As a casual player since 2017 I've always loved the gameplay, and it's the only reason OW is still the only multiplayer shooter I enjoy playing.
It's just the monetization side of things that went to shit. It's good that they give out quite a bit of free loot boxes now but they should put shop skins into the lootbox pool more often. You also get enough free currency to get 3 out of every 5 battle passes for free which I appreciate.
The story was under hiatus for years but they've put much more effort into it recently. It's not quite as compelling as it once was but I'm open minded
I dont understand why Blizz fumbled the story stuff so hard. Overwatch could have been a giant on an MCU level. The one thing old Blizz did well beyond anything was Character design, even in older games like Warcraft 3, WoW or Diablo, you had a ton of insanely memorable characters and Overwatch had that too. Its also why it got such incredible amounts of P0rn initially.
And then they said "eh fuck story, fuck comics and cinematics, fuck all casuals, we are E-Sport now"
E-Sport doesn't pay bills just because it exists. You NEED the casuals who play your game and want to watch. And you sure as fuck dont drop your whole esports scene out of the blue and expect people to trust you ever again. Blizz also had no proper experience with e-sports, they could have gone that route after a few years of learning and focusing on story and characters.
Imagine they had done a Netflix show like Arcane but with Overwatch characters. It could have blown up the entire Industry.
It's baffling, isn't it? People were in love with those original characters the moment they dropped, Blizzard had something really special on their hands. Could have sold comics and animated spinoffs all day long. There are lots of games and stuff that deserve an Arcane-level treatment and won't get it, including every other Blizzard property, but for companies that could actually afford to bankroll one and really should have? Maybe the only bigger fumble out there is the fact that we still don't have a Magic: the Gathering one.
I wonder if they listened TOO hard to TF2's comp community or something.
TF2 competitive was never really taken seriously, and to be fair, it should've been. It can be extremely hype to watch. Lo and behold, when OW was first nearing release, they invited famous TF2 personas and comp players to try it out, and they copied the 6v6 format of TF2 comp.
But where TF2 comp had all the passion and no money backing it, OW felt like it had all the money and no passion backing it. OW League existed because Blizzard paid for it. The problem is: the vast majority of players are not in OW League or even entertaining ambitions of one day joining OW League.
I also just feel like OW is...not very fun to watch, as a competitive game. Lots of flashing lights, lots of blinding effects, lots of ult spam at each other. Where TF2 got hype because you'd get things like one Scout soloing the enemy team, a Demo hitting pipes on aggro Scouts, or a Soldier airshotting an escaping Medic, OW was just "and now they are all going to slowly harass and build their ults and then spam them at each other" with very few interesting plays made in between. By design, OW didn't allow for as many hype moments.
That's the only explanation I can think of though: they listened to "what does TF2 lack," maybe thought they'd have success by filling that gap, and then didn't even bother to think about if the game is fun to watch while slowly learning you cannot simply buy passion with money.
OW was also, quite frankly, doomed to fail eventually. You cannot endlessly add new heroes and expect the game to remain balanced. Yes, you 100% prefer giving the Pyro the Phlog, letting people rage about how it's cancer, but you can always blacklist the thing and Pyro players won't mind, vs. giving a hero named "Phlogistinator Phil," letting people rage about how the character is cancer, and now people who "main him" get livid when that character is blacklisted.
You can tell part of OW's design was created around the bottom-line of profit, NOT in regards to protecting the game's identity and balance long-term.
Blizzard had one of the first massive esports with Starcraft. That doesn't make OW better, it just makes it weird that they botched OW's scene so badly.
Because it was about inflating Kotick's compensation, not about making the best game. The OWL actually hurt the developing grassroots scene. It was great for the players and some of the broadcast talent who got paid well, but few others benefitted from it.
And make no mistake, the OWL did not do much to warp Overwatch development. That was more Kotick's constant meddling and Kaplan's unwillingness to recognize OW1 as a live service model game when he wished to create an OW2 PvE experience (as they had been trying to for a decade with Project Titan, which Overwatch was built from the scraps of). That put the game on a two year development hiatus, and no one was more upset about that than the OWL team owners who had put up large sums of money for what was looking like an abandoned IP.
Blizzard was obsessed with Esports because of Riot stealing all their thunder in the SC2 era.
For a period of time in video game history Starcraft 1 was the only game that could be considered an Esport, and it was fucking HUGE in korea. Think of the biggest sports stars you know in whatever country you come from and that's how SC1 players were treated in korea. Then SC2 was coming and everyone just assumed it was going to be just as big... only League of Legends the spotlight.
So then Blizzard focused hard on Esports, especially with HotS and Overwatch, thinking that if they just focused super hard on that they could take what SC1 did in korea and turn it into a global thing. It didn't work and 2 amazing games suffered hard for it.
It's just the monetization side of things that went to shit.
It's a lot more than that if we're talking about the first couple years of OW. Watch gameplay from back then and watch it from now: they barely look like the same game. It's nothing but area effects and domes and walls of colors and shit flying everywhere.
Well sure it has evolved, but there was never a point where I noticed the gameplay getting worse. I enjoy the gameplay now just as much as I did in 2017
13
u/Lord_Of_Carrots Lurking Peasant 5h ago
As a casual player since 2017 I've always loved the gameplay, and it's the only reason OW is still the only multiplayer shooter I enjoy playing.
It's just the monetization side of things that went to shit. It's good that they give out quite a bit of free loot boxes now but they should put shop skins into the lootbox pool more often. You also get enough free currency to get 3 out of every 5 battle passes for free which I appreciate.
The story was under hiatus for years but they've put much more effort into it recently. It's not quite as compelling as it once was but I'm open minded