Blizzard’s bringing its PC games to Steam, starting with Overwatch 2
polygon.com
polygon.com
Reducing the normal team size from 6->5 was probably also intended, in part, to help with establishing matches more quickly. For me, this kicked off a catastrophic series of design changes that pushed me away from the game completely.
As it currently stands, you couldn't pay me less than my current hourly consulting rate to play OW2 (on any platform). That said, I'd consider paying a $10/m premium subscription fee if they brought back OW1 in the exact form it existed in circa 2019 and issued a deep, thoughtful apology regarding their design choices.
At the most meta level, the fact that blizzard had to actively kill OW1 to make OW2 even remotely attractive also makes me not ever want to do business with them again.
Yes exactly this.
A completely open-ended team comp that players dynamically rotate through during a game was the original intention. It was incredibly sophisticated gameplay and theory.
I guess it turned out that the average gamer was too much of a dumbass to learn this system, so it had to be watered down into a gameplay style you could copy from mobafire.com
It's fun to get points/kills in PvP games. Especially in a casual mode.
Agreed. The game isn't balanced around casual. If you want to play the game play ranked. Otherwise you cede the right to complain about balance or the behavior of your team.
OW1 mid-high tier competitive gameplay felt a constant explosion and your brain was engaged nearly 100% of the time. In OW2, the urgency level feels more like a game of counterstrike or League of Legends. Everything is muted and grey in terms of fast-paced arena shooter experience. More waiting, less fighting, more weird complex bullshit, fewer things happening per unit time, etc. Subtracting a player from each team certainly is a big part of this.
The community itself is crappier too. The "energy" left the room 3 years ago. The first year of OW1 competitive felt like a digital drug to me.
The most annoying thing for me though is that when new heroes are released you cannot play them right away. I don’t play that often anymore, so when a new hero comes out it sucks that I can’t play them unless I grind and grind or shell out money. If I miss several hero releases, I have to do challenges (play 30 matches as support, do 12000 damage, etc) and they are pretty annoying because I have to remember to activate them and I can’t do more than one at a time. It’s time consuming and obviously designed to make me want to spent money to skip them. I’m no stranger to games locking new heroes on release, in apex legends you have to unlock them with coins, but at least in that game you can accumulate the coins passively and have a bunch saved up for new release—this is not the case in OW2.
They design these games to be a chore with an appealing but costly way to skip the chore, and rather than demanding they design a game that's actually fun, you ask them for a more convenient way to take money from you?
Is this sarcasm? Help me understand this POV.
Contrast that to unlocking a hero/character (the 'fast' way) alone will cost that much, and you still don't have access to everything.
The reason why F2P with that kind of incentive is popular among developers is that it's a good way to artificially inflate your playerbase with tons of people playing the game for 'free' while you manipulate the 'whales' (the addicts) into paying an insane amount to offset costs.
That's 5€-3€ a month, I wouldn't call that cheap
a subscription to an MMORPG for example ; 15 bucks a month, 5 hours a month = 3 bucks per hour. this is basically uncapped. if you only play 5 hours, then you're paying 3/hr - if you do more (say 10 hours a week = 40 hours a month) then the value goes up and cost goes down.
a single player game; 70 bucks, 20 hours = 3.5 bucks per hour. Plus an extra 5-10 hour for another 40-70 bucks DLC to extend the experience
i don't have time to grind out an overwatch2 hero in 30 hours, nor am i going to pay for one. i'd rather pay for a 15 bucks subscription for 1 month, then if i want to, then cancel.
Personally I skip games that gate primary content behind microtransactions (with some exceptions like MS Flight Simulator where additional content is highly individual and takes a lot of effort to create)
I don't understand why you people make this sound so terrible. If you don't like OW2 then don't play it, that's fine. If you do like it, playing it is not a chore and you quickly unlock new heroes without paying anything.
I unlocked the flower boy in about 30 hours, that's completely doable in 2-4 weeks if you're playing regularly. If you play less than that you have plenty of work to do learning the other heroes anyway.
Role lock and 5v5 have dramatically improved the health of the game. They've made matches more even, lessened toxicity, improved queue times, improved player experience, improved game balance, and made the game more dynamic. There are definitely drawbacks: tank synergies like Reinhardt/Zarya or Winston/Dva were fun, and having the option to play triple damage or GOATS or whatever was cool. But the tradeoff is so overwhelmingly positive that it kind of blows my mind that people want to go back to 2019 Overwatch.
It’s also easy to say how much better the game is when there is no OW1 to compare side by side. I will say I had much more fun in the beginning than now. I think Birgitte being released was the beginning of the end for me, and Tracer had hard nerfs as well making her almost useless except in pro hands.
I would, too, I'd even go beyond that. I'm used to OW2, and I don't care about an apology, but I would -love- to get back old OW.
The downside of these online games really is the ability for developers to shut them down / change them drastically without you having a way to stick with an older version. There are multiplayer games from the 90s that I still play today, and they're just as enjoyable now as they were then.
But then they started forcing classes, implemented the different queues and today that's become a big issue.
If I continually play healer I can find games relatively easily (in say a minute or two), but on the other hand if I want to play dps I'm going to be in a queue for 20 minutes. Tanks are usually in the middle, so a big portion of the game just feels non-accessible to me.
I also think the whining about hero unlocks is total bullshit. It's trivial to unlock everything completely for free if you play semi frequently. I think it took me about 30 hours of playtime to unlock the flower boy. I have never and will never purchase a battle pass.
The only complaint I have is that I miss free loot boxes. The battle passes don't give any cool skins for the free tier. But I don't really care much about skins so it's alright, the game is still fun. It's not like I can see my own skins in-game anyway.
Agreed. OW1 wasn't perfect but getting rid of the 2nd tank wasn't the solution. Making tank more fun is the solution. People play Hanzo genji doomfist because they are fun. People don't play Orisa because she is boring.
Listen unless you allow me to buy the original WC3 or SC1 I really don't care, there has been very little blizzard has built lately that is that good.
Its actually interesting in a way that Blizzard singlehandedly created 3 new generes of gaming because of how flexible their WC3 editor was. A different company a different time.
I can’t imagine the best and brightest still wanting to work there, parent companies never understand what made the place special, else they’d replicate it themselves. MS is going to be further nails in the coffin
One of the more popular posts:
https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-...
Also, it is easy to draw parallels between David Craddock's `Stay Awhile and Listen` book and Masters of Doom. I tried to quickly whip up the Amazon link, but I'm seeing multiple versions and listings... apparently multivolume? When I first encountered it, it was a single book.
You have your pick! Sexually harass your colleagues into committing suicide (Blizzard) or get farted on by the CEO (Riot).
when they pulled that bullshit stunt I decided I was done with Blizzard, and it's just been a steady decline ever since.
Hmm, what three are you thinking of? Tower defense and MOBA come to mind, but I can't think of the third.
(Also, tower defense maps really started with Starcraft -- the game engine limited what developers could do with those maps, but the concept was there.)
Warcraft III map editor just had more tools to really flesh out these concepts
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/how-to-download-the-orig...
Doubt the online/network stuff still works but maybe? I think they're still playing SC1 in korea competitively.
> Blizzard says that players on Steam will still need a Battle.net account connected to Overwatch 2 to play the game.
EA with it then you can't play PvZ Garden Warfare.
I would rather spend $1000 on Indy games than give Blizzard a single cent.
I also miss my macOS Steam library before the 32-bit apocalypse.
But it was confirmed that OW will be launched directly through Steam https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1681720303389667328 (if you need to manually log in with a BNet account after, or just link your account and it auto does that is a different question)
Funnily enough there have been a few times that Wine specific problems have been addressed by the BNet team (pre steamdeck) and when Linux players were accidentally banned they have unbanned them iirc in some scenarios.
about a decade ago, when Blizzard was in court with Valve over the latter taking the reigns of "DotA", this would've been unthinkable.
Enemies all feel the same, quests and events all feel the same, almost literally every minibuss and even some major bosses have this dumb ass mechanic where they summon ads which make them invulnerable, seriously it's the least interesting game mechanic in the world and they overuse it so severely it's honestly a big part of why I didn't finish the game.
It's just not fun, let me kill shit. The whole point of ARPGs is to get powerful and kill things fast.