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Comment by codybontecou | Hacker News Reader

What are the key differences between 2019 OW1 and current OW2? From an outside view, they look very similar.

The way the game is played with a single tank is a pretty big shift in dynamics, the game becomes much more rock/paper/scissors based for the tank role and some of the tanks feel out of place since they were originally designed as off-tanks, not main tanks. While a single player has always been able to have a big negative impact on the match, a skill gap between the tanks on each team is very obvious now (I know they changed the match making to help fix this by balancing teams based on role instead of just the overall team average, which probably helped).

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.

This is one reason why I don't play these games - I don't want to grind just to play / unlock aspects of the game. Give me a subscription plan!

> Give me a subscription plan!

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.

A good subscription plan is often capped at 10-15/month, with full access to the game. This is cheap entertainment if you are already playing even 3-5 hours a month, and a good way to fund on-going development.

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.

The relevant point of comparison for me is Overwatch 1, which cost around $40 and provided me with hundreds of hours of entertainment for years after release, as well as indie titles that typically cost $15-30 and equally provide me with least dozens, if not hundreds of hours of entertainment. A $10/mo subscription is an increase of at least 1000%.

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)

>This is cheap entertainment if you are already playing even 3-5 hours a month

That's 5€-3€ a month, I wouldn't call that cheap

Compared to a 20 hour single player game for 70 USD? Let's break it down.

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.

I have 1200 hours in OW1 (thanks to the pandemic). That's $0.05 per hour. You'd have to watch 8 hours of Netflix every single day to match that.

The "chore" you describe is literally just playing the game and the "reward" for the "chore" is also just playing the game.

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.

You don't have to grind, you literally just play the game. You can play a whole bunch of heroes and eventually you'll be able to play all of them. It's not a problem at all.

6v6 and no role queue (depending on what part of 2019 they mean...). OW2 is a 5v5 game, there is a role queue and you choose to play tank, DPS or healer before finding a match and you're locked into that choice over the course of the match and the number of each role is fixed at 2 DPS, 2 support and 1 tank. In old OW1 you'd just queue and could pick any role at any time so your time could be 6 DPS or 3 DPS, two tanks and a support. And at launch of the game you could even have multiple of the same hero on a team in a match.

> and no role queue

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 turned into everyone picking Winston or another character. There weren't plays and counter plays. It was rush and who could click on heads better.

Or every gamer wants to be the "killer" and not the healer nor tank.

It's fun to get points/kills in PvP games. Especially in a casual mode.

>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.

The part of the game that suffered the hardest was competitive multiplayer.

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.

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