I can’t imagine any single one of the developers responsible for Overwatch 2 thinking: “OH yeah this is going to be uhmazing everyone is going to love this now…” rather they MUST OF THINKING》 “I wonder when my supervisor will walk away from my workspace so I can send my resume out to those 3 other studios I started work dialogue with…I gotta get the heck outta here before everyone plays this steaming hot tiger tutty of a game, sigh they never listen to the devs… man am I gonna miss Overwatch 1…”
I used to play Q2 competitively, so I’m a little opinionated:
Not all games are eSports-ready, nor do they need to be.
Why: eSports need to be fair. Everyone has to start at the same place, and the majority, if not all of the performance has to come from player skill.
E.g: Imagine modern football where certain players running on the field could just randomly teleport or fly, but most can’t.
Class-based (hero arena, etc) shooters are inherently unequal in the same way, because that’s the point of classes (e.g: Heavy having more HP than Scout, Spy being able to cloak and so on).
If you’re about to make the argument that “TF2/OW/LOL/WTFBBQ” requires plenty of skill despite the abilities/imbalance: save it.
There’s an enormous gulf between what the audience and casual players + enthusiasts perceive as being inside of an eSport and what’s actually going on mechanically on the top-level.
Players optimize and engineer the fun out of a game.
eSports players/pros engineer the game out of the game.
Very strange argument. It seems like you’re bad at those games and created some elaborate theory to rationalize it. Class based games require just as much, if not more, skill than non-class based games. As the number of classes increases, the total amount of knowledge required and variety of techniques available also tends to increase.
Professional players do optimize the fun out of a game, but that’s totally unrelated to the point you were trying to make.
If I’m being honest, they deserve it. I played Overwatch 2 maybe 10 Times, the constant reminder that you aren’t playing for fun, but for a totally original and new character or something very useful like a skin in the battle pass is quite annoying. The 5v5 was at first glance refreshing but got old at a rapid pace. Just play Team Fortress 2 if you’re looking for a great shooter.
They dont push it on you, except when you need to grind 45 levels a season just to be able to play the new character that anyone willing to pay already has.
Maybe thats not a problem for you, i dont k ow your situation, but i get enough time for maybe 2 or 3 games a night except when i have nothing else on. I BARELY scraped getting rammattra and i had to win 35 games as support to get lifeweaver (which sucked as a solo player). Now theres another one i have no hope in hell of unlocking unless i want to cough up the cash.
That isnt fun, its a fucking drain. Its boring and its a complete slap in the face for anyone who supported overwatch 1 and waited years for the version of overwatch 2 that we were all promised that isnt going to happen.
So you are saying that you had a different experience to me and that is exactly my point. Putting aside the fact that i glfind it very unlikely that you got the new hero “with ease” i did not and winning 35 games as support as a solo player is not easy or fun.
Regardless saying you dont need the new hero shows you dont really understand the mechanics of the game. You are supposed to be able to change your character to counter the choices the opposing team have made. If the new character is a good counter and i dont have them then i lose out. Simple as that.
Companies NEVER care about their customers. They care about profit.
Sometimes, it is profitable to be considerate of the consumers, but when customers are willing to give a company money despite their bad practices, they will always prioritize profit.
That’s the problem, if at least a part of us would start to punish companies, not with comments or bad reviews but with their actual wallet, and instead “reward” them for customer friendly behavior, the industry as a whole would be in a faaaaar better state.
I think maybe it requires legislation or a change in systems. It’s not really feasible to rely on millions of individual customers coming together to punish bad companies, it just doesn’t seem to happen effectively or make a significant impact.
Nah, the next CoD is most definitely coming to Steam. Blizzard had to know that these reviews were coming from the discourse online alone. Plus, pretty sure that it’s Microsoft’s decision to do so now anyways and there’s no way their going to limit their potential profits by locking out a platform like that just over some bad reviews.
How is everybody just now finding out how capitalism works? Any public company is LEGALLY REQUIRED to care only about shareholder profits. It is literally illegal for them to do anything else.
Fiduciary duty is a real thing. Agent/principal relationships require the agent to try and get the maximum return for the level of risk.
Even if a CEO doesn’t have a written fiduciary duty in their contract do, the company as a whole usually does.
The CEO of a public corporation reports to the board who report to index fund managers who have a agent/principal relationships with all of their investors.
The comment was basically shorthand for “a fiduciary duty exists between corporate leadership and shareholders, creating a legally-enforceable requirement that the only consideration be maximum potential return on investment for existing shareholders and risk.”
It’s absolutely true in practice. CEOs have gotten sued for not acting in the shareholders best interests.
And in relation to the original comment I replied to, are you truly saying that companies, esp. public companies, are not, FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES, beholden to making money for the shareholders? Any “nice” company will make less money, will not compete well, will then fail or be bought out by the less nice, more profitable company.
Im not a lawyer, but I’ve looked into this misunderstanding before and it stems from what constitutes "breaking one’s fiduciary duty to investors. While deliberately acting against the interests of investors is illegal, ive yet to hear of a lawsuit, let alone a successful one, brought by an investor for not making all of the money. Id be interested in hearing an investment oriented lawyers perspective since from what i understand, the full extent of fiduciary duty has not been tested that way in court
Board of directors and company officers have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders and the corporate entity.
Acts done outside their authority as stated in the articles of corporations are said to be ultra vires. They are absolutely actionable.
When the directors or officers breach the fiduciary duty to shareholders, they are liable under what’s called a derivative action, because it is derivative of the contract represented by the stock certificate.
Let’s be honest. It’s not about the 5v5. It’s not about the CC. It’s not about the balance changes. It’s not about the cancelled single player.
It’s about the free stuff. Blizzard took away the free stuff, and everybody’s angry about it. Now you have to pay for a decent amount of cosmetics, and getting a new hero requires a grind (a big grind for current-season hero, small grind for past ones) unless you want to pay.
There are two viable business models for service-based games (and running servers and paying moderators is service, that’s why they’re called servers):
Sell a game and then support it right up until everybody’s already bought the game, then sell the sequel and repeat. Otherwise how do you fund development when nobody is paying you anymore?
Sell a game and then harass your players into giving you recurring payments.
don’t make the game a service. The game is a product and not a service, the service is the bare minimum to keep the master server up. Players run dedicated servers, make the expansions through modding, etc. This is how it used to be for everything before Xbox Live.
I get that it’s disappointing, but when you get angry about not getting enough post-release content you’re asking for 1 or 2. And the industry has pretty much moved away from type 3 – I can’t think of a modern popular game that isn’t a decades-old institution like Minecraft Java that fit into that category.
It was pretty generous for people who weren’t buying loot, but selling loot crates in a slot machine was far worse, imho. You just know how bad that must’ve been for people with gambling addictions – “here, buy 100 random pulls and hope you get the skin you want”.
The difference being that it was a skin and you didnt need to buy them. I had almost every skin in ow1 just by playing and i didnt even have a silver banner thingy around my character portrait.
In ow2 you are buying characters which you actually need to play effectively.
I wholey agree that gambling mechanics have no place in games, and that cosmetics can have as much pull to addicts and people susceptible to fomo as things that affect gameplay but when the thing you are gambling on can be bought for coins (which you earn tons of by playing the game and pulling items you already have) and the chances of pulling items you dont already have are stacked in the players favour then it does beg the question of wheres the fomo?
The characters are very easy to unlock in game for free. Obviously it’s not as good as getting them at the start of the season, but it’s not p2w. They’re at the end of the free battle pass in their launch season, and have an easy achievement challenge to unlock them in following seasons. I’d say the preferred weapons in tf2 were harder to get.
45 level grind isnt easy for people that have limited time to play. And i needed to win 35 games as a support character to unlock lifeweaver, which as a solo queue player with enough time to play 2 to 3 games on average a night when i actually get to play, is not easy.
I know im not the only person playing the game but i also know im not alone in my situation.
The fact is its not the game it used to be but its pretending that it is.
If they hadnt cancelled the co-op rpg element that was the original reason we all had to abandon ow1 th3n maybe that wouldnt be much of an issue. But they said its too much to develop it so its gone. And now to replace it they want more money for something else that used to be free.
Its all just a cash grab. Its not balanced towards player, if you think its fair then you have been fooled by capitalism too.
It is a lie that they cant provide the resources to make the rpg part of ow2. They have several thousand employess and are one of the richest game companies in the world. Larian have 400 employees and managed to make bg3 in 6 years… so its absolute bollocks. Blizzard spent 3 years developing wat ended up being ow1 witha reskin.
Well that’s a good sign then. That should mean the masterserver is cheap to run, and good chance that the game can be hacked to be fully p2p in the event the masterserver gets taken down. P2p means far less server side code that has to be reverse-engineered.
Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don’t really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.
But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don’t miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.
Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to ‘outraged’ unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don’t know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.
I think what’s more important is a real shift towards your ‘type 3’ games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it’s had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was ‘dead’. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money’s worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be ‘dead’?
Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I’d love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that’s what will actually make a difference, it’s what’s actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.
I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We’ve basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.
Define “harass”. LoL and Fortnite don’t “harass” you into giving recurring payments. You can make f2p-friendly games, especially on pc, if you want. Blizzard just doesn’t want.
With no context, completely in isolation, yeah Overwatch 2 isn’t the worst. But for a lot of players, it’s not just about what Overwatch 2 is, but also about what it did and what it means. That factors into players’ feelings about the game.
Spot on. I dont give a single fuck about shovelware, but I absolutely care about OW and how Blizzard managed to turn me off a game I was pretty much addicted to.
It depends on what metrics do you use. In general, lowest-rated stuff on sites are not the worst by objective terms, but because of propaganda or other stuff that pisses off people.
I loved WarCraft 2, but it came much earlier so it wouldn’t fit the “peak Blizzard” timeline. For all those years to this day I’ve been humming music from that game.
IDK, I think Diablo 2 was peak Blizzard. We had StarCraft and Warcraft 2, and imo World of Warcraft was kind of the sign of the end, at least when it seemed they would keep doubling down on expansions instead of new games. I thought StarCraft 2 was just alright (bought Wings of Liberty on launch), and I didn’t bother with Diablo 3 due to it being always online.
So for me, peak Blizzard was around 2001. Granted, I never played Warcraft 3 (was just too different from the earlier Warcraft games), nor did I play World of Warcraft (didn’t have stable Internet, stable income, or stable time), so maybe the peak should be pushed out a few years.
Personally I think of StarCraft 2 as Blizzard’s last good game. It was the last time they made something new and didn’t cut it up to sell to you in pieces.
They were the GOAT for SC:BW, D2:LOD, and the first couple years of WoW.
SC2 has done well over the years but I remember being really disappointed when it came out. The original’s campaign was so gritty. Playing each race, you felt like you were in this strange scifi world. It was brilliant.
The SC2 campaign was so bad. Cartoonish, one dimensional characters. They made zerg and protoss more human like and boring. They were already focused on making their games sports, so single player was not their focus at all. I was fine with the esport focus but not at the cost of making it more cartoonish.
I was so excited to play the SC2 campaign when the game came out. Starcraft and Brood War was my life for years.
I was so disappointed by SC2 that, to this day, I haven’t even read the wikipedia summary of the expansion campaigns. Never bought either of them. I stopped playing around the time they introduced paid maps (in 2010 or something). Playing competitive was good, but UMS was botched just as bad as the campaign when the game was new. That was my most anticipated thing after the campaign. Even now people mostly only play the same 3 UMS maps.
The original game still holds up too. We got robbed of a good sequel. And don’t even get me started about diablo 3 lol. RIP blizzard.
Edit: did some googling and it turns out they announced, but did not implement paid maps in 2009. Map micro translation did eventually get implemented though.
I watched SC2 on YouTube on and off over the years. UThermal is worth checking out, he’s a great player and super positive self-conmentator. I’m pretty sure I’ve watched SC2 a lot more than I’ve played it. Which is sort of weird for a game…
Which one? The game was rebalanced so many times it was basically several different games. If they put in a 2-2-2 mode with the weaker open-queue tanks, I’d call that close-enough to Overwatch 1. Of course, that still would mean the new expensive monetization model. Like there’s one skin in the free tier of the current battle-pass, and it’s for Torb.
When they made OW2, they replaced OW1 with it. Technically, I think OW2 is just a really big update for OW1. But now there's no way to play the old version that a lot of us liked better. :(
I remember fondly playing overwatch 1 with my friends and sinking in hundreds of hours. If they wanted to break into the steam market they should have done it with the first one. Not with their lackluster, phoned in sequel. This was just stupid of them.
I loved Assassin's Creed 2, so I didn't bat an eye buying Brotherhood and Revelations as they had the same basic background. They were full price games and I played for about 15 to 20 hours on each. That's not much for full price. They were basically just new story lines for the main game.
Personally, I sometimes like when a game feels like just a new storyline (and map) for the same game. Sometimes I just want more of a good thing and don’t want to have to learn new mechanics or risk the game making things worse.
And since dev time is limited, I think in theory, this could mean more time could be spent on making the story missions perfect. But in practice, I don’t think that usually happens. Publishers would rather cheap out.
Lol when I first updated it the game didn’t replace my desktop icon so it was still saying overwatch 1 so yes just stupid patch that ruined a perfectly good game haven’t returned since
An update implies they changed something to the game. This was just an update to the monetization. A blatant pure cash grab sold as a sequel game. Its a travesty, and if they had any decency they’d scrap it, apologize, and release “Overwatch 2 A Realm Reborn” that is an actual legitimate sequel to the original game.
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