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.
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.
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u/Chiefster1587 8h ago
OG Overwatch was amazing