Overwatch 2 Dev Chat - Creating Starwatch, PvE Updates & 2023 Roadmap

[Edge-]

I genuinely hope people who actually have paid for this shit (also, lol what were you thinking) start making cases for refunds and lawsuits because at this point they have objectively lied about what was being sold

Good news: Nobody paid for it. Nothing related to PvE was ever sold for OW2. It's still shitty and people are rightfully angry/disappointed, but seeing all the Internet Lawyers come out to talk up fraud lawsuits or false advertisement lawsuits or class action lawsuits because, "Your honor, my feelings are really hurt." is hilarious though.

Diablo 4 is the last hope of a good game from them

I'm pretty sure folks are just waiting for the shoe to drop. I know I am.

[KainneAbsolute]

Indeed, Diablo 4 is like the last hope because they put so many resources and talent into it. Curiously some of them persons already left for other ex-Blizzard companies.

[Delekii]

Good news: Nobody paid for it. Nothing related to PvE was ever sold for OW2. It's still shitty and people are rightfully angry/disappointed, but seeing all the Internet Lawyers come out to talk up fraud lawsuits or false advertisement lawsuits or class action lawsuits because, "Your honor, my feelings are really hurt." is hilarious though.



I'm pretty sure folks are just waiting for the shoe to drop. I know I am.

Anyone who pays money for ANYTHING related to D4 expecting it to last more than a month or two has no place getting angry at this point. I will buy and play D4 but I won't spend a cent on battlepasses or any other monetization, I fully expect it to be a flash in the pan.

OW2 is basically a commercial videogame company version of a rugpull. They took away access to a game people paid for, offering a "free" game in its place, but drastically worsened the drops and skins people got by removing the lootboxes from OW1. They sold the community on the hype of the PvE aspect of the game, which made that transition relatively well accepted, then rugpulled the shit out of the PvE.

Blizz has ruined their name hard over the past few years but even then, I didn't expect something this overtly direct. There is no way they did this not knowing that this would be the response; they released overwatch 2 already knowing that this moment would come. Man do I feel sorry for the developers, imagine spending a couple of years developing a game, only to find out your bosses knew it was never going to release and were only letting you go through the motions to maintain the facade of a promise so people would eat the shit that was being fed to them in the meantime. At the end you have no product to maintain your job, no output to sell you to the next job, and no fulfillment. Must be awful.

[Edge-]

Anyone who pays money for ANYTHING related to D4 expecting it to last more than a month or two has no place getting angry at this point. I will buy and play D4 but I won't spend a cent on battlepasses or any other monetization, I fully expect it to be a flash in the pan.

OW2 is basically a commercial videogame company version of a rugpull. They took away access to a game people paid for, offering a "free" game in its place, but drastically worsened the drops and skins people got by removing the lootboxes from OW1. They sold the community on the hype of the PvE aspect of the game, which made that transition relatively well accepted, then rugpulled the shit out of the PvE.

Blizz has ruined their name hard over the past few years but even then, I didn't expect something this overtly direct. There is no way they did this not knowing that this would be the response; they released overwatch 2 already knowing that this moment would come. Man do I feel sorry for the developers, imagine spending a couple of years developing a game, only to find out your bosses knew it was never going to release and were only letting you go through the motions to maintain the facade of a promise so people would eat the shit that was being fed to them in the meantime. At the end you have no product to maintain your job, no output to sell you to the next job, and no fulfillment. Must be awful.

D4 will last longer than a few months. They've at least got S1 mostly done and likely entering production on S2. The longer term support once developers get their performance bonuses after it ships and start quitting, as reports are that the D4 team is one of the more stable ones because people don't want to leave before bonuses, yeah, I'm assuming that they may be making crisis roadmaps like the WoW team has been lately.

In other news - https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/st...40637649633281

I'll be reporting plenty on Overwatch 2 in the future, but for now: Maintaining a live service game is hard enough without building a totally new game on top, which is hard enough without constant company crises, which is hard enough without massive attrition. Worth some empathy

Imagine reading this tweet and thinking "wow can't believe Jason is asking me to empathize with Activision executives who own multiple houses" lmao this website

I can't believe this even needs to be said, but you can be mad or frustrated at Blizzard the company and also empathetic toward the people who work there. It's OK to have two feelings! That's what we tell our toddler - clearly Gamers need to hear it too

Tweets from Schreier, so we'll get some kind of reporting on the unholy combination of shit factors. I hope it goes into "how Blizzard wasted years of development time" because that's definitely the biggest question here - where those years worth of work when OW1 wasn't being supported went.

Also I'm glad to see that Gamers(TM) are having very reasonable reactions to being asked to understand and process a hint of nuance.

[Gorsameth]

The literal only way I can figure is if they spent the first years 100% focused on the bigger PvE mode and made great progress and then at some point something just...happened and everything ground to a halt for some reason. Maybe around the time Kaplan left. Around that time they basically had an all-hands trying to figure out what to do with the game and tried to salvage the plans for a bit before realizing that they had to pivot to PvP and spent the last year and a half or so building what eventually launched. That's why despite the quality being very much on display, the overall "this is it?" feeling was very apparent and why the game has fairly quickly come a long way - same problem with many of these games including BF2042, too short a development cycle born out of necessity but one that allows for a lot of fairly quick progress post-launch.

Otherwise I can't make heads nor tails of this situation. And I'm struggling to think of another game that announced with a huge component like the bigger PvE plans and then just...said nah. I'm not sure another developer could afford, financially or in terms of their credibility, to make such a mistake.

So they basically did a repeat of Project Titan with the game they salvaged from Titan?

There has to be some irony in that.

[Edge-]

https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/23952480/

Blog post is up and...honestly it's pretty weaksauce. We learn nothing new, it's structured in a way that makes it difficult to understand timelines and seems like it was hammered out in a half day or something after they realized that the backlash was so strong.

Honestly it continues to seem like, somehow, they knew broader PvE plans wouldn't work early on but for some reason blew years working on it, realized that it was completely unworkable far too late, and hard-pivoted to PvP while keeping a bit of that work in the hopper for the later PvE missions. I'm completely astounded by this.

Like, did the not scope out the work to support both PvP and the expanded PvE content before they announced and started full production on OW2 and shit? Because it reads like they sure didn't and that the team was learning about working on a live-service game for the first time...despite having launched and supported one since OW launched in 2016.

[StillMcfuu]

Good news: Nobody paid for it. Nothing related to PvE was ever sold for OW2. It's still shitty and people are rightfully angry/disappointed, but seeing all the Internet Lawyers come out to talk up fraud lawsuits or false advertisement lawsuits or class action lawsuits because, "Your honor, my feelings are really hurt." is hilarious though.



I'm pretty sure folks are just waiting for the shoe to drop. I know I am.

This isn't exactly true, the watchpoint pack and general mtx were bought with the understanding skins and what not would be available in PvE which now doesn't exactly exist anymore.

I'm annoyed and feel flecced out of 40 for the WP Pack, I would have never paid for it and never installed OW2 if I knew it was just going to be a 5v5 downgrade to OW. Not to mention I've lost access to OW1 now as well. I've written the money off, but if I heard Blizz was giving refunds for mtx and WPP, I'd take advantage of it. I haven't had the game installed for near 6 months now.

PS: And yeah the dev response to this has been abysmal and tone deaf.

[Edge-]

This isn't exactly true, the watchpoint pack and general mtx were bought with the understanding skins and what not would be available in PvE which now doesn't exactly exist anymore.

I'm annoyed and feel flecced out of 40 for the WP Pack, I would have never paid for it and never installed OW2 if I knew it was just going to be a 5v5 downgrade to OW. Not to mention I've lost access to OW1 now as well. I've written the money off, but if I heard Blizz was giving refunds for mtx and WPP, I'd take advantage of it. I haven't had the game installed for near 6 months now.

PS: And yeah the dev response to this has been abysmal and tone deaf.

The assumption, yes. A very reasonable assumption, don't get me wrong. But the contents of the pack were clearly labeled and there was no mention of PvE. Companies are usually very specific about what they sell specifically to avoid opening themselves up to liability like this.

Still sucks all the same though, especially for folks who bought that and were otherwise buying stuff/playing for skins for use in PvE. I'm glad I didn't care enough to bother and only had the client installed and updated so that getting into PvE would be easier/faster when it drops. But with the PvE scaled way, way back and them still hyping it up while showing nothing I just don't see any reason to get remotely excited for it : /

[StillMcfuu]

The assumption, yes. A very reasonable assumption, don't get me wrong. But the contents of the pack were clearly labeled and there was no mention of PvE. Companies are usually very specific about what they sell specifically to avoid opening themselves up to liability like this.

Still sucks all the same though, especially for folks who bought that and were otherwise buying stuff/playing for skins for use in PvE. I'm glad I didn't care enough to bother and only had the client installed and updated so that getting into PvE would be easier/faster when it drops. But with the PvE scaled way, way back and them still hyping it up while showing nothing I just don't see any reason to get remotely excited for it : /

I 100% agree with you, Blizz covered their tracks with the WPP and other MTX. I also believe they aren't liable in any legal sense, but this is going to crush the community.

I think the community was largely at its "hard-core limit" during the tail end of the OW drought. OW2 changes shed a portion of that community through pvp changes, but it brought in new players with F2P and PvE. With the PvE being canceled, and f2p players being largely fair weather flyers, the community left over after this is going to be smaller than the late drought community.
I think the game is on life support right now, they are pushing PvE content out with seasonal updates and once that's over I expect OW2 to go into maintenance mode the same way D3 was after Blizz burned through the second expansions content.

[Jester Joe]

I think the game is on life support right now, they are pushing PvE content out with seasonal updates and once that's over I expect OW2 to go into maintenance mode the same way D3 was after Blizz burned through the second expansions content.

Not comparable. D3 was literally making nothing with its seasonal updates.

Overwatch 1 had a decent playerbase even when they had no new content for a long time. Overwatch 2 isn't nearly on life support, it's just far too easy to see people getting outraged online and think "well the game must not be doing well"

[Edge-]

I think the community was largely at its "hard-core limit" during the tail end of the OW drought. OW2 changes shed a portion of that community through pvp changes, but it brought in new players with F2P and PvE. With the PvE being canceled, and f2p players being largely fair weather flyers, the community left over after this is going to be smaller than the late drought community.

While it says nothing about how much money it's making, it's worth noting that Blizzard saw a huge spike in MAU's (monthly active users, their go-to metric in earnings reports) in OW2's launch quarter (Dragonflight as well, which we know hasn't sold gangbusters so likely isn't a major factor) that already dropped back to pre-launch MAU numbers.

https://massivelyop.com/2023/04/26/a...izzard-q1-2023

27M -> 31M (DI China/Wrath Classic) -> 45M (OW2/Dragonflight) -> 27M again

So I'm sure it's actually making lots of money for them, but even before this news the huge boost in players seems to have already basically disappeared.

I think the game is on life support right now, they are pushing PvE content out with seasonal updates and once that's over I expect OW2 to go into maintenance mode the same way D3 was after Blizz burned through the second expansions content.

Absolutely not on "life support". Despite bigger PvE plans being canned there's still plenty of content coming to the game. Plus don't forget Blizzards massive investment in OWL over the years, which I imagine they're looking to continue running.

[[Apok]]

https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/23952480/

Blog post is up and...honestly it's pretty weaksauce. We learn nothing new, it's structured in a way that makes it difficult to understand timelines and seems like it was hammered out in a half day or something after they realized that the backlash was so strong.

Honestly it continues to seem like, somehow, they knew broader PvE plans wouldn't work early on but for some reason blew years working on it, realized that it was completely unworkable far too late, and hard-pivoted to PvP while keeping a bit of that work in the hopper for the later PvE missions. I'm completely astounded by this.

Like, did the not scope out the work to support both PvP and the expanded PvE content before they announced and started full production on OW2 and shit? Because it reads like they sure didn't and that the team was learning about working on a live-service game for the first time...despite having launched and supported one since OW launched in 2016.

The worst part is that in the initial interview they basically admitted they had lied to us about pve coming, as they knew before ow2 launched that it wouldn't be happening in the way they promised, yet 7 months after launch when they have milked players for battle-pass and microtransactions they decide to announce.

How do you then ask people to trust you to deliver on a roadmap which is nothing but promises, whether it's the fault of the developers, management a combination or a whole melting pot of shit, you can't expect people to trust you deliver on future promises when you've been promising them shit which wouldn't appear and have basically lied about it for a long time.

[Edge-]

The worst part is that in the initial interview they basically admitted they had lied to us about pve coming, as they knew before ow2 launched that it wouldn't be happening in the way they promised, yet 7 months after launch when they have milked players for battle-pass and microtransactions they decide to announce.

How do you then ask people to trust you to deliver on a roadmap which is nothing but promises, whether it's the fault of the developers, management a combination or a whole melting pot of shit, you can't expect people to trust you deliver on future promises when you've been promising them shit which wouldn't appear and have basically lied about it for a long time.

I think the roadmap is pretty darned safe at this point. But I do think that, especially after some of the issues leading up to this point, they've shattered the any trust they'd built up with a lot of folks.

And it's 100% on management/leadership, from Keller up to Kotick.

[Zuben]

If their plan of new hero/map every other season still holds we're supposed to get a map for S5, yet their roadmap didn't mention it. Only some stuff that look to be fantasy-themed, Mischief & Magic and Questwatch. Wonder if the new map has something to do with them, or if the plan if scrapped and we don't get a new one.

[Baraden]

Good news: Nobody paid for it. Nothing related to PvE was ever sold for OW2. It's still shitty and people are rightfully angry/disappointed, but seeing all the Internet Lawyers come out to talk up fraud lawsuits or false advertisement lawsuits or class action lawsuits because, "Your honor, my feelings are really hurt." is hilarious though.



I'm pretty sure folks are just waiting for the shoe to drop. I know I am.

People like you are exactly why this company of abusers and lazy freaks will never have to actually answer for it's blatant failures and betrayals of consumers

Get some self-respect, christ