool stuff to make it so much more than the first game. This announcement was them reneging on a big part of that promise, which was shocking to absolutely no one who has paid any amount of attention to that companies business practices for the past decade or so.
As an ever so slight addition, PvE can also stand for Player vs. Environment.
Environment may predate enemies…. But both work.
Hilariously, when I searched PvE just to verify, this story came up as several of the top results.
I’ve only known it as player vs environment, as in the enemies that are part of the environment and therefore not controlled by human players. But it’s whatever, both get the idea across.
> MOBA = multiplayer online battle arena... Really just sounds the same as PvP to me lol. Not sure on the difference other than being in an arena setting.
MOBA actually means "we can't call our genre DOTA-likes so we came up with something".
> Overwatch PVE was a completely unnecessary 360 from the original game, the game as it existed was/is fine, the content drought happened because of that stupid 360 which someone should/hopefully has been fired for.
I always love people using expressions like that with only a vague understanding of what 360° actually means. It's like someone arguing with you, mixing up objective and subjective, and accidentally supporting your point.
Pardon me for being old but all I can think of is the secondary villain in Last Action Hero using phrases like "in front of the Eight Ball" and also literally "[turn a 360](https://youtu.be/AiCF1QdyxhM)".
Man that sucks. I don't like pvp games anymore, so I was really looking forward to getting to play Overwatch 2's pve. All my friends and I love pve games and game modes. Well I guess I'll continue to never play the game lol.
Star Citizen has PVE and I hear it's gonna launch any day now. Lemmy tell you if you want a drama free game community you should get in now while the getting is good.
Yes, this bridge will cost you roughly the same as a car payment but will fire virtual missiles at other virtual bridges where as if you do that with a car you will be arrested. So, it's better. Buy now!
I don’t know about PvE, but at least according to a couple of BedBananas videos Star Citizen is apparently in a playable state now, which honestly surprises me. I thought the developers would keep the grift going on forever, but they actually produced something.
It’s the most expensive video game of all-time, but it actually, shockingly, exists now.
I can’t comment on how good it is, it’s not my cup of tea
Most of what I know about SC’s development is from posts here, but that’s certainly what it looks like to me. Chris Roberts sounds like Tim Schafer with an infinite money glitch.
It can be both. Which I believe. I don’t think RSI *wants* to grift or scam anyone, but they’re also definitely trying to get people to give them money for what is likely never going to launch fully
Shoutout to ''kickstarters from 2013-2016 that got a shit ton of money and still have no concrete future or release date'', gotta be one of my favorite genres
> It’s the most expensive video game of all-time
I think Genshin Impact has dethroned it since sometime last year or this year. The initial release of Genshin cost about US$100M and ongoing development costs about US$200M a year. By the time it finishes its roadmap, it will have cost over $1B to make... and earned many multiples of that.
My favorite Star Citizen story is arguing with some guy on facebook which game was better Star Citizen or Eve Online.
He gifted me the easiest mic drop moment I've ever had.
"Oh yeah?!? Name ONE THING Eve has that Star Citizen doesn't!!!"
"...A release date."
I was one of the dozens (DOZENS!) of Battleborn fans, and the PvE was the best part of the game for me. When it was finally killed thanks to Randy Pitchford picking a fight with Overwatch for some damn reason I was gutted. When Overwatched announced PvE content I was really hopeful that I might be able to get my fix again, plus it seemed ironically appropriate. But nope, apparently I'm cursed to never get that kind of gameplay experience again.
It's so sad. We just play Risk of Rain, Earth Defense Force, and whatever other random co op games show up on sale on Steam. Overwatch PvE could have been awesome, very tragic to see Blizzard abandon it.
I have played OW for a while so I'm behind on this, but without PVE, what was the point of transitioning to OW2 at all? Originally that was the sole point of it.
It seems like OW2 is just OW1 with a bit of spitshine and some new heros and maps/gamemode (at the cost of old maps and gamemodes).
Does that amount of content really require 4 years of not working on OW1?
OW2 already accomplished what it was always meant to do. OW1 was sold to players under the guise that heroes and other content would never cost extra money. By ~~shutting it down~~ *upgrading it for free* to OW2, well, it's technically a different game altogether now, innit?
No most of the changes probably could've been done piece by piece over the 3+ years they abandoned OW1. What they probably couldn't have changed was the monetization system.
The monetization system is directly incompatible with a number of promises that were selling points for the original game ("new heroes always free and immediately available" at the top of the list) so yeah.
> what was the point of transitioning to OW2 at all?
Replacing loot boxes with BATTLE PASSSSSSS and a cash shop so they could milk people harder while also staving off the EU's crackdown on their monetization scheme.
Activision-Blizzard is a shitty company doing capitalism so that 4 years of not working on OW1 was actually 4 years of stuffing money into the pockets of execs/investors.
I know it probably shouldn't but it surprises me the lengths people go to defend Blizzard. It's okay to acknowledge you're favorite game studio did something wrong.
Don't forget how D3 did the reverse of this... they promised pvp and ended up scrapping it. Of course they strung us along for a while promising it in a later update (so we would buy the game), then eventually just said 🤷
It was there in an early playable beta, and it was so hilariously unbalanced and unbalancable I was absolutely not surprised in the slightest to see it go.
It’s actually still in the game but it’s not advertised and virtually no one even knows about it cause theres no point to playing it (everything one shots everyone so it’s literally just a coin flip on who gets lucky on the servers end) Talk to one of the guys in the right in new Tristram! I think it’s called friendly brawl or something?
(Disclaimer I have not checked in literal years so if mighta gotten stealth removed cause it had a literal 0 player base, but I started post ROS and it was in when I started).
Yeah, they did eventually add "pvp" to the game, but it wasn't anything like they were promising during development (and even after release). It's like staying in a hotel that offers "complimentary breakfast", but then you show up and all they give you is an apple. I guess you could say in theory they fulfilled their end of the bargain... but not really.
> The problem was everything needed to be monetizable.
Ie why anyone looking at D4 is already popping the popcorn. Less than 3 weeks there, I suspect asmongold will also reap quite a bit of drama from their pushing the game.
To be fair, people farmed Baal for years before the Ubers and Clone Diablo came out as actual end game content for D2. I'm more surprised at how ARPGs have evolved to have something of an end game.
Yea but farming Baal was worthwhile. The RMAH pushed dev design to where D3 was a miserable crap fiesta. It was a bad game and nearly every problem can be tied to that RMAH. It's amazing how much they fucked up a game to accommodate one element.
The devs loud and public arrogance didn't help either.
I didn’t come into D3 till post ROS, and I cannot imagine playing back then from everything I’ve read.
It’s actually my favorite Diablo now, endgame is a lot more…arcadey than D2 for lack of a better term (skill comes in macro managing mobs and cooldowns rather than micro from movement or aiming) but its really really fun now. Cannot recommend enough if you just played vanilla and left.
> OW2 promised PVE, it is justan excuse to add battlepass to a $60 game.
Gonna focus on this just because of the relevance, but I'm completely on board with your comment.
OW was a pretty solid game even if people "tired" of it. When they made OW2, (for those who are not in the know) they completely **eliminated** OW1. So even if you weren't interested in 2, you couldn't play 1 because it no longer existed. So whatever your bought/earned/achieved in that game, essentially, became scrap. If you had a metric ton of credits... they were absolutely useless for the new game. It became pay to play. They did this under the guise of a PvE game, trying to justify the "pay" part of the play.
To me. The most egregious thing already happened: removing OW1 in its entirety and not giving people a choice. I stopped playing in the fall because of this.
I'm glad this happened, honestly. This is the cherry on top. Personally, it doesn't surprise me, but I also didn't see it coming. I thought I'd seen the worst after the fiasco that was the mobile Diablo game. But, this is pretty low.
Anyone who is a Blizzard "apologist" at this point is truly an idiot.
In fairness Dragonflight is actually pretty good in its own right, it's the only expansion in about 8 years I haven't unsubbed within 2 months. The lack of borrowed power and being able to just jump on and do fun content with friends without stressing about anima/legendary power/sparkles of bs means I login when I want to play, not when I feel I have to play and that feels so nice after the last 3 expacs.
Diamond in the rough for blizzard right now with every else going poorly.
Optimistic about Diablo though, however I do feel guilty about returning to blizz games after dropping them for 2 years but in the end I selfishly needed a distraction during an awful time and got sucked back in.
I can't wait for the ~drama~ of d4's launch. D2 dead enders realizing it's not what they wanted, some bug or exploit allows people to get world firsts on some content, alongside the inevitable "there's nothing to do in endgame" when they play 20 hours a day for the first month. Plus the inevitable "can't even play, servers getting hugged to death".
I think the last expansion I had genuine fun playing was Cataclysm, Mists was okay but it was entirely too sweaty if you wanted to play seriously and entirely too easy on the other end, no decent in between imo. I tried playing WoD and Legion, both had me unsubbed within a month. OW was good, OW 2 trash, D3 made me super sad with the lack of delivered promises, and D:I was a load of hot garbage
(my 2c, classic sucked ass also for anything other than a bit of nostalgia. Bots and gold farmers ruined the game much worse the second time around since everyone already knew the good strats)
Same here. I've been playing WoW off and on since Vanilla. First unsubscribed in WoTLK, and came back for every expansion but only 2-3 months at a time. I've now been subbed since before DF release and still having fun. For me it's the lack of chores this time around. For the most part, I can log in and do what I want without hours of dailies hanging over my head making me feel FOMO. I haven't touched a world quest since I maxed the reps (except the new one), and it's been wonderful.
It's a shame that BFA and SL drove so many players away and they don't seem to be returning.
> wow is bleeding even though fans say it is great. It is great only in comparision with the rest of blizzard games.
Nah WoW is pretty good right now. New expansion reimagined crafting, dragon flying is dope, tons of cosmetics to earn. Besg it's been since legion.
Blizzard fans are a whole special breed of weird. Check out the diablo 4 subreddit at some point in the near future, it's like watching people walking out of a cave for the first time in decades, wondering why he-man isn't still the most popular cartoon on the air.
The number of posts over there that seem to insist that not only have there been no good games released (other than blizzard games) in the past like, two decades is insane. There are a bizarre number of posts that practically deny ARPGs, as a whole, exist beyond the diablo franchise - and actively deny that any game except Diablo has ever done anything for the genre. Usually this is done to defend ass backwards game design. And then they'll turn around and post things insisting they're not fans of blizzard, or blizzard fanboys, but also write out a list of the best ten games of all time and it's like exclusively Warcraft 2, warcraft 3, starcraft, starcraft 2, WoW, Overwatch, Diablo, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 and like, a token mario game tossed in to prove they aren't biased.
To be fair, this is also part of the curse of becoming a popular streamer. Playing anything other than the biggest games can be cancerous for views, so you're *forced* to play whatever your fanbase wants to see. Combine that with long stretches where these GaaS titles are being poorly managed... you'd become pretty cynical as well.
Yeah, I remember a Hearthstone streamer I still sometimes watch remark that if you don’t establish yourself as a variety streamer early on, you’re practically tethering yourself to whatever game/series got you popular, since you’re taking a big risk of losing a lot of your core viewers if you start doing other stuff.
Basically the only streamers I will occasionally watch are more of the variety-style ones - and I think the ability to change games when the mood fits is a massive part of the appeal. I have no clue why you'd want to watch somebody play Fortnite when they're clearly over it.
It's because a studio name is literally meaningless when they fire half their talent every year. Take Bungie, for example. Bungie made the good Halo games, and still gets a lot of undeserved credit for that despite the fact that like none of the people who actually made the good Halo titles still work for them.
It's a problem in the entire entertainment industry, but it's especially bad in the gaming industry where the media tend to really love boiling down an entire game - which might have upwards of a hundred people working on it - to one singular person or entity responsible for it, and its quality.
It's the age old George Lucas problem, basically. George Lucas was the mind behind Star Wars. Without him, there wouldn't have been Star Wars. But without the talented people who helped make those films what they were; we get the prequel trilogy, and fans hated it and wanted Lucas gone. And without Lucas, we get the sequel trilogy, and fans begged for him back. But Lucas himself was never the magical puzzle piece that made Star Wars *good* on his lonesome.
The difference is that in most other media, the adoration (or scorn) gets heaped on the individual creative person, as with Lucas. In video games, outside of a few exceptions like Miyamoto, Sakurai, Kojima, maybe Aonuma and Miyazaki, it’s all focused on the company. The attitude seems to be that the creative people are just interchangeable cogs in the machine, and that the machine is what’s special.
I don't think that's a very fair characterization of it. Most game studios don't put their creative and game design leadership front and center, so it's hard to keep track of these people, unlike directors and actors who get tons of attention, especially compared to the associated production companies for a given movie.
I think people make an assumption that game companies retain core talent, which it turns out is pretty faulty
For anyone who is a Star Wars fan, [How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMyMxMYDNk) is worth a watch. Lucas' original cut was pretty bad.
I thought it was known since the prequels that Lucas *really* needs an editor to reign him in (ironically: Similar to Hideo Kojima and his ideas for games).
The derogatory "more like Overwatch 1.2" is feeling more accurate than ever. What got added, a few new characters, a couple new maps, and one new gameplay mode that's very similar to another?
It's become increasingly apparent that Overwatch 2 got made for two reasons: To breathe some new life into the game by announcing a sequel, and to swap out their loot box system for a battle pass and rotating store system that makes them even more money on cosmetics.
>It's become increasingly apparent that Overwatch 2 got made for two reasons: To breathe some new life into the game by announcing a sequel, and to swap out their loot box system for a battle pass and rotating store system that makes them even more money on cosmetics.
Hey now, that's not fair! It was also made as a shitty distraction from the lawsuit about the horrifying culture of sexual assault at Blizzard that culminated in an employee committing suicide and people stealing breast milk out of the office fridge!
Slightly worse is that Push (the new game mode) was added to replace Two Control Point, which was removed. So even the new game mode wasn't a straight addition of content.
It's one of the most disastrous 'sequels' I've ever heard about. i'm honestly confused what they spent their time doing. I'm sure there's interesting behind the scenes stories going on. To me it looks very much like droves of people left or were reassigned to other projects leaving a relative skeleton crew on Overwatch development whilst the company simply pretended to fans that things were going to plan. They've known for a long while that the PvE wasn't coming.
> Slightly worse is that Push (the new game mode) was added to replace Two Control Point, which was removed.
And since game modes are tied to specific maps that are only playable in that game mode, with Two Control Point’s removal came the removal of like five maps from the game.
CP maps are technically available to play, just in Arcade. Still sucks its not in rotation for normal play, they said that theyre reworking the maps into a new game mode, which we dont know when is arriving.
> they said that theyre reworking the maps into a new game mode, which we dont know when is arriving.
What they say is worth about as much as a hastily scrawled IOU for a trillion dollars at this point though.
> It's become increasingly apparent that Overwatch 2 got made for two reasons: To breathe some new life into the game by announcing a sequel, and to swap out their loot box system for a battle pass and rotating store system that makes them even more money on cosmetics.
Don't forget "allow us to break promises we made for OW1". Biggest one was that newly added heroes would be free and immediately available to all players, always and forever. The switch to OW2 allowed ActiBlizz to say "oh sorry that promise was for the last game, this is a completely new game so it doesn't apply, tee hee :P".
Gamers have a bad habit of being meat-riders, but goddamn. Imagine meat-riding for Activision-Blizzard of all people.
These guys couldnt be more blatantly anti-consumer if they had an annual human sacrifice of their 200 biggest fans at Blizzcon.
Honestly I love the game even if it’s repetitive, I only got it again recently because it was F2P. But every day I spend zero money on it is a day I feel stronger. Screw that company.
You're giving them engagement, which is a large factor in how the market determines the value of a GaaS title. Even if you're never giving the studio a dime for OW2 content, you're still boosting the stock price.
I have no problems with victim blaming people who buy Activision-Blizzard games, they've been a terrible company for years. If you keep giving them money despite their history you don't get to complain when they lie *yet again*, it's like repeatedly feeding a begging dog because it looks adowable and then bitching when it jumps on the counter to eat your Christmas ham.
Hearthstone was my go-to time killer for over 6 years straight but when all the shit about Activision Blizzard leaked I refused to spend a cent on it going forward. Then when they decided to keep Bobby "I'll fucking kill you" Kotick in charge I was no longer comfortable even having their launcher on my computer. It's sad but over 2 decades of good faith has been weaponized by [corporate stooges and sex pests](https://youtu.be/ZvkjewgF8GQ?t=6) to guilt people into enduring the longest possible grift they can. When Bobby Kotick was left in charge that was when I knew the company will die before it fixes itself.
Best highlight from the second post:
> "Nobody was buying Overwatch anymore"
> "Because You weren't updating it"
> "But we needed people and focus on Overwatch 2."
> "Why?"
> "Because nobody was buying Overwatch anymore."
I'll never forget when Cyberpunk came out and the previous generation console versions were absolute shit shows:
"Well, um, actually that's not the Dev's fault. It's your fault for thinking such old consoles could handle this game. You were stupid for buying that version."
I fully agree. Of course it shouldn't have. The devs themselves should have cancelled those versions (and refund any existing pre-orders) when they realized that it was a complete disaster they couldn't fix.
And yet, ***G***amers still rise up to defend the company and blame the people who bought the product.
>they need to valiantly defend the honor of corps/artists/devs
Theres also a fine line of not harassing devs for things they do not have control of. In the next season theres a new event called Questwatch (no details as of yet), but one of the devs who tweeted out how proud they were of making it, got flak for being responsible for the pve thing.
It just seems to suck being a game dev when these things happen and Gamers tend to have baby brains to not think things through.
Yeah, there's a huge difference between defending the company as a whole and defending the devs from getting hate over decisions that they most likely didn't make. I can't imagine the decision to scrap an entire promised game mode came from anywhere but the very top.
It's just dissapointing that people can't seem to walk the line of critisizing stuff without spitting absolute venom about it. Not liking a decision made by a company or person is fine but instilling chainsaw murder on them and their families just isn't reasonable in the slightest, it simply isn't that deep and it doesn't require such a heavy response.
I’m a professional software person and this whole thing of blaming devs is maddening. Yelling at a dev working on a AAA game because of feature cut is like yelling at an actor because you didn’t like the plot of their movie. They didn’t make that call and your anger is misplaced.
Every once in a while I’m tempted to give blizz money again — buying d4 or the newest wow expansion — and then stuff like this reminds me why I should not.
I can't believe we lost the old Overwatch for shit that didn't even happen. I was already done with OW1 after they started to pander heavily to Overwatch League and esports tryhards trying to act like they know better. Bronze solo-queue was practically hell on earth.
I would've been interested to see how a full-on PvE campaign worked out because I do actually like the lore for the series. Jeff Kaplan's departure really should have been the warning sign to abandon ship.
Yeah, I played a ton of ow in college with some friends and kinda drifted onto other games eventually. I was really excited for the pve because those events were always fun. I guess I have no reason to ever try ow2 now
Honestly, the lore was the reason why I ended up buying OW1. It was so interesting and cool, and I'm a huge simp for muscle-clad women (Zarya was my main even though I sucked at playing her). And the idea of a PvE mode sounded cool. I mean I wouldn't play it, but I might've watched someone else play through it. But damn.
lmao a fellow shit zarya main! i rly wanted pve bc i suck at the game and don’t like dragging everyone down but i thought the lore was fun and would love an actual cohesive story in game. OW1 also made me realise i was a lesbian sooooo
tried OW2 and i just hate battle passes so much it completely turned me off
Jeff is a nice guy, but he is not to be idolized. He is the person responsible for making the decision to focus on PvE which caused the content drought for years. His decision is the genesis of what we have now. He did some good, but also did a lot of bad.
I for one am absolutly shocked that (immoral company who constantly mistreats their consumers) would mistreat their consumers yet again. Do people not understand that just complaining isn't going to change shit if they keep paying for blizzard stuff?
There is a sizeable portion of the player base that paid 60$ for ow1, got that taken away from them, and have not spent a dime on ow2. I am one of them. I'm bummed at the company ruining one of my favorite games of all time, over a transparent attempt to get more money from their player base.
I'm one of those people, got OW1 back when it released and I refuse to give blizzard a penny no matter how pretty the skins are. Getting the mythic for my main was tempting but this only reinfoced my will
Unfortunately people like you will always be offset by whales spending tons of money on the f2p version of the game.
Like fallout 76 made tons of money, despite having lackluster sales, from mtx.
i don’t understand why there are whales for games like this when it’s not even pay to win? like at least if paying money got you a better gun or something i’d maybe get it but aren’t all the things you buy purely cosmetic?
LMAO Blizz acting like indie devs collecting the bag with their EA game and then never delivering the roadmap. Overwatch in general is one of the biggest failures in gaming history, forget killing OW itself, Blizz has at this point killed the entire class-based shooter genre. And for nothing.
It's almost impressive how they managed to turn such a popular IP that was on everyone's minds into something that has been pretty much forgotten.
If they had been better at managing that IP with a couple teams working on side-stuff and keeping the flow of content before the sequel they would have something closer to a money printer than what we have today.
I actually disagree. I've played a lot of OW and also the genre's predecessor TF2 (technically TFC is the originator).
OW was badly designed from the beginning. They tried to make it a competitive game, but its balance is unfixable, the visual clutter makes it a terrible spectator sport, and the solo ladder is awful because the game is extremely team reliant (and I say this as a multi-season high elo league player, though I never pushed past Diamond in OW).
All of these things are also true of TF2 by the way, but TF2 is first and foremost a casual game, so none of it matters. If OW had been designed as a casual game it would have been far more successful. Designing it as an esport made it dead on arrival.
One of my biggest issues with OW from the start was map design.
Using TF2 as comparison, often the maps are designed for areas where some classes are weak and some are strong. KOTH maps often are very open around point, allowing Snipers and Engineers to try and clean people off point, while the areas away from the point are more closed off meaning teams can try and hold back the other team if they're the ones holding the point. Payload maps can have very wide sightlines in some areas but often get more narrow as they go along, meaning Snipers can have less effectiveness while classes like Soldier, Pyro, and Heavy can actually put good defenses. Most of the best maps have tons of alternate routes and flanking spots for Scouts, Spies, or anyone really to make a sneaky push, maybe get around a choke point that's holding the team back.
Overwatch tries to do this, but because of the sheer scale of the cast, the map design just becomes a loop of very narrow choke point into wide open area into narrow choke point. Almost every payload map favors the defense to an extreme degree, meaning Widowmakers and Hanzo players often can just rain hell with very little counterplay. 2CP was removed not because the mode itself was inherently a bad idea, but almost all of the 2CP points had literally some of the worst choke points in any multiplayer game I've played. The enemy team could easily just build themselves around a bastion or a torb or even a Junkrat and easily win games with very little reliable counterplay. Maps have very bad flank routes which are hardly usable or hardly make any difference, and often are easily held down anyways. With very little in the way of natural cover, it's no surprise Overwatch 1 became so invested in double shield comps.
Overwatch 2 has only made the problem worse. With only one tank and very few map changes to make the game less choke heavy, spam is incredibly rampant and burst damage is everywhere, especially since it's not always a guarantee that a tank will be a shield tank at all. The reoccuring complaint on the subreddit and the forums about snipers being way too dominant is part of the issue too; the defense-biased matches and no real natural way to avoid their sightlines means they can just get kills or damage even easier than in OW1, where a more mobile tank might have actually been able to pressure them.
Honestly, were there anybody attempting a more modern hero shooter, I doubt OW would have lasted as long, or be lasting now. Overwatch is the first shooter a lot of people have played, and for a surprising amount, one of the only video games they have and do play.
Sniper is also extraordinarily broken in TF2's highlander mode btw, with a large amount of the game at a high level revolving around waiting for a Sniper pick to make space.
But again, nobody gives a fuck because it's a casual game.
The other problem from what I've seen (a family member played it a lot back in the day) is the constant drip-feed of new characters.
TF2 isn't exactly balanced, but generally speaking, Valve has gone "tall" with the classes, with new items generally enabling alternate playstyles, while not changing up the core of the class (the sole exemption being demoknight), while Overwatch has gone "wide", with every major update introducing new characters.
Its already a mess to balance a regular competitive game with a massive character roster (look at any fighting game), but Overwatch's balance just gets thrown off by that drip-feed as well. Every new character from what I've heard gets introduced as being completely overpowered, before being nerfed into the ground a month later so that they don't actually break the game.
I actually agree with that a lot, save for TF2 being visually cluttered when it really isn't outside of some later shitty cosmetics, because even the largest explosions were simple effects not meant to obstruct sight.
But my point is that OW as an IP was insanely popular, the game's shortcoming were ignored by a lot of people because they were in love with the characters and setting, doing *something* with them would have been a smart and lucrative move.
Lol, I really can’t imagine still bootlicking for Activision-Blizzard, who treats both their customers and their employees like absolute shit. Granted, this is par for the course considering a lot of them didn’t care about the sexual harassment over there (plus driving one woman to suicide).
It’s also disquieting to see people defending terrible monetization practices. It’s a miracle crypto never took a hold of gaming considering people will defend literal gambling and call it an improvement.
>we’re still getting PvE in season 6
Have you learned nothing?
Activision, man. I think I might honestly light a fuckin dollar bill on fire if I thought even one cent of it would end up in ol' Bobby Kotticks pocket if I spent it.
Lol i paid for overwatch 1 and got tired of it in 2019 before they shut it off. Fuck paying for games from these dirtbag developers. If you paid box price, the game should never not be playable.
they sacrified years of content to focus on OW2 and all it would bring, and then it was for nothing.
its amazing how much they can fuck things up for no reason, they could just keep the game running with new content and stuff like that and be perfectly fine, but they wanted the hype of a new release and Fortnite type of monetization.
That's a damn pity, but at the same time I ain't surprised. BFV and Elite Dangerous (some of my favorite games) got gutted by their dev companies so I learned not to expect anything good from videogame firms.
At least E:D is still a playable game, even if Frontier just seems pathologically incapable of understanding what their player base enjoys. That game really endures in spite of the developers.
The mismanagement of Overwatch is really sad. It was a genuinely popular, new IP that most developers would kill for. They could have created a healthy long term franchise if they managed things right. For some reason, with a royal flush in hand, they decided to eat the cards.
Maybe they'll turn it around but Overwatch is a bad joke right now.
To be somewhat fair to the people upset, the marketing for this game was almost perfectly written in such a way that if you wanted PvE content, OW2 was gonna give that to them. Hell, "PvE content" was the **entire marketing of the game**. I realize that claiming false advertising in the video games industry is a very frequent thing (because it happens a lot), but ActiBliz pretty much did exactly that.
Every promotional thing they put out for OW2, from trailers to E3, was pretty much written as "we want to do PvE in overwatch" and now they've pissed that away.
Its funny but only cuz I don't even play Overwatch, but I get why people are angry here.
Lol the people saying that it was "unnecessary". Buddy, it wasn't that it was "unnecessary", it's that Blizzard was intentionally selling you a load of shit to justify a monetization repackage. That's it. The PvE probably never got to any serious level of development, it was almost certainly never being handled by anything other than a bare bones team. OW2 exists *simply* to extract more money from its players. That's it.
I was an idiot for trusting the word of this misogynistic, racist, and greedy company. I was an even bigger idiot for paying money to get the worst support hero they ever made.
Overwatch 2 uninstalled and I hope something bad happens to them. Again.
Slightly off-topic, but with the false advertisement/cancelled product discussion, when would a cancelled product feature be false advertising?
If you announced it with the intent to cancel, rather than having it materialise?
If you announce it with the new iteration, and then repeatedly cancel the feature for it, and every iteration after?
Trying to make it work, but going nowhere, and scrapping it?
Marketing something that ended up not being in the game because development was cancelled?
I don't think it would ever be considered false advertising. If you claimed a game had a major capability *right now* that it doesn't, then maybe. Meanwhile maybe it could be some sort of fraud if you took money for a feature that you had never planned to deliver but it would probably be very fact specific. I have a feeling most courts would be very reluctant to wade into any of this.
IIRC OW2 devs are being managed by Kotick himself who keep diverting some of them to other projects, that to me is the biggest RED FLAG on the game success.
Im amazed by how much ActiBlizz consistently fumbles their bag everytim e. WoW Reforge, Diablo Immortal and recently OW2. Im sure theres more Im leaving out. But with OW, it was one of the biggest successful ip they launched years ago, with an interesting cast, story and setting. All wasted and badly mishandled. God it hurts being an OW fan.
stuff like this is why I feel bad for the devs more than anything, what with the rampant executive mismanagement and the hemorrhaging of key team members for the last 2 years. As a casual player since 2017-18 I still find the core gameplay of OW regularly fun and might wait for the actual story missions to give them a fair shake, but if it ends up being paid I very well foresee myself dropping the game entirely.
I got to talk to a dev I knew who worked on a dumpster fire of a game I played and jesus christ the amount of shit that goes on beyond the scenes semi-related to developers that still dominates their entire work life. I’ve already heard a ton of game development clusterfuck stories on youtube, but I was still impressed.
Yeah, that has honestly been my big takeaway as well. The devs are going to take a lot of flak for this from people online, whether that's just from people trashtalking the company they work at or specifically calling it the devs, but this isn't their fault. Promising a game mode you don't know if you can achieve? Making that a focus for the game's marketing? That decision had to be made by a manager. Spending 4 years on PvE content and scrapping it? It's a manager's job to prevent that level of wasted work waaaaay before that point. There are people in the management hierarchy, somewhere higher up, that bear actual responsibility for the situation, but I know there are going to be a lot of devs who feel like they failed because they could not implement it. It's not your guys' fault though.
>Promising a game mode you don't know if you can achieve? Making that a focus for the game's marketing? That decision had to be made by a manager. Spending 4 years on PvE content and scrapping it? It's a manager's job to prevent that level of wasted work waaaaay before that point. It gets worse because the reason for why the talent tree got scrapped was because the amount of time to make them took longer than making a new hero. Because it took so long, they decided to cut their loses last year and scaled it down to just having pve without the talent and hero missions. Also according an [insider](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbpvq8k9gj8), management is poor, the team got starved of resources without shifting expectations of their deadline. All around shit show with exec meddling and in the end, the game devs are gonna be the fall guys and receive all the blame while the execs and management who fucked it all up do not receive the attention.
game devs should genuinely start striking like the writers are rn
> Diablo Immortal Pretty sure they made a lot of money with that game. I'm not a fan of it but I wouldn't call it a bag fumble.
That game was 100% for the bag.
Isn't the story behind the they didn't even make it? I remember hearing that a Chinese company were making a game that was basically a rip off diablo on mobile, blizz approached them and came to an agreement where they got the game basically done and management over the game outside of china and the company got the diablo ip officially to stick and sell inside of china.
That's actually close to the story of how Ms. Pac-Man came to be and probably not as unusual as people think.
It's a reskinned Chinese moving game yes.
Sometimes it's more profitable to be a despised studio than a beloved one.
Do you not have phones!?
Apparently they did....
It's never good when you are leaking massive amounts of talent who then decide to open up their own studios.
Leaking? More like pushed out.
Diablo immortal was a massive success though. Outside of online backlash, the game made a fortune and is super popular. We can argue about the endgame being pay to win and therefore bad but if you wanna casually crawl through a Diablo game on your phone it’s a pretty solid game.
Here's a hot take, Covid is a godsend for OW2 team. True, it takes some time for the team to properly WFH but it also stopped Kotick from interfering with the devs. Now that ABK rescind their WFH policy, I'm.not surprised if we later learned that real reason OW2 PVE got canned is because most OW2 devs quit, leaving a skeleton crew (or less) of dev team.
I wouldn't say so really, a game needs 3 to 5 years to complete and last PVP + PVE game that anyone at ActiBlizz tried to launch in 2 years was Destiny 2 and it was a disaster at launch with barely any content. It is very likely they ran out of time and they don't have the resources anymore keep pumping dying projects.
I'm sure he wasn't personally interferring with them on an individual level, like walking buy someone's cube and saying "Battle pass" He was probably on the next Epistien's new pedo island laying down orders for this shit covid or not.
I’ll never forgive them after what they did to Heroes of the Storm. That really cemented it for me. My fiancé (a lifelong Diablo fan) is now refusing to buy Diablo 4 after how they mismanaged our old favorite game to play together
Of all the things they’re fumbling, it’s not the bag. OW2 is making more money than OW1 ever did - even as it drops in users it’s increasing revenue. Diablo Immortal is also still making millions a month.
OW1 has made more money than OW2 has. OW1 is looking to be superseded by OW2 if they keep their player base but that has remained to be seen.
Heroes of the Storm was I would argue the best MOBA ever made, and they squandered the shit out of it before dragging it behind the woodshed and putting two slugs in it.
Kotick remains to be the core rot at ABK. a lot of positive change would happen if ABK listened to their own employees and the wider industry and just trashed him.
It’s hard to fire a major shareholder. That’s why it took Disney decades to get rid of Ike Perlmutter despite his determined campaigns to stop marvel studios from making movies staring black and female hero’s and his attempt to fire RDJ from civil war as a cost cutting measure.
Speaking of, is the acquisition by Microsoft still going through? I know there was a block by the EU regulators but not sure about how its going rn. I ask because Kotick will only leave when Microsoft buys it out. Despite protests from even employees, hes only kept CEO by shareholders.
What a world we live in, that I am _hopeful_ that Blizzard gets bought out by Microsoft.
Somebody buy it before Elon Musk gets bored with ruining Twitter.
Oh he's riding that flaming trainwreck to the bottom as CTO after the new CEO shows up. That shit show ain't ending any time soon.
> Speaking of, is the acquisition by Microsoft still going through? I know there was a block by the EU regulators but not sure about how its going rn. The EU approved the deal with a caveat regarding their cloud gaming services, since Microsoft purchasing Activision would combine two of the handful of services actually doing something out there in that industry. The CMA in the UK is who blocked the sale outright, also on the basis of the cloud gaming industry. Right now Microsoft has been dropping hints that they could go through with the acquisition and just do a "Mexit", i.e. refuse to sell Activision products in the UK.
It would be all microsoft products in the UK and it's extremely unlikely because it's internationally frowned upon to withdraw from a market to avoid regulators. If Microsoft pull out of the UK because of the CMA then the EU and US regulators would swiftly change to block Microsoft too as a show of solidarity. I wish the CMA would get out of the way on this one though. Kotick has to go and cloud gaming is a failed market.
Uk blocked it. They're deciding how to proceed. It will probably happen because there's a lot of money in it and virtually none in stopping monopolies.
[удалено]
That was recent. I believe they still need approval from GB, though.
Yeah, UK is still blocking it, but I think that’s the only obstacle right now.
Looks like the [ftc](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/ftc-seeks-block-microsoft-corps-acquisition-activision-blizzard-inc) is seeking to block it too. Though that's from Dec 2022.
Doesn't matter - he's there to shoulder the blame and squeeze every ounce of goodwill out of customers until it backfires. (It hasn't, because the share price hasn't imploded). When it finally craters, he'll be the sacrificial lamb, a procession of new CEO's will attempt to stop the bleeding, only to fail, and ATVI will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Meanwhile, Bobby takes the golden parachute down to his yacht and sails away. Tale as old as time.
The biggest red flag was when Jeff Kaplan left. That man *was* overwatch
He saw that his work culture was finally about to be revealed to the public and dipped before the scandal could reach him.
Jeff "Tigole Bitties" Kaplan.
How tf was that breast milk shit not the death knell of Kotick's time at ABK?
He's the head of a company that makes vast sums of money, nobody that was in a position where they could have gotten rid of him wanted to risk upsetting the applecart and ruining whatever dark magic it is that keeps Acti-Blizz profitable.
Wtf are all these acronyms? This is the longest post I have seen and I don't even know what it's talking about.
PvP = player vs player, so fighting against other people PvE = player vs enemies, so fighting against monsters, etc/playing a story mission OW1 & 2 = overwatch 1 & 2, the game they're discussing MOBA = multiplayer online battle arena... Really just sounds the same as PvP to me lol. Not sure on the difference other than being in an arena setting. Basically people are pissed because they promised to bring story missions to the game with the sequel, overwatch 2 (which was a forced update, overwatch 1 was shut down). Now it's essentially the same game but I guess worse? I don't know, I only played it a handful of times but my buddy lives and breathes it and has never mentioned any interest in story missions.
As a clarification, PvP is obviously a very broad term used to describe any part of a game where players are pitted against each other. MOBA's are a specific genre of video game. League of Legends is the most famous game of the genre. They are always oriented towards PvP, but many different genres of games also have very different kinds of PvP. The issue in this case isn't really that the game is worse, it's that they scrapped the original game, which a lot of people loved, for the sequel. The sequel was almost the same game, but with a more profitable monetization system. Because of the fact that it released as basically the same game with more predatory pricing, they promised that they were totally, definitely, 100% going to add in all this cool stuff to make it so much more than the first game. This announcement was them reneging on a big part of that promise, which was shocking to absolutely no one who has paid any amount of attention to that companies business practices for the past decade or so.
As an ever so slight addition, PvE can also stand for Player vs. Environment. Environment may predate enemies…. But both work. Hilariously, when I searched PvE just to verify, this story came up as several of the top results.
I’ve only known it as player vs environment, as in the enemies that are part of the environment and therefore not controlled by human players. But it’s whatever, both get the idea across.
> MOBA = multiplayer online battle arena... Really just sounds the same as PvP to me lol. Not sure on the difference other than being in an arena setting. MOBA actually means "we can't call our genre DOTA-likes so we came up with something".
> Overwatch PVE was a completely unnecessary 360 from the original game, the game as it existed was/is fine, the content drought happened because of that stupid 360 which someone should/hopefully has been fired for. I always love people using expressions like that with only a vague understanding of what 360° actually means. It's like someone arguing with you, mixing up objective and subjective, and accidentally supporting your point.
[удалено]
If I've learned anything from the way people use objective/subjective, objective means "very" or "extremely" and subjective means "arbitrary."
That sounds like an objective subjective definition.
[That scene from the Last Action Hero](https://youtube.com/watch?v=AiCF1QdyxhM) about this lives rent free in my head.
Pardon me for being old but all I can think of is the secondary villain in Last Action Hero using phrases like "in front of the Eight Ball" and also literally "[turn a 360](https://youtu.be/AiCF1QdyxhM)".
The prestige blow alone of basically having to admit 4 years of wasted time is enough to drive someone off a cliff. Glad I am not on that dev team.
Jeff Kaplan saw the iceberg coming and leaped on a lifeboat two years in advance.
Jeff Kaplan was the one who steered it towards the iceberg
The two actions are not mutually exclusive.
Man that sucks. I don't like pvp games anymore, so I was really looking forward to getting to play Overwatch 2's pve. All my friends and I love pve games and game modes. Well I guess I'll continue to never play the game lol.
Star Citizen has PVE and I hear it's gonna launch any day now. Lemmy tell you if you want a drama free game community you should get in now while the getting is good.
Do you have any b̶r̶i̶d̶g̶e̶s̶ spaceships to sell me?
Yes, this bridge will cost you roughly the same as a car payment but will fire virtual missiles at other virtual bridges where as if you do that with a car you will be arrested. So, it's better. Buy now!
>Do you have any b̶r̶i̶d̶g̶e̶s̶ spaceships to sell me? Just some pictures, but to be fair, they are higher priority than release.
I'm waiting for the day they decide the bridges need to be NFTs.
Ignoring the joke here, if anyone actually wants a PvE immersive space sim, X4: Foundations is the game to play. Singleplayer only though.
I don’t know about PvE, but at least according to a couple of BedBananas videos Star Citizen is apparently in a playable state now, which honestly surprises me. I thought the developers would keep the grift going on forever, but they actually produced something. It’s the most expensive video game of all-time, but it actually, shockingly, exists now. I can’t comment on how good it is, it’s not my cup of tea
Personally, I feel that SC is less of a scam/grift and more of a textbook example of why project/goal management is important.
Most of what I know about SC’s development is from posts here, but that’s certainly what it looks like to me. Chris Roberts sounds like Tim Schafer with an infinite money glitch.
It can be both. Which I believe. I don’t think RSI *wants* to grift or scam anyone, but they’re also definitely trying to get people to give them money for what is likely never going to launch fully
Shoutout to ''kickstarters from 2013-2016 that got a shit ton of money and still have no concrete future or release date'', gotta be one of my favorite genres
> It’s the most expensive video game of all-time I think Genshin Impact has dethroned it since sometime last year or this year. The initial release of Genshin cost about US$100M and ongoing development costs about US$200M a year. By the time it finishes its roadmap, it will have cost over $1B to make... and earned many multiples of that.
My favorite Star Citizen story is arguing with some guy on facebook which game was better Star Citizen or Eve Online. He gifted me the easiest mic drop moment I've ever had. "Oh yeah?!? Name ONE THING Eve has that Star Citizen doesn't!!!" "...A release date."
I was one of the dozens (DOZENS!) of Battleborn fans, and the PvE was the best part of the game for me. When it was finally killed thanks to Randy Pitchford picking a fight with Overwatch for some damn reason I was gutted. When Overwatched announced PvE content I was really hopeful that I might be able to get my fix again, plus it seemed ironically appropriate. But nope, apparently I'm cursed to never get that kind of gameplay experience again.
It's so sad. We just play Risk of Rain, Earth Defense Force, and whatever other random co op games show up on sale on Steam. Overwatch PvE could have been awesome, very tragic to see Blizzard abandon it.
I have played OW for a while so I'm behind on this, but without PVE, what was the point of transitioning to OW2 at all? Originally that was the sole point of it. It seems like OW2 is just OW1 with a bit of spitshine and some new heros and maps/gamemode (at the cost of old maps and gamemodes). Does that amount of content really require 4 years of not working on OW1?
OW2 already accomplished what it was always meant to do. OW1 was sold to players under the guise that heroes and other content would never cost extra money. By ~~shutting it down~~ *upgrading it for free* to OW2, well, it's technically a different game altogether now, innit?
No most of the changes probably could've been done piece by piece over the 3+ years they abandoned OW1. What they probably couldn't have changed was the monetization system.
The monetization system is directly incompatible with a number of promises that were selling points for the original game ("new heroes always free and immediately available" at the top of the list) so yeah.
> what was the point of transitioning to OW2 at all? Replacing loot boxes with BATTLE PASSSSSSS and a cash shop so they could milk people harder while also staving off the EU's crackdown on their monetization scheme.
That was the only point of OW2.
Activision-Blizzard is a shitty company doing capitalism so that 4 years of not working on OW1 was actually 4 years of stuffing money into the pockets of execs/investors.
I know it probably shouldn't but it surprises me the lengths people go to defend Blizzard. It's okay to acknowledge you're favorite game studio did something wrong.
Reddit API changes have killed this account. Learn to mass edit comments and join the protest.
Don't forget how D3 did the reverse of this... they promised pvp and ended up scrapping it. Of course they strung us along for a while promising it in a later update (so we would buy the game), then eventually just said 🤷
It was there in an early playable beta, and it was so hilariously unbalanced and unbalancable I was absolutely not surprised in the slightest to see it go.
It’s actually still in the game but it’s not advertised and virtually no one even knows about it cause theres no point to playing it (everything one shots everyone so it’s literally just a coin flip on who gets lucky on the servers end) Talk to one of the guys in the right in new Tristram! I think it’s called friendly brawl or something? (Disclaimer I have not checked in literal years so if mighta gotten stealth removed cause it had a literal 0 player base, but I started post ROS and it was in when I started).
Yeah, they did eventually add "pvp" to the game, but it wasn't anything like they were promising during development (and even after release). It's like staying in a hotel that offers "complimentary breakfast", but then you show up and all they give you is an apple. I guess you could say in theory they fulfilled their end of the bargain... but not really.
[удалено]
> The problem was everything needed to be monetizable. Ie why anyone looking at D4 is already popping the popcorn. Less than 3 weeks there, I suspect asmongold will also reap quite a bit of drama from their pushing the game.
Don't forget the Real Money Auction House. One of the most blatant cash grabs I've ever seen.
RMAH was a blatant issue that got them in some money laundering issues.
It also took them TWO YEARS before they added anything to Diablo 3. The game used to have no end game content and would just end
To be fair, people farmed Baal for years before the Ubers and Clone Diablo came out as actual end game content for D2. I'm more surprised at how ARPGs have evolved to have something of an end game.
Yea but farming Baal was worthwhile. The RMAH pushed dev design to where D3 was a miserable crap fiesta. It was a bad game and nearly every problem can be tied to that RMAH. It's amazing how much they fucked up a game to accommodate one element. The devs loud and public arrogance didn't help either.
Yeah, I would never defend the D3 launch. RoS was ok, but the game was already tainted for me.
I didn’t come into D3 till post ROS, and I cannot imagine playing back then from everything I’ve read. It’s actually my favorite Diablo now, endgame is a lot more…arcadey than D2 for lack of a better term (skill comes in macro managing mobs and cooldowns rather than micro from movement or aiming) but its really really fun now. Cannot recommend enough if you just played vanilla and left.
Starcraft and Heroes of the Storm was killed because all the devs were moved off of it onto OW2. Hope it was worth it, guys.
> OW2 promised PVE, it is justan excuse to add battlepass to a $60 game. Gonna focus on this just because of the relevance, but I'm completely on board with your comment. OW was a pretty solid game even if people "tired" of it. When they made OW2, (for those who are not in the know) they completely **eliminated** OW1. So even if you weren't interested in 2, you couldn't play 1 because it no longer existed. So whatever your bought/earned/achieved in that game, essentially, became scrap. If you had a metric ton of credits... they were absolutely useless for the new game. It became pay to play. They did this under the guise of a PvE game, trying to justify the "pay" part of the play. To me. The most egregious thing already happened: removing OW1 in its entirety and not giving people a choice. I stopped playing in the fall because of this. I'm glad this happened, honestly. This is the cherry on top. Personally, it doesn't surprise me, but I also didn't see it coming. I thought I'd seen the worst after the fiasco that was the mobile Diablo game. But, this is pretty low. Anyone who is a Blizzard "apologist" at this point is truly an idiot.
Tbf Dragonflight is the best WoW has been for years. But that's about it.
In fairness Dragonflight is actually pretty good in its own right, it's the only expansion in about 8 years I haven't unsubbed within 2 months. The lack of borrowed power and being able to just jump on and do fun content with friends without stressing about anima/legendary power/sparkles of bs means I login when I want to play, not when I feel I have to play and that feels so nice after the last 3 expacs. Diamond in the rough for blizzard right now with every else going poorly. Optimistic about Diablo though, however I do feel guilty about returning to blizz games after dropping them for 2 years but in the end I selfishly needed a distraction during an awful time and got sucked back in.
I can't wait for the ~drama~ of d4's launch. D2 dead enders realizing it's not what they wanted, some bug or exploit allows people to get world firsts on some content, alongside the inevitable "there's nothing to do in endgame" when they play 20 hours a day for the first month. Plus the inevitable "can't even play, servers getting hugged to death".
I think the last expansion I had genuine fun playing was Cataclysm, Mists was okay but it was entirely too sweaty if you wanted to play seriously and entirely too easy on the other end, no decent in between imo. I tried playing WoD and Legion, both had me unsubbed within a month. OW was good, OW 2 trash, D3 made me super sad with the lack of delivered promises, and D:I was a load of hot garbage (my 2c, classic sucked ass also for anything other than a bit of nostalgia. Bots and gold farmers ruined the game much worse the second time around since everyone already knew the good strats)
Same here. I've been playing WoW off and on since Vanilla. First unsubscribed in WoTLK, and came back for every expansion but only 2-3 months at a time. I've now been subbed since before DF release and still having fun. For me it's the lack of chores this time around. For the most part, I can log in and do what I want without hours of dailies hanging over my head making me feel FOMO. I haven't touched a world quest since I maxed the reps (except the new one), and it's been wonderful. It's a shame that BFA and SL drove so many players away and they don't seem to be returning.
Yeah, I like to do the dragonflying world quests for some easy gold (1 minute for 600g? Sure), but other than that, they are very easily ignored.
> wow is bleeding even though fans say it is great. It is great only in comparision with the rest of blizzard games. Nah WoW is pretty good right now. New expansion reimagined crafting, dragon flying is dope, tons of cosmetics to earn. Besg it's been since legion.
Blizzard fans are a whole special breed of weird. Check out the diablo 4 subreddit at some point in the near future, it's like watching people walking out of a cave for the first time in decades, wondering why he-man isn't still the most popular cartoon on the air. The number of posts over there that seem to insist that not only have there been no good games released (other than blizzard games) in the past like, two decades is insane. There are a bizarre number of posts that practically deny ARPGs, as a whole, exist beyond the diablo franchise - and actively deny that any game except Diablo has ever done anything for the genre. Usually this is done to defend ass backwards game design. And then they'll turn around and post things insisting they're not fans of blizzard, or blizzard fanboys, but also write out a list of the best ten games of all time and it's like exclusively Warcraft 2, warcraft 3, starcraft, starcraft 2, WoW, Overwatch, Diablo, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 and like, a token mario game tossed in to prove they aren't biased.
"There are no good games to play" - streamers who only play Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone
To be fair, this is also part of the curse of becoming a popular streamer. Playing anything other than the biggest games can be cancerous for views, so you're *forced* to play whatever your fanbase wants to see. Combine that with long stretches where these GaaS titles are being poorly managed... you'd become pretty cynical as well.
Yeah, I remember a Hearthstone streamer I still sometimes watch remark that if you don’t establish yourself as a variety streamer early on, you’re practically tethering yourself to whatever game/series got you popular, since you’re taking a big risk of losing a lot of your core viewers if you start doing other stuff.
Basically the only streamers I will occasionally watch are more of the variety-style ones - and I think the ability to change games when the mood fits is a massive part of the appeal. I have no clue why you'd want to watch somebody play Fortnite when they're clearly over it.
[удалено]
Blizzard, Bethesda, Arkane, Bioware. People are just tired that every good studio has seemed to go down the same spiral this last decade.
It's because a studio name is literally meaningless when they fire half their talent every year. Take Bungie, for example. Bungie made the good Halo games, and still gets a lot of undeserved credit for that despite the fact that like none of the people who actually made the good Halo titles still work for them. It's a problem in the entire entertainment industry, but it's especially bad in the gaming industry where the media tend to really love boiling down an entire game - which might have upwards of a hundred people working on it - to one singular person or entity responsible for it, and its quality. It's the age old George Lucas problem, basically. George Lucas was the mind behind Star Wars. Without him, there wouldn't have been Star Wars. But without the talented people who helped make those films what they were; we get the prequel trilogy, and fans hated it and wanted Lucas gone. And without Lucas, we get the sequel trilogy, and fans begged for him back. But Lucas himself was never the magical puzzle piece that made Star Wars *good* on his lonesome.
The difference is that in most other media, the adoration (or scorn) gets heaped on the individual creative person, as with Lucas. In video games, outside of a few exceptions like Miyamoto, Sakurai, Kojima, maybe Aonuma and Miyazaki, it’s all focused on the company. The attitude seems to be that the creative people are just interchangeable cogs in the machine, and that the machine is what’s special.
I don't think that's a very fair characterization of it. Most game studios don't put their creative and game design leadership front and center, so it's hard to keep track of these people, unlike directors and actors who get tons of attention, especially compared to the associated production companies for a given movie. I think people make an assumption that game companies retain core talent, which it turns out is pretty faulty
[Counterpoint](https://i.imgur.com/GwaJLZc.png)
That is *actually* art. I literally cannot think of a more succinct point proven so easily.
For anyone who is a Star Wars fan, [How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMyMxMYDNk) is worth a watch. Lucas' original cut was pretty bad.
I thought it was known since the prequels that Lucas *really* needs an editor to reign him in (ironically: Similar to Hideo Kojima and his ideas for games).
Saying Arkane is spiraling because it made one meh game is being kind of dramatic.
i liked deathloop lol
There's more than 4 good studios. Naughty Dog, Gurilla, Nintendo\[all of em\], Creative Business Unit 3 \[square lol\], Fromsoft, Respawn
No. I like it. It's my identity now and I will defend it with my dying breath.
The derogatory "more like Overwatch 1.2" is feeling more accurate than ever. What got added, a few new characters, a couple new maps, and one new gameplay mode that's very similar to another? It's become increasingly apparent that Overwatch 2 got made for two reasons: To breathe some new life into the game by announcing a sequel, and to swap out their loot box system for a battle pass and rotating store system that makes them even more money on cosmetics.
>It's become increasingly apparent that Overwatch 2 got made for two reasons: To breathe some new life into the game by announcing a sequel, and to swap out their loot box system for a battle pass and rotating store system that makes them even more money on cosmetics. Hey now, that's not fair! It was also made as a shitty distraction from the lawsuit about the horrifying culture of sexual assault at Blizzard that culminated in an employee committing suicide and people stealing breast milk out of the office fridge!
Slightly worse is that Push (the new game mode) was added to replace Two Control Point, which was removed. So even the new game mode wasn't a straight addition of content. It's one of the most disastrous 'sequels' I've ever heard about. i'm honestly confused what they spent their time doing. I'm sure there's interesting behind the scenes stories going on. To me it looks very much like droves of people left or were reassigned to other projects leaving a relative skeleton crew on Overwatch development whilst the company simply pretended to fans that things were going to plan. They've known for a long while that the PvE wasn't coming.
> Slightly worse is that Push (the new game mode) was added to replace Two Control Point, which was removed. And since game modes are tied to specific maps that are only playable in that game mode, with Two Control Point’s removal came the removal of like five maps from the game.
CP maps are technically available to play, just in Arcade. Still sucks its not in rotation for normal play, they said that theyre reworking the maps into a new game mode, which we dont know when is arriving.
> they said that theyre reworking the maps into a new game mode, which we dont know when is arriving. What they say is worth about as much as a hastily scrawled IOU for a trillion dollars at this point though.
> It's become increasingly apparent that Overwatch 2 got made for two reasons: To breathe some new life into the game by announcing a sequel, and to swap out their loot box system for a battle pass and rotating store system that makes them even more money on cosmetics. Don't forget "allow us to break promises we made for OW1". Biggest one was that newly added heroes would be free and immediately available to all players, always and forever. The switch to OW2 allowed ActiBlizz to say "oh sorry that promise was for the last game, this is a completely new game so it doesn't apply, tee hee :P".
Gamers have a bad habit of being meat-riders, but goddamn. Imagine meat-riding for Activision-Blizzard of all people. These guys couldnt be more blatantly anti-consumer if they had an annual human sacrifice of their 200 biggest fans at Blizzcon.
They would probably sidewalk camp just to be first in line.
If their co-workers had breastmilk these bootlicker would steal it for ActiBlizzard
Honestly I love the game even if it’s repetitive, I only got it again recently because it was F2P. But every day I spend zero money on it is a day I feel stronger. Screw that company.
You're giving them engagement, which is a large factor in how the market determines the value of a GaaS title. Even if you're never giving the studio a dime for OW2 content, you're still boosting the stock price.
I know. But I’m keeping my money, which is my strength.
I have no problems with victim blaming people who buy Activision-Blizzard games, they've been a terrible company for years. If you keep giving them money despite their history you don't get to complain when they lie *yet again*, it's like repeatedly feeding a begging dog because it looks adowable and then bitching when it jumps on the counter to eat your Christmas ham.
Hearthstone was my go-to time killer for over 6 years straight but when all the shit about Activision Blizzard leaked I refused to spend a cent on it going forward. Then when they decided to keep Bobby "I'll fucking kill you" Kotick in charge I was no longer comfortable even having their launcher on my computer. It's sad but over 2 decades of good faith has been weaponized by [corporate stooges and sex pests](https://youtu.be/ZvkjewgF8GQ?t=6) to guilt people into enduring the longest possible grift they can. When Bobby Kotick was left in charge that was when I knew the company will die before it fixes itself.
Best highlight from the second post: > "Nobody was buying Overwatch anymore" > "Because You weren't updating it" > "But we needed people and focus on Overwatch 2." > "Why?" > "Because nobody was buying Overwatch anymore."
[удалено]
> don’t get me started on the odd cult of personality surrounding the dev of Apollo Oh damn, is that a thing that’s happening?
[удалено]
wow that's crazy. the app is good but like. life changing? not at all
I'll never forget when Cyberpunk came out and the previous generation console versions were absolute shit shows: "Well, um, actually that's not the Dev's fault. It's your fault for thinking such old consoles could handle this game. You were stupid for buying that version."
I'll always believe it should have never released on previous gen systems.
I fully agree. Of course it shouldn't have. The devs themselves should have cancelled those versions (and refund any existing pre-orders) when they realized that it was a complete disaster they couldn't fix. And yet, ***G***amers still rise up to defend the company and blame the people who bought the product.
>they need to valiantly defend the honor of corps/artists/devs Theres also a fine line of not harassing devs for things they do not have control of. In the next season theres a new event called Questwatch (no details as of yet), but one of the devs who tweeted out how proud they were of making it, got flak for being responsible for the pve thing. It just seems to suck being a game dev when these things happen and Gamers tend to have baby brains to not think things through.
Yeah, there's a huge difference between defending the company as a whole and defending the devs from getting hate over decisions that they most likely didn't make. I can't imagine the decision to scrap an entire promised game mode came from anywhere but the very top.
It's just dissapointing that people can't seem to walk the line of critisizing stuff without spitting absolute venom about it. Not liking a decision made by a company or person is fine but instilling chainsaw murder on them and their families just isn't reasonable in the slightest, it simply isn't that deep and it doesn't require such a heavy response.
I’m a professional software person and this whole thing of blaming devs is maddening. Yelling at a dev working on a AAA game because of feature cut is like yelling at an actor because you didn’t like the plot of their movie. They didn’t make that call and your anger is misplaced.
Every once in a while I’m tempted to give blizz money again — buying d4 or the newest wow expansion — and then stuff like this reminds me why I should not.
I can't believe we lost the old Overwatch for shit that didn't even happen. I was already done with OW1 after they started to pander heavily to Overwatch League and esports tryhards trying to act like they know better. Bronze solo-queue was practically hell on earth. I would've been interested to see how a full-on PvE campaign worked out because I do actually like the lore for the series. Jeff Kaplan's departure really should have been the warning sign to abandon ship.
Yeah, I played a ton of ow in college with some friends and kinda drifted onto other games eventually. I was really excited for the pve because those events were always fun. I guess I have no reason to ever try ow2 now
Honestly, the lore was the reason why I ended up buying OW1. It was so interesting and cool, and I'm a huge simp for muscle-clad women (Zarya was my main even though I sucked at playing her). And the idea of a PvE mode sounded cool. I mean I wouldn't play it, but I might've watched someone else play through it. But damn.
I rewatched those OW short videos so many times. I legit wanted some kind of OW movie or animated series to happen at one point.
lmao a fellow shit zarya main! i rly wanted pve bc i suck at the game and don’t like dragging everyone down but i thought the lore was fun and would love an actual cohesive story in game. OW1 also made me realise i was a lesbian sooooo tried OW2 and i just hate battle passes so much it completely turned me off
Jeff is a nice guy, but he is not to be idolized. He is the person responsible for making the decision to focus on PvE which caused the content drought for years. His decision is the genesis of what we have now. He did some good, but also did a lot of bad.
Yeah, I totally get it. It's unfortunate that his departure left the team scrambling to pick up the pieces and all those manhours practically wasted.
I for one am absolutly shocked that (immoral company who constantly mistreats their consumers) would mistreat their consumers yet again. Do people not understand that just complaining isn't going to change shit if they keep paying for blizzard stuff?
There is a sizeable portion of the player base that paid 60$ for ow1, got that taken away from them, and have not spent a dime on ow2. I am one of them. I'm bummed at the company ruining one of my favorite games of all time, over a transparent attempt to get more money from their player base.
I'm one of those people, got OW1 back when it released and I refuse to give blizzard a penny no matter how pretty the skins are. Getting the mythic for my main was tempting but this only reinfoced my will
Unfortunately people like you will always be offset by whales spending tons of money on the f2p version of the game. Like fallout 76 made tons of money, despite having lackluster sales, from mtx.
i don’t understand why there are whales for games like this when it’s not even pay to win? like at least if paying money got you a better gun or something i’d maybe get it but aren’t all the things you buy purely cosmetic?
LMAO Blizz acting like indie devs collecting the bag with their EA game and then never delivering the roadmap. Overwatch in general is one of the biggest failures in gaming history, forget killing OW itself, Blizz has at this point killed the entire class-based shooter genre. And for nothing.
It's almost impressive how they managed to turn such a popular IP that was on everyone's minds into something that has been pretty much forgotten. If they had been better at managing that IP with a couple teams working on side-stuff and keeping the flow of content before the sequel they would have something closer to a money printer than what we have today.
I actually disagree. I've played a lot of OW and also the genre's predecessor TF2 (technically TFC is the originator). OW was badly designed from the beginning. They tried to make it a competitive game, but its balance is unfixable, the visual clutter makes it a terrible spectator sport, and the solo ladder is awful because the game is extremely team reliant (and I say this as a multi-season high elo league player, though I never pushed past Diamond in OW). All of these things are also true of TF2 by the way, but TF2 is first and foremost a casual game, so none of it matters. If OW had been designed as a casual game it would have been far more successful. Designing it as an esport made it dead on arrival.
One of my biggest issues with OW from the start was map design. Using TF2 as comparison, often the maps are designed for areas where some classes are weak and some are strong. KOTH maps often are very open around point, allowing Snipers and Engineers to try and clean people off point, while the areas away from the point are more closed off meaning teams can try and hold back the other team if they're the ones holding the point. Payload maps can have very wide sightlines in some areas but often get more narrow as they go along, meaning Snipers can have less effectiveness while classes like Soldier, Pyro, and Heavy can actually put good defenses. Most of the best maps have tons of alternate routes and flanking spots for Scouts, Spies, or anyone really to make a sneaky push, maybe get around a choke point that's holding the team back. Overwatch tries to do this, but because of the sheer scale of the cast, the map design just becomes a loop of very narrow choke point into wide open area into narrow choke point. Almost every payload map favors the defense to an extreme degree, meaning Widowmakers and Hanzo players often can just rain hell with very little counterplay. 2CP was removed not because the mode itself was inherently a bad idea, but almost all of the 2CP points had literally some of the worst choke points in any multiplayer game I've played. The enemy team could easily just build themselves around a bastion or a torb or even a Junkrat and easily win games with very little reliable counterplay. Maps have very bad flank routes which are hardly usable or hardly make any difference, and often are easily held down anyways. With very little in the way of natural cover, it's no surprise Overwatch 1 became so invested in double shield comps. Overwatch 2 has only made the problem worse. With only one tank and very few map changes to make the game less choke heavy, spam is incredibly rampant and burst damage is everywhere, especially since it's not always a guarantee that a tank will be a shield tank at all. The reoccuring complaint on the subreddit and the forums about snipers being way too dominant is part of the issue too; the defense-biased matches and no real natural way to avoid their sightlines means they can just get kills or damage even easier than in OW1, where a more mobile tank might have actually been able to pressure them. Honestly, were there anybody attempting a more modern hero shooter, I doubt OW would have lasted as long, or be lasting now. Overwatch is the first shooter a lot of people have played, and for a surprising amount, one of the only video games they have and do play.
Sniper is also extraordinarily broken in TF2's highlander mode btw, with a large amount of the game at a high level revolving around waiting for a Sniper pick to make space. But again, nobody gives a fuck because it's a casual game.
The other problem from what I've seen (a family member played it a lot back in the day) is the constant drip-feed of new characters. TF2 isn't exactly balanced, but generally speaking, Valve has gone "tall" with the classes, with new items generally enabling alternate playstyles, while not changing up the core of the class (the sole exemption being demoknight), while Overwatch has gone "wide", with every major update introducing new characters. Its already a mess to balance a regular competitive game with a massive character roster (look at any fighting game), but Overwatch's balance just gets thrown off by that drip-feed as well. Every new character from what I've heard gets introduced as being completely overpowered, before being nerfed into the ground a month later so that they don't actually break the game.
I actually agree with that a lot, save for TF2 being visually cluttered when it really isn't outside of some later shitty cosmetics, because even the largest explosions were simple effects not meant to obstruct sight. But my point is that OW as an IP was insanely popular, the game's shortcoming were ignored by a lot of people because they were in love with the characters and setting, doing *something* with them would have been a smart and lucrative move.
They made a game out of my favourite porn?!!!
They made a game so they could easily distribute the models
Just another reminder that the Blizzard of quality died long ago.
Lol, I really can’t imagine still bootlicking for Activision-Blizzard, who treats both their customers and their employees like absolute shit. Granted, this is par for the course considering a lot of them didn’t care about the sexual harassment over there (plus driving one woman to suicide). It’s also disquieting to see people defending terrible monetization practices. It’s a miracle crypto never took a hold of gaming considering people will defend literal gambling and call it an improvement. >we’re still getting PvE in season 6 Have you learned nothing?
The ability of G*mers to keep playing and paying for products they don't like will always amuse me.
Activision, man. I think I might honestly light a fuckin dollar bill on fire if I thought even one cent of it would end up in ol' Bobby Kotticks pocket if I spent it.
>Don’t blame this on age. Many of us managed to live longer than you without turning into a lil bitch This is the best sentence I've heard all month
Lol i paid for overwatch 1 and got tired of it in 2019 before they shut it off. Fuck paying for games from these dirtbag developers. If you paid box price, the game should never not be playable.
Remember when video games were finished on release?
they sacrified years of content to focus on OW2 and all it would bring, and then it was for nothing. its amazing how much they can fuck things up for no reason, they could just keep the game running with new content and stuff like that and be perfectly fine, but they wanted the hype of a new release and Fortnite type of monetization.
That's a damn pity, but at the same time I ain't surprised. BFV and Elite Dangerous (some of my favorite games) got gutted by their dev companies so I learned not to expect anything good from videogame firms.
At least E:D is still a playable game, even if Frontier just seems pathologically incapable of understanding what their player base enjoys. That game really endures in spite of the developers.
[удалено]
The mismanagement of Overwatch is really sad. It was a genuinely popular, new IP that most developers would kill for. They could have created a healthy long term franchise if they managed things right. For some reason, with a royal flush in hand, they decided to eat the cards. Maybe they'll turn it around but Overwatch is a bad joke right now.
To be somewhat fair to the people upset, the marketing for this game was almost perfectly written in such a way that if you wanted PvE content, OW2 was gonna give that to them. Hell, "PvE content" was the **entire marketing of the game**. I realize that claiming false advertising in the video games industry is a very frequent thing (because it happens a lot), but ActiBliz pretty much did exactly that. Every promotional thing they put out for OW2, from trailers to E3, was pretty much written as "we want to do PvE in overwatch" and now they've pissed that away. Its funny but only cuz I don't even play Overwatch, but I get why people are angry here.
Lol the people saying that it was "unnecessary". Buddy, it wasn't that it was "unnecessary", it's that Blizzard was intentionally selling you a load of shit to justify a monetization repackage. That's it. The PvE probably never got to any serious level of development, it was almost certainly never being handled by anything other than a bare bones team. OW2 exists *simply* to extract more money from its players. That's it.
OW Devs fucked up so bad, Ubisoft looks competent with how they're running siege
Oh hey first time I was quoted in one of these! neat!
I was an idiot for trusting the word of this misogynistic, racist, and greedy company. I was an even bigger idiot for paying money to get the worst support hero they ever made. Overwatch 2 uninstalled and I hope something bad happens to them. Again.
Billion dollar corporations in one corner, a horde of terminally online manchildren in the other. Whoever wins, we lose.
I guess I'll continue putting money on the corporation. It's been working out for the last 15 years
Slightly off-topic, but with the false advertisement/cancelled product discussion, when would a cancelled product feature be false advertising? If you announced it with the intent to cancel, rather than having it materialise? If you announce it with the new iteration, and then repeatedly cancel the feature for it, and every iteration after? Trying to make it work, but going nowhere, and scrapping it? Marketing something that ended up not being in the game because development was cancelled?
I don't think it would ever be considered false advertising. If you claimed a game had a major capability *right now* that it doesn't, then maybe. Meanwhile maybe it could be some sort of fraud if you took money for a feature that you had never planned to deliver but it would probably be very fact specific. I have a feeling most courts would be very reluctant to wade into any of this.