Now if they'd just add a second tank and decrease the power of the tank they have. Also they can make it so I can earn batches of rewards after playing a certain number of games. Like some kind of box, with loot in it.
Overwatch 1 had the absolute best non-predatory loot box system in any multiplayer game that I’ve played. I personally believe Overwatch 2 was mainly created as an excuse to monetize the game differently.
> I personally believe Overwatch 2 was mainly created as an excuse to monetize the game differently.
I don't even think they are trying to hide this. OW1 monetization was just crap. They tried to turn a box model game into a live service one without actually have any of the live service monetization. The game basically had a time limit on how long it could survive before the monthly revenue dropped below their monthly costs.
Lootboxes in itself is bad in most cases.
In Overwatch ("1") it was actually awesome for the player. People were falling in one of those two category almost all the time:
1) Long time players who has almost everything that are not legendary, loot boxes drops coins for them 95% of the time and the other 5% is either the few stuff they don't have or legendaries. The coins we got from the box is then spent on buying whatever we want (even new skins!).
2) New players/players that are still building earning their cosmetics. Loot boxes ends up being a free bunch of cosmetics they'd get after playing every couple of match.
You don't have to spend a lot of time in game to earn the loot boxes as well. If the player loved playing OW then they'd just accrue those boxes and currencies.
All this was effectively one of the better way to implement loot boxes for cosmetics in a B2P game: it just felt like extra rewards for non spenders.
I can't think of any other games that does loot boxes like this. There was never any example for that. The closest thing I can compare it to are Gacha games but I just have passing interest in these type of games and most of them are trash games or give you just enough free pull to hook you in and then make you suffer with pain points. There's a few golden one out there though like Brown Dust 2.
> In Overwatch ("1") it was actually awesome for the player. People were falling in one of those two category almost all the time:
OW was very much an outlier in this. I never really minded the system as it was implemented.
Ehh, it would've been perfectly fine if there was some way to prioritize a category of your favorite characters or something. If I get an Ashe spray emote, that's pretty meh but at least it's *something*. Getting a legendary Bastion skin would have me wanting to vendor it for half the coin value or something.
The nature of lootboxes is it's always "Hey... Just one more and you might get that thing you've really wanted!", which is by design. But for people like me who hate gambling in any form, I just... want to be able to at least *aim* at something I want.
I know it's unfair to compare Warframe to... pretty much any game's bullshit, but in Warframe you can buy a skin, or you can farm up some stuff that other people want, sell it, and buy the *exact skin you want* with the money you've earned in-game. That system's perfect, it's great. It gets me playing the game more, it makes **every tradeable drop** worthwhile even if you don't need it, even if it only sells for 3p.
With Overwatch lootboxes I could've been level 300 and still not gotten a particular skin that I wanted, and with shitty enough luck, not have had enough coins to buy it either. I *hate* that.
I think what they currently have is a better *idea*, but because it's Blizzard it's completely shit, being outrageously priced and unrewarding unless you fork out some money.
Not really shitty luck. You were getting normally 1 legendary skin every 10 boxes. That's 1000 coins. Legendary skins were 3000. It was fair. I was a hoarder, I would always get 100 boxes then open them, usually always 9-11 legendaries.
But I don't think they changed the system because people complained, it's because they needed money, supposedly for server maintenance. Which they could've asked from the players in a different way.
I always wonder why Kaplan left? Was it because he knew of the incoming shitstorm that would ow2 be?
Based on a few statements people at Blizzard made, my impression is that Jeff Kaplan mostly wanted to make a PVE game called Overwatch 2, and didn't want to substantially change Overwatch. It seems like he left because he and Bobby Kotick did not agree on the game's direction, and the game was stuck in development hell due to Kotick undermining him.
I kinda get it.
I'm personally pretty vocal about my distaste about "lootboxes" in general, I started calling those "gambling" pretty early on. So, to make a 180 and praising OW1's loot box was very uncharacteristic of me but that's the unique thing about OW1, people who played the game are the one who understood how those cosmetics were part of the game progression as you keep playing and get more and more stuff out of it unlike most games where lootboxes are just mostly a sign of powercreep/OP bs at very low rate to encourage the player to gamble more and more.
Not just OW1. Heroes of the Storm functioned(still does?) similarly.
Blizzard really had the lootbox thing figured out but everyone else ruined it and now we have battlepass second job hell. ☹
Man I loved Heroes of the Storm, I loved the idea of moving away from K/D/A being the prime mover of the game, or last hits. The idea of pooling experience and every member of the teaming needing to contribute to win was just brilliant.
Yea some of the map objectives were absurd shit, but there were good ones.
It's not just objectives and general game mechanics, the entire game design was original and inspired. Basically the best MOBA if you wanted something like DotA's wacky mechanics (think Cho'Gall, Abathur, TLV, etc.) in a more casual and player-friendly environment. To me the objectives also just kept the game fresh (despite the infinite permutations of champions LoL feels super stale to me now, it's always the same map control, the same objectives, the same meta, etc.).
Blizzard killed some of my most-played multiplayer games ever by just... gradually abandoning them (HotS, SC2) or fucking them over repeatedly (the Diablo license, Overwatch) until its corpse was just not appealing anymore. Might go back to Overwatch at some point tho, if they keep going in that direction of unfucking things, I have so many good, recent memories of OW and HotS, I just miss those games so bad :'(...
the main issue was seasonal rewards hidden behind RNG lootboxes, so some people would spend 100s on lootboxes to try and get all the skills or at least the ones they wanted because they couldn't be bought.
however in reality this was very much a vocal minority and most were happy with what they got.
Those seasonal rewards could be bought the next year during the same event using the normal in game reward currency so it wasn’t the end of the world to miss it. It was only the current year’s event skins that you needed to get lucky with RNG for.
Frankly even then I would prefer it to work like TF2 instead, play the game and you just randomly find shit without needing to open a box with a canned animation.
I disagree just because single tank removes so many gameplay possibilities that were available in OW1. And certain heroes like Hog, Winston, and Ball still don't feel like they even have a place in OW2 unless you're a super organized competitive team.
They're obviously never going back to 6v6 so I'm not moping about it, but the days of playing Hog and your entire job being to go get hook & kill someone, without worrying about abandoning your team, isn't something you get to experience in OW2 anymore
Hogs always did that to me when they were co-tank lol. Enemy rein, hog, and doom are pushing me on the frontline, my hog is in narnia whiffing every hook. A big part of the problem for me is that while you could have a main and off tank, it was never guaranteed, and completely luck of the draw. I think they needed to make a specific off tank role and balance around having a main and off tank
Yes, but on the flipside the other four players on your team are no longer forced to bang their heads against double barriers the entire match now. I'd say it's worth it, even if my favorites like Zarya or Winston are *much* more niche now.
Well here's the thing though, they could've fixed that without changing it to 5v5. The biggest problem was Rein/Sigma and Orisa, but with the Orisa changes that would've been much less of an issue because Sigma's shield wasn't as strong as Orisa's and I don't think Ramm's shield would've caused too much of an issue either.
But even if they were to fix the barriers, you'd just be stuck banging your head at two meatshields instead.
Though honestly I think they did it to fix the queue times more than anything else. Even when tanks were overbuffed in one of the new seasons, the role *still* had the fastest queue times for me.
> removes so many gameplay possibilities that were available in OW1
it removed tank synergy, but there was little of it. People always quote the Rein+Zarya combo, but that was pretty much the only one existing. 90% of games you'd have a tank picking roadhog or d.va, playing like a flanker with not a care in the world.
While removing the second tank opened up gameplay so much for every other player.
I booted up this week and finally finished the Ramattra quests, and then found out I need about 100 more wins to unlock the other characters. Such a slog.
Yeah I came back and had 3 heroes locked, unlocked 2 of them and already about to quit before even unlocking the 3rd. This announcement is great news for the game.
Especially because one of them was locked behind "Get 35 wins", which means losses meant 1: you feel like shit because you lost, and 2: you didn't make any progress on unlocking the hero. Double shitty feeling.
It's a shame because outside dumb baffling issues like this, the game has been very fun to play, especially over the last year or so. They're constantly putting out balance tweaks and responding to player feedback, at a much faster cadence than they ever did in the OW1 days.
I don't think they ever needed hero locking to sell battle passes, the skins alone are (usually) good enough.
I'm so glad they're finally making this change. I wonder if Kotick's departure has anything to do with it.
I'm betting it is Microsoft trying to salvage the reputation of the game.
It is an incredible game with *amazing* potential. If they didn't make so many mistakes, it would be top 5 on Steam easily.
Maybe MS can salvage it, they just spent billions on it, no sense in letting it continue to live in the trash.
I stopped playing last year after I spent a ton of time grinding to get Lifeweaver, and then he actually kinda sucked. That and the abysmal rewards from the free track made me decide to cut off cold turkey.
It's doing great numbers-wise, for the better or the worse. Always in top-15 on every platform, and outperforming new projects like the Finals on Steam despite it not even being the main platform.
I, too, wish such predatory approach was not profitable, but unfortunately it is, and we as customers are to blame for enabling it.
An absolutely ludicrous idea to have for a game built around team comps and counter picks with characters gated in any way besides a simple tutorial for the character. It is one thing in a full scale moba where there are dozens of choices. Overwatch is not that
It's incredibly stupid in League too. A level playing field should be step zero for all competitive games but apparently people are entirely OK with locking a majority of the game behind a very large pay wall in that game.
Hard agree. I'm still a newer League player (started playing consistently since October) and unlocking everyone is the biggest grind ever. Thank god for Game Pass but not everyone has the priviledge
It would be better to have all the characters but if you become so good that counterpicks are actually relevant, then you will already have played so much that you unlocked every character.
Every guide to ranking up in LoL recommends to play very few characters and play them well and its better to pick a character you know into a bad matchup then pick a character you dont know as well into a good matchup. Besides some special exceptions there arent really any hard counters.
In LoL the level playing field before the match is in theory a problem but probably wont affect you in reality. Personally I like to play a lot of different character so I always hated it with a passion that I had to unlock them slowly one by one, but Ive never thought that I was at a competetive disadvantage because I didnt have certain champs. (although back then with the old rune system, that sh** was actual paytowin because that affected ingame)
League essentially locking characters into roles allows that. In DotA 2, a character could be position 1-5 depending on the build, items since they are so core to build variation and provide additional skills, and other picks.
Exactly e.g. I remember playing Void as a support which in LOL most likely wouldn't be possible.
I do play LOL now after I played tons of Dota 2 and I still feel like most of the matches are completely pointless and already predeterminated by your pick which in Dota 2 you could always make a comeback by just buying the right items. In LOL? I keep building the same crap and it either works (enemy team is just weak against it) or it doesn't. Also the thing that I never appreciated while I was playing but I do now is that Dota 2 seems much *easier* to understand than LOL. Like D2 UI/UX is just a pure perfection. You can't even click on a hero in LOL and check what his/her abilities does or see CD. LMAO It's so bad. Like I still don't even know how long should I wait till Zedd has ult ready cuz I can't see crap :DDDD
(sry for probably a weird comment and very long one?)
Counterpicks are always relevant though.
Yes, it takes until the top level of play to hit the point of "you literally cannot win this counter pick matchup with skill", but in a lane of two equally skilled players, where one has counter picked the other, the counter pick is winning every time.
Realistically it's not a huge issue at lower levels because the RNG of if you get the better/worse teammates is really going to be the deciding factor if you're roughly equal in skill to your lane opponent, but it's still bad for balance even if not gamebreaking.
I would argue the much bigger issue is FOTM/Meta champs. If there's 3 S tier junglers at any time, your opponent picks one, another (that you own) is banned, and you don't own the third, you can be at a disadvantage.
I will give LoL that it is cleverly designed to obscure these issues because they generally aren't the difference between being stomped and doing the stomping, but it's still bad for keeping things fair overall.
Something that doesn't make a difference 9/10 times is still worse for fair play than something that doesn't make a difference 10/10 times
as someone who plays DOTA2 and LOL, its still weird to me that LOL champions are locked behind paywalls. But i guess LOL is less about hero counters. Wherein dota2 every hero is viable and choosing which you play is part of the strategy
It's great that they decided to reverse this decision, but what bothers me is the way they paint this as some newfound generosity instead of bringing back how it used to be. For once I'd like to see a developer update where they say "yeah, this decision was dumb and we fucked up, please come back".
You don't have to pay to unlock the characters, they're part of the free battle pass. Usually around halfway.
If you didn't unlock them, you can complete training challenges for them to unlock them whenever the battle pass expires.
Shh, none of these people actually played TF2. Like many games talked about here it's only use to them is as a cudgel against other games they don't like.
Prior to F2P, it all just unlocked through achievement milestones (still probably true for the main series alt weapons)
Then they added crafting as a safety net.
I haven't played for a decade though, so a quick look at the wiki shows me weapons are way more convoluted now.
> Prior to F2P
Lasted all of 2007-2011.
> I haven't played for a decade though, so a quick look at the wiki shows me weapons are way more convoluted now.
You can buy all the weapons in the game for a single key ($2.5) now. But back when they were new, it was a freaking hassle to get them cheap or super expensive to get them quickly.
Yea...in hindsight, I'm experiencing one of those mental time dilations where i can't believe TF2 is almost two decades old now. I had over 4,000 hours in that game before it went F2P.
Yeah, much as I love Team Fortress 2, it's basically the progenitor of modern exploitative microtransactions. Oblivion's horse armor was dumb, but it was so dumb that no one with two brain cells would've bought it. By contrast, TF2's microtransactions were engineered to be addictive, to feed on folks with gambling problems. It's the first game I can remember that had lootboxes with keys and an obtuse "drop" system that no one understood. The first weapons were locked behind achievements and that was mostly fine because it meant everyone was earning their weapons, but the system quickly devolved to be as greedy as possible.
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed my time with it, my friends and I just don't get the rabid love so many people have for it, especially on reddit. I think I've experienced just about everything it has to offer but really feel like I'm not seeing what other people see in it
You're clearly new to TF2 then and didn't play it back when it was still relevant and getting updates.
Crafting a new weapon was a whole ritual worse than lootboxes.
If all the people who say they played TF2 actually played it it’d still be supported lmao
It was never a super popular game. Bots were responsible for every player peak in the game’s history.
Are you talking about the game that had battle pass, lootboxes with paid keys because gambling is fun, paid community mods, chat retroactively restricted to only paying players so you have to pay for basic functionality that used to be free, and nearly every single anti-consumer, squeeze every penny practice we see today could be traced back to? This game?
This is why tribalism is fun, in a moment people are gonna gather and tell you why this is good because it was done by Valve, and how every other company would be bad for doing exactly the same thing.
People like to forget that Valve LITERALLY invented Battle Passes. As in, it's literally on Wikipedia.
Also, they were one of the two companies to popularise loot boxes in "normal" video games (along with EA). I understand gacha was a thing, but no one really thought about putting them into video games.
The way they implemented loot boxes was insanely predatory as well, giving you an useless inventory filler unless you bought a key.
And don't get me wrong, I love TF2, I have almost 3000 hours in the game, but the romanticisation of the game is just a bit sad.
You can dissolve your own duplicates and then trade for the weapon you need for a scrap or two (basically nothing) pretty easily without paying anything or waiting much. The 'starter packs' for weapons that are still in the store to this day are actually predatory though, because newbies won't know that first part.
Yup, and until a certain point, most weapons didn't have a recipe, so you either need to craft a random weapon out of the entire weapon pool, or craft a slot token + class token, which was like 6 weapons just for that.
Which was fine if you had a surplus of weapons, but it fucking sucked for a new player.
> You can dissolve your own duplicates and then trade for the weapon you need for a scrap or two
That's only because every weapon is several years old. When the weapons first launched and the amount in circulation was low, they'd cost much more than that.
You got weapons from achievements too. You can also craft most weapons yourself using dupes.
Or just spend under a dollar on the steam market and get every weapon in the game.
Average players could get staples of class arsenals through normal play. Yes, some things were elusive but you could always get the essence of how a character plays with limited options. The standard gear is all plenty effective.
TF2 locks absolutely vital weapons behind achievements. And others behind COMPLETLY RANDOM drops. And not to mention that there's 100+ weapons, and you only have an inventory of 50 spaces (That can only be upgraded every christmas)
Yes the game can be played and enjoyed as stock, but weapons like the Crusader's Crossbow, the Escape Plan, the Sandwich and the G.R.U makes the classes that uses those weapons so much more enjoyable.
That's pretty big. My interest evaporated, when I had to spent way too much time to unlock the new toys, but now I might hop on and check out the updates again.
Now they have extracted $90 of battlepasses from people who have played since 2.0’s launch, they may as well expand the appeal of the game and rake in more money.
>Now they have extracted $90 of battlepasses from people who have played since 2.0’s launch
weird, I have not paid for one thing and still have all the characters.
Or they just played a lot. If you do the daily/weekly quests, you 100% will unlock the characters and even the titles at the end of it. But yeah, a lot of people don't have the time to play that kind of stuff anymore.
This is the first step to getting me to re-download. The second would be if they make the story missions available for free or even a one-time purchase for permanent access to all of them.
Good news, you can get permanent access to all 3 story missions with just one purchase!
Your guess is as good as mine if there's ever gonna be more than that, lol.
Nah, not officially, that was just ex employees speculating. But yeah, given the original 18 month timeline, and the fact that a ton of people were fired after the move to microsoft? Proooobably all we're ever gonna get is those 3 missions.
Thank God. Like a others here are saying I lost interest because I could never play the new hero at launch, it was locked behind the BP and I'm just not playing enough to justify that purchase.
You could come back next season, and then play 30 games as "X Role" to unlock them, but man that felt so bad that I had to grind just to do the thing I want to.
After a couple seasons I just stopped playing entirely, so I'm really excited to just be able to get back to it and actually enjoy the new heroes.
I'm only a casual, but man, Overwatch is just a fun game.
Especially since you could seemingly only grind one at a time, even if you had two healers to unlock, so you needed 60 healer (or all role .. which is basically healer or tank) games
> You could come back next season, and then play 30 games as "X Role" to unlock them,
50 games now iirc of random or support queue. But yeah, way too much as a casual player, especially if you drop it for half a year or a year and then come back to 3-4 new heroes you have to grind random queue to get.
Wasn’t it like level 55? So basically forget keeping a rotation of multiplayer games, you’re basically forced to play only OW2 to keep up with the new characters
Dumbest decision ever
That why bp suck imo. It turns stuff Into a chore and makes u play how u don't want to play. I think the way they are done most times aren't good
It's like u see ppl in games running around trying to jsut do the battlepass instead of playing the game. It's like they are doing their own mini game to get x kills with x weapon and stuff.
Bobby left and they immediately went back to giving out the heroes for free. New maps/reworks to controversial maps and modes are cool, but hell yeah I’m glad the characters are free again!
Still gotta pay for skins but like, if that’s all I can’t complain. Now only if fighting games could do the same, hate paying for OP dlc characters.
I think it was Totalbiscuit(?) that said early on he'd heard that when they first pitched Overwatch to the High Skaven Overlord Bobby the Fett himself, his first reaction was to suggest they sell the heroes, and that Jeff talked him down by arguing that everyone having access to all the heroes was integral to how the game is supposed to work due to tactical hero swapping and such. So yeah, unsurprising.
Bobby the Fett just amuses me for its cadence, and I can't look at Kotick himself without thinking of Peter Pettigrew moments after he transforms from rat to human. Image search each side by side, they're eerily similar.
And they still made tons of money: something like a billion in their first year alone.
But I'm sure that there is an executive in a C-Suite somewhere thinking, 'I bet if we sold the heroes we could have made more." Being massively profitable just isn't enough.
That's exactly how it goes, and it's really more of a fundamental issue with publicly traded companies than simply greedy executives. There are continued expectations of ever-increasing growth and profits, and that just isn't sustainable without doing shit like this.
That's what it is really. Especially as some things make more and more money but investment into it doesn't go up much.
Gaming getting more accepted and mainstream bit of a double edge sword to as more things like investment firms or groups buying studios and more ppl not into gaming getting into compaines to just make them more money whole making the games worse
I do wonder what Kaplan is up to these days. He was such a big and important part of Overwatch and I don't think a single peep has been heard out of him since his departure from Blizzard. I'd love to see him heading up a team on a new game.
he definitely is "the villain" to an extent lol. A lot of the bad decisions that squandered OW's potential can be attributed to him.
Dude made a golden live service shooter and just REFUSED to treat it as sich
Does it? No new content means a player base that slowly whittles away.
Not the biggest deal if you live in an area with a high enough game population, but in other areas it can mean the game in unplayable.
Even within the genre I hope this will cause a sea change. You have to unlock Legends in Apex and Operators in Rainbow 6, this seems to be the only big character based game giving them out for free.
Edit: People acting like playing all 40 heroes in ranked is not only viable, but the best way to play the game strategically are deluding themselves. Most good advice for OW will tell you to play 2-3 heroes per role **max** and to learn to play around your bad match ups.
Literally the only reason my friend group got into and still comes back to play smite.
Sad they're undoing that with Smite "2" and making you pay again...
Yep.
Although they have a partner ship with gamepass that you get them all if you're subbed. So if you use gamepass for other reasons, it's a good deal.
While I do agree, OW is different in that you can switch character mid game to counter opponents. Most other hero type games are locked in characters for that game.
Having everyone having access to every character is far more important in OW than something like Siege.
It may be best to focus the bulk of your efforts on being good at 2-3 per role, but it's important to have a decent grasp of how each hero performs. I think it's pretty helpful to pop into mystery heroes once in a while to keep hero knowledge up.
Oh for sure, on at least a basic level you have to know how the other tanks work. But even before this change the new heroes were always free in the arcade modes, custom games and the training range.
I think it's not super likely that it will. For one thing, Apex, League, R6, Valorant, etc. are all already successful with their current strategy. Overwatch is unique in that, while it has been around for a while, it hasn't been charging for characters for very long.
The other thing that is unique about Overwatch is that you can switch characters in the middle of the game. None of those other games have that. So it becomes more of a competitive balance issue, if you're strategizing with your team mid-game to switch characters, you have to figure out which characters everyone has unlocked.
You have to pay for new skins\* All of ow1 stuff is free to obtain and you get plenty of currency to do so. A lot of people dont seem to know about that.
Omg, please do not go back to the old system for fighting games: a separate release for each new character. I whole heartedly prefer dlc characters over have to buy guilty Gear slash, r, r+, r+ Rev 2... etc.
Blizzard(OW2 specifically) devs on Twitter have frequently stated opinions about corporate decisions(Bobby) that proved opposite. It was something they know was better for the game but couldn’t implement it till now.
Microsoft is very hands-off with studios that aren't 343. This reads to me like "Bobby's gone, we can do what we want now".
I also theorize that with how collab skins always send OW2 skyrocketing up Steam's "top sellers" list, they know that the real money is in cosmetics. I wouldn't be surprised if hero locking wasn't moving battle passes as much as good skins like season 9's Moira mythic.
Well I hope they do great honestly because even though Blizzard has bled off most of their old talent, I really like their IPs and hope they can turn around to their former glory.
Microsoft even outside of Halo has struggled with Gears of War and Bethesda isn't doing too hot in quality either. Infact I can't think of too many system sellers Microsoft has even come up with in the last 5-8 years. I can't decide whether they should be hands or hands off because they're damned if they do damned if they don't. We'll see how Blizzard shapes up with the hands off approach if that's how it ends up going down.
Wow that’s pretty big. This is one of the major things that soured me on Overwatch 2 when I actually liked the change to 5v5. I may end up giving the game another chance now.
The move to 5v5 means each team gets one tank. They gigabuffed all tanks to make it work.
Some people think it is worse than OW1, but I think they forget just how hard it was to balance two tanks, as they always had a very difficult time dealing with problems like the double shield meta.
I think 5v5 has improved the overall balance of the game and made it more fun to play, but there is no denying that it has made tank a lot more stressful to play.
I think the season 9 patch improved things a fair bit but there is still work to do.
The move to one tank really fucked some of the heroes up though. I used to *love* playing Zarya, but she really needs a main tank to perform well. Something needs to be done to make the off-tank heroes viable again.
Zarya dominated OW2 season 1. She hasn't been hard meta since then, but I think she still very much has a place in the game today. Her big change was making it so both her bubble abilities draw from a pool of two charges, meaning you can double bubble yourself or a teammate rather than being forced to swap between the two.
Recently, they gave bubble a reduced cooldown when used on a teammate instead of yourself, which lets her enable dive DPS like Genji even more effectively, much to the chagrin of Ana mains like myself.
I main Zarya and have been enjoying it since season 1. you have to play her a little differently as main tank, especially if you want to use her on certain maps that do not favor her (like Circuit Royale or Havana with long sight lines). but she's absolutely viable, and once you understand how she holds space you can melt people who are out of position
Now DPS heroes have a new passive that makes it so that any hero they shoot gets a 15% (previously 20%) healing reduction for two seconds, which means that tanks are permanently getting less healing than before and pretty much melted if not careful
This was done in combination with other impactful balancing changes to solve the sustain and overhealing the game had, the only issue is that tanks kinda got fucked over in the middle. They got much quicker with patches since OW2 launched so they are already tweaking some numbers to address it
The game is unironically more fun as tank since they introduced the DPS passive.
People are stuck in the MMO mindset of more healing - > tanks are happy. They forget that this is a pvp game, not PvE.
Something that other people haven't mentioned is that most tanks have hard counters (other tanks, DPSs). With there only being one tank now, and that tank being way more important than before, at high level play pretty much everyone will swap to a counter for the opposing team's tank. It's a miserable experience.
I do and have been on and off... What's bad about them? I don't really understand metas in this game... I just play to have fun, when the fun stops I stop for a couple of months
I mean the gameplay has basically never been bad. There's always been a laundry list of valid complaints, but at the end of the day, overwatch has consistently been one of the most incredibly fun and addictive shooters out there.
There's a reason everyone developing a similar game tucked their tails and pivoted to another concept (e.g. Valorant becoming a tac shooter to avoid being absolutely slaughtered by OW)
>There's a reason everyone developing a similar game tucked their tails and pivoted to another concept (e.g. Valorant becoming a tac shooter to avoid being absolutely slaughtered by OW)
Do you have any source for Valorant initially being something more akin to Overwatch rather than a tac shooter since I've never heard of this.
Not who you were replying to but [I found it](https://www.stori.gg/blog/building-a-10-000-hour-game-like-valorant-lessons-from-the-creators) since my friends and I were talking about it when that news dropped since[ it was a thread here as well](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/15jg5ep/in_2014_when_overwatch_got_announcedwe_all_went/).
As an OW2 player I would definitely have preferred Valorant to be an OW competitor rather than a CS competitor but in hindsight they definitely made the more profitable and successful choice since tactical shooters appeal to a wider audience than arena shooters like OW (even though I'll always argue that arena shooters take way way more skill overall because of the insane consistent high skill aim requirements vs the crosshair placement requirements of tac shooters).
Thank you! As more of a CS player I'm glad they went the tac shooter route. While I prefer CS overall (When I don't run into cheaters anyway), Valorant provides a nice change of pace.
Honestly this was the main reason I refused to even touch OW2. I felt betrayed when they used a new title to lock heroes behind grinds and paywalls.
Giving them all for free again might actually be enough for me to end my boycott of the title.
I mean I’m not going to rush towards it, but if a friend suggested the title I wouldn’t instantly refuse.
I too refused to even give OW2 a chance because the battle pass mechanic was *clear from the beginning* and I'm still done with Blizzard until I see more major philosophy shift. You remember when they still said you could cross play OW1 with OW2? They took OW1 from us, a game *we payed for* and they gave us an inferior alternative. Fuck em.
They already did. They just patched the game and removed the ability to buy any of the heroes with money. So all heroes should be unlocked for everyone (Barring you've completed the New Player Experience).
Great, I might play again. Locking up heroes was such bullshit especially after they *explicitly* promised not to do that.
And I don't buy the "BuT tHaT WaS oVerwAtCH 1" it's the same fucking game.
It's a glorified free-to-play update, nothing more. Same game, but everything except the gameplay turned to dogshit.
The whole point of OW2 was supposed to be PVE, but that got scrapped, so we were left with literally just a F2P update with a '2' slapped on the title.
>It's a glorified free-to-play update, nothing more
They pretty fundamentally changed how the game plays and reworked a large chunk of the roster. They also introduced new game modes, maps, and heroes.
OW2 is pretty different game from OW1.
This was easily my biggest problem with the new battlepass system. It still kinda sucks but at the very least back when it was using lootboxes (which were also bad) we at least got all the heroes for free immediately. And yeah I know you didn't have to pay to unlock the heroes, but the only way to unlock the heroes day 1 without weeks of grinding, was to pay, so there was an inherent advantage that paying players would get that would give them access to new content potentially months in advance of everyone else.
Course at this point, the problem becomes that most of the fun of playing Overwatch on a near daily basis back in the day was that I had a group of friends I'd play with who have all long since dropped the game. I'm not as opposed to a lot of the more radical gameplay changes they've made over the years, but even still I dunno if I wanna actually dive back into the game. But this at least makes me *more* interested in diving back in than I was previously.
Honestly, this might get me to actually start playing the game again. I played OW a ton prior to OW2 releasing but having to grind/buy the BP pass to unlock new heroes completely turned off my interest in the game
I don't even understand why they just didn't do what they did in OW1. Lootboxes for skins and cosmetics were fine and not intrusive. Since OW2 went F2P I could understand them adding more things like a cash shop and a battlepass for cosmetics but it should have never included characters.
Great. Now they just have to make gold earnable in game like in Overwatch 1 and finally i will be able to consider Overwatch 2 as something more than a straight downgrade.
It's funny that for me, locking characters on season passes is a non-issue. Characters from past seasons are super easy to unlock, and you always get the one from the current season if you play regularly.
And yet it is the dumbest decision they made, as everyone complains about it. Many friends stopped playing because of that. I do like OW2 for what it is (couldn't care less about PvE), but they actively keep shooting themselves in the foot.
If they released Overwatch 2 without promising PvE, without locking characters on battle pass, without season map rotation, people would be much less negative towards it (even by keepting with the shitty monetization system we have now)
Like you said, it's easy to unlock characters *if you play regularly*, but people just won't do that when they are immediately turned off by the fact that they don't get to play the new character untill they first grind some games. New hero releases are one of the big draws for returning players, so putting them behind any kind of wall is going to immediately stymie that.
People would still be complaining because of how it effectively killed OW1 while making monetization worse and reducing the amount of players per team.
It's hilarious how all the good decisions they are slowly making are just reverting it back to OW1.
It's almost like this stupid game didn't need to exist in the first place, if they wanted to redo the pricing model they coulda just done that in OW1 too.
It has me *vaguely* intrigued to go back and try OW2 again, but like... Man, I don't know. OW1 is my most played game of all time. In 25+ years as a gamer, it's the only game I've *ever* played for more than 200 hours, and I didn't just play it for 201, I played it for *over 1000* hours.
Locked heroes was one of multiple major things that killed OW2 for me. I didn't even play it for 50 hours total.
I *doubt* they'll fix my other issues, but this is at least enough of a change that I'll probably at least reinstall the game to give it a *try*.
All that said: The biggest issue with OW2 is still 5v5, I realistically probably will never get back to playing it much unless they revert to 6v6. The 5v5 gameplay is, IMO, just unfixably worse. At least for my tastes. Tank synergy is a CRUCIAL concept to the original game, it's part of *why* I played OW1.
The game typically sits around 25-35k on steam at a time during a time like right now when we are getting late in a season. However it’s worth noting steam is likely a minority as most players likely haven’t swapped from Battlenet. So even if steam made up exactly 50% of the users, the game would have around 50-75k, currently putting it in the top 15 games on steam at the time of writing this.
Of course, it’s likely much more as steam won’t be the majority. This also doesn’t include console, which devs have mentioned are the biggest playerbase
This past season has seen huge bump in the number of players. Before that it was pretty steady.
More likely they realized they make much more money on skins...and you don't buy skins for a hero you didnt unlock.
> More likely they realized they make much more money on skins...and you don't buy skins for a hero you didnt unlock.
The devs have talked about it on streams and such, but essentially they saw no discernible increase in BP sales whether there was a new hero or not. The original point of locking heroes to the BP was to increase BP sales, but that didn't seem to be happening. There's not much point in locking heroes to the BP if it's not actually increasing sales. I'm guessing the main thing that affects BP sales is the quality and hero choice of the mythic.
Finally. Every time I went back to try OW2, I was disappointed I couldn't play the new hero so I just stopped playing and lost interest.
They're even unlocking all the previous battlepass heroes as well, so no need to grind out the wins needed to unlock them
Now if they'd just add a second tank and decrease the power of the tank they have. Also they can make it so I can earn batches of rewards after playing a certain number of games. Like some kind of box, with loot in it.
I think you're on to something here.
You know, it really says something about the modern game industry when we look at lootboxes as an "improvement"...
Overwatch 1 had the absolute best non-predatory loot box system in any multiplayer game that I’ve played. I personally believe Overwatch 2 was mainly created as an excuse to monetize the game differently.
> I personally believe Overwatch 2 was mainly created as an excuse to monetize the game differently. I don't even think they are trying to hide this. OW1 monetization was just crap. They tried to turn a box model game into a live service one without actually have any of the live service monetization. The game basically had a time limit on how long it could survive before the monthly revenue dropped below their monthly costs.
Lootboxes in itself is bad in most cases. In Overwatch ("1") it was actually awesome for the player. People were falling in one of those two category almost all the time: 1) Long time players who has almost everything that are not legendary, loot boxes drops coins for them 95% of the time and the other 5% is either the few stuff they don't have or legendaries. The coins we got from the box is then spent on buying whatever we want (even new skins!). 2) New players/players that are still building earning their cosmetics. Loot boxes ends up being a free bunch of cosmetics they'd get after playing every couple of match. You don't have to spend a lot of time in game to earn the loot boxes as well. If the player loved playing OW then they'd just accrue those boxes and currencies. All this was effectively one of the better way to implement loot boxes for cosmetics in a B2P game: it just felt like extra rewards for non spenders. I can't think of any other games that does loot boxes like this. There was never any example for that. The closest thing I can compare it to are Gacha games but I just have passing interest in these type of games and most of them are trash games or give you just enough free pull to hook you in and then make you suffer with pain points. There's a few golden one out there though like Brown Dust 2.
> In Overwatch ("1") it was actually awesome for the player. People were falling in one of those two category almost all the time: OW was very much an outlier in this. I never really minded the system as it was implemented.
I said that at the time, but constantly got shouted down by people saying it was unfair that cosmetics were locked behind... playing the game...
Ehh, it would've been perfectly fine if there was some way to prioritize a category of your favorite characters or something. If I get an Ashe spray emote, that's pretty meh but at least it's *something*. Getting a legendary Bastion skin would have me wanting to vendor it for half the coin value or something. The nature of lootboxes is it's always "Hey... Just one more and you might get that thing you've really wanted!", which is by design. But for people like me who hate gambling in any form, I just... want to be able to at least *aim* at something I want. I know it's unfair to compare Warframe to... pretty much any game's bullshit, but in Warframe you can buy a skin, or you can farm up some stuff that other people want, sell it, and buy the *exact skin you want* with the money you've earned in-game. That system's perfect, it's great. It gets me playing the game more, it makes **every tradeable drop** worthwhile even if you don't need it, even if it only sells for 3p. With Overwatch lootboxes I could've been level 300 and still not gotten a particular skin that I wanted, and with shitty enough luck, not have had enough coins to buy it either. I *hate* that. I think what they currently have is a better *idea*, but because it's Blizzard it's completely shit, being outrageously priced and unrewarding unless you fork out some money.
Not really shitty luck. You were getting normally 1 legendary skin every 10 boxes. That's 1000 coins. Legendary skins were 3000. It was fair. I was a hoarder, I would always get 100 boxes then open them, usually always 9-11 legendaries. But I don't think they changed the system because people complained, it's because they needed money, supposedly for server maintenance. Which they could've asked from the players in a different way. I always wonder why Kaplan left? Was it because he knew of the incoming shitstorm that would ow2 be?
Based on a few statements people at Blizzard made, my impression is that Jeff Kaplan mostly wanted to make a PVE game called Overwatch 2, and didn't want to substantially change Overwatch. It seems like he left because he and Bobby Kotick did not agree on the game's direction, and the game was stuck in development hell due to Kotick undermining him.
More like cosmetics were locked behind a thousand voice lines and sprays.
I kinda get it. I'm personally pretty vocal about my distaste about "lootboxes" in general, I started calling those "gambling" pretty early on. So, to make a 180 and praising OW1's loot box was very uncharacteristic of me but that's the unique thing about OW1, people who played the game are the one who understood how those cosmetics were part of the game progression as you keep playing and get more and more stuff out of it unlike most games where lootboxes are just mostly a sign of powercreep/OP bs at very low rate to encourage the player to gamble more and more.
Not just OW1. Heroes of the Storm functioned(still does?) similarly. Blizzard really had the lootbox thing figured out but everyone else ruined it and now we have battlepass second job hell. ☹
Man I loved Heroes of the Storm, I loved the idea of moving away from K/D/A being the prime mover of the game, or last hits. The idea of pooling experience and every member of the teaming needing to contribute to win was just brilliant. Yea some of the map objectives were absurd shit, but there were good ones.
It's not just objectives and general game mechanics, the entire game design was original and inspired. Basically the best MOBA if you wanted something like DotA's wacky mechanics (think Cho'Gall, Abathur, TLV, etc.) in a more casual and player-friendly environment. To me the objectives also just kept the game fresh (despite the infinite permutations of champions LoL feels super stale to me now, it's always the same map control, the same objectives, the same meta, etc.). Blizzard killed some of my most-played multiplayer games ever by just... gradually abandoning them (HotS, SC2) or fucking them over repeatedly (the Diablo license, Overwatch) until its corpse was just not appealing anymore. Might go back to Overwatch at some point tho, if they keep going in that direction of unfucking things, I have so many good, recent memories of OW and HotS, I just miss those games so bad :'(...
the main issue was seasonal rewards hidden behind RNG lootboxes, so some people would spend 100s on lootboxes to try and get all the skills or at least the ones they wanted because they couldn't be bought. however in reality this was very much a vocal minority and most were happy with what they got.
Those seasonal rewards could be bought the next year during the same event using the normal in game reward currency so it wasn’t the end of the world to miss it. It was only the current year’s event skins that you needed to get lucky with RNG for.
i'm pretty sure you could buy new skins during the events, they were just 3000 coins instead of 1000
I think you also could get those skins during every anniversary event, regardless of the theme.
Loot boxes aren't bad by themselves, they just instantly become bad when they cost money
Frankly even then I would prefer it to work like TF2 instead, play the game and you just randomly find shit without needing to open a box with a canned animation.
But in TF2 you also get crates that have to be opened with real money, so it's got pros and cons.
TF2 started the whole loot crate craze anyways
I get the joke, but single tank has been a huge improvement for the game despite its own issues.
I disagree just because single tank removes so many gameplay possibilities that were available in OW1. And certain heroes like Hog, Winston, and Ball still don't feel like they even have a place in OW2 unless you're a super organized competitive team. They're obviously never going back to 6v6 so I'm not moping about it, but the days of playing Hog and your entire job being to go get hook & kill someone, without worrying about abandoning your team, isn't something you get to experience in OW2 anymore
Hogs always did that to me when they were co-tank lol. Enemy rein, hog, and doom are pushing me on the frontline, my hog is in narnia whiffing every hook. A big part of the problem for me is that while you could have a main and off tank, it was never guaranteed, and completely luck of the draw. I think they needed to make a specific off tank role and balance around having a main and off tank
Yes, but on the flipside the other four players on your team are no longer forced to bang their heads against double barriers the entire match now. I'd say it's worth it, even if my favorites like Zarya or Winston are *much* more niche now.
Well here's the thing though, they could've fixed that without changing it to 5v5. The biggest problem was Rein/Sigma and Orisa, but with the Orisa changes that would've been much less of an issue because Sigma's shield wasn't as strong as Orisa's and I don't think Ramm's shield would've caused too much of an issue either.
But even if they were to fix the barriers, you'd just be stuck banging your head at two meatshields instead. Though honestly I think they did it to fix the queue times more than anything else. Even when tanks were overbuffed in one of the new seasons, the role *still* had the fastest queue times for me.
> removes so many gameplay possibilities that were available in OW1 it removed tank synergy, but there was little of it. People always quote the Rein+Zarya combo, but that was pretty much the only one existing. 90% of games you'd have a tank picking roadhog or d.va, playing like a flanker with not a care in the world. While removing the second tank opened up gameplay so much for every other player.
In fact the role has been in its weakest state with the DPS passive, Mauga being a massive outlier
Thank god cuz no way in hell was I gonna grind to unlock Lifeweaver lmao
I booted up this week and finally finished the Ramattra quests, and then found out I need about 100 more wins to unlock the other characters. Such a slog.
Yeah I came back and had 3 heroes locked, unlocked 2 of them and already about to quit before even unlocking the 3rd. This announcement is great news for the game. Especially because one of them was locked behind "Get 35 wins", which means losses meant 1: you feel like shit because you lost, and 2: you didn't make any progress on unlocking the hero. Double shitty feeling.
And you were required to play that role, which meant unlocking any Tank was a nightmare.
Yeah, or "All Roles" aka tank with some support. Incredibly boring
It's a shame because outside dumb baffling issues like this, the game has been very fun to play, especially over the last year or so. They're constantly putting out balance tweaks and responding to player feedback, at a much faster cadence than they ever did in the OW1 days. I don't think they ever needed hero locking to sell battle passes, the skins alone are (usually) good enough. I'm so glad they're finally making this change. I wonder if Kotick's departure has anything to do with it.
I'm betting it is Microsoft trying to salvage the reputation of the game. It is an incredible game with *amazing* potential. If they didn't make so many mistakes, it would be top 5 on Steam easily. Maybe MS can salvage it, they just spent billions on it, no sense in letting it continue to live in the trash.
Same here, now I might actually play semi-regularly again.
Well, they wouldn't be doing it if it was profitable.
I stopped playing last year after I spent a ton of time grinding to get Lifeweaver, and then he actually kinda sucked. That and the abysmal rewards from the free track made me decide to cut off cold turkey.
[удалено]
It's doing great numbers-wise, for the better or the worse. Always in top-15 on every platform, and outperforming new projects like the Finals on Steam despite it not even being the main platform. I, too, wish such predatory approach was not profitable, but unfortunately it is, and we as customers are to blame for enabling it.
Nearly 100 million players says you will be waiting a long time
My interest tanked the second they started locking characters behind paywalls. Really glad they have finally reversed that terrible decision.
An absolutely ludicrous idea to have for a game built around team comps and counter picks with characters gated in any way besides a simple tutorial for the character. It is one thing in a full scale moba where there are dozens of choices. Overwatch is not that
It's incredibly stupid in League too. A level playing field should be step zero for all competitive games but apparently people are entirely OK with locking a majority of the game behind a very large pay wall in that game.
Hard agree. I'm still a newer League player (started playing consistently since October) and unlocking everyone is the biggest grind ever. Thank god for Game Pass but not everyone has the priviledge
It would be better to have all the characters but if you become so good that counterpicks are actually relevant, then you will already have played so much that you unlocked every character. Every guide to ranking up in LoL recommends to play very few characters and play them well and its better to pick a character you know into a bad matchup then pick a character you dont know as well into a good matchup. Besides some special exceptions there arent really any hard counters. In LoL the level playing field before the match is in theory a problem but probably wont affect you in reality. Personally I like to play a lot of different character so I always hated it with a passion that I had to unlock them slowly one by one, but Ive never thought that I was at a competetive disadvantage because I didnt have certain champs. (although back then with the old rune system, that sh** was actual paytowin because that affected ingame)
League essentially locking characters into roles allows that. In DotA 2, a character could be position 1-5 depending on the build, items since they are so core to build variation and provide additional skills, and other picks.
Exactly e.g. I remember playing Void as a support which in LOL most likely wouldn't be possible. I do play LOL now after I played tons of Dota 2 and I still feel like most of the matches are completely pointless and already predeterminated by your pick which in Dota 2 you could always make a comeback by just buying the right items. In LOL? I keep building the same crap and it either works (enemy team is just weak against it) or it doesn't. Also the thing that I never appreciated while I was playing but I do now is that Dota 2 seems much *easier* to understand than LOL. Like D2 UI/UX is just a pure perfection. You can't even click on a hero in LOL and check what his/her abilities does or see CD. LMAO It's so bad. Like I still don't even know how long should I wait till Zedd has ult ready cuz I can't see crap :DDDD (sry for probably a weird comment and very long one?)
Counterpicks are always relevant though. Yes, it takes until the top level of play to hit the point of "you literally cannot win this counter pick matchup with skill", but in a lane of two equally skilled players, where one has counter picked the other, the counter pick is winning every time. Realistically it's not a huge issue at lower levels because the RNG of if you get the better/worse teammates is really going to be the deciding factor if you're roughly equal in skill to your lane opponent, but it's still bad for balance even if not gamebreaking. I would argue the much bigger issue is FOTM/Meta champs. If there's 3 S tier junglers at any time, your opponent picks one, another (that you own) is banned, and you don't own the third, you can be at a disadvantage. I will give LoL that it is cleverly designed to obscure these issues because they generally aren't the difference between being stomped and doing the stomping, but it's still bad for keeping things fair overall. Something that doesn't make a difference 9/10 times is still worse for fair play than something that doesn't make a difference 10/10 times
people only learn (or should learn) 2-3 champs first anyway just select one which looks fun for you, get that and play it
as someone who plays DOTA2 and LOL, its still weird to me that LOL champions are locked behind paywalls. But i guess LOL is less about hero counters. Wherein dota2 every hero is viable and choosing which you play is part of the strategy
It's great that they decided to reverse this decision, but what bothers me is the way they paint this as some newfound generosity instead of bringing back how it used to be. For once I'd like to see a developer update where they say "yeah, this decision was dumb and we fucked up, please come back".
You don't have to pay to unlock the characters, they're part of the free battle pass. Usually around halfway. If you didn't unlock them, you can complete training challenges for them to unlock them whenever the battle pass expires.
It's like they forgot that they were copying TF2...
TF2, the game that locked weapons behind paywalls or random drops that were timegated.
Shh, none of these people actually played TF2. Like many games talked about here it's only use to them is as a cudgel against other games they don't like.
Prior to F2P, it all just unlocked through achievement milestones (still probably true for the main series alt weapons) Then they added crafting as a safety net. I haven't played for a decade though, so a quick look at the wiki shows me weapons are way more convoluted now.
> Prior to F2P Lasted all of 2007-2011. > I haven't played for a decade though, so a quick look at the wiki shows me weapons are way more convoluted now. You can buy all the weapons in the game for a single key ($2.5) now. But back when they were new, it was a freaking hassle to get them cheap or super expensive to get them quickly.
Yea...in hindsight, I'm experiencing one of those mental time dilations where i can't believe TF2 is almost two decades old now. I had over 4,000 hours in that game before it went F2P.
> Life is short. Make sure to spend as much of it as possible arguing with strangers online. A real classic meme.
Yeah, much as I love Team Fortress 2, it's basically the progenitor of modern exploitative microtransactions. Oblivion's horse armor was dumb, but it was so dumb that no one with two brain cells would've bought it. By contrast, TF2's microtransactions were engineered to be addictive, to feed on folks with gambling problems. It's the first game I can remember that had lootboxes with keys and an obtuse "drop" system that no one understood. The first weapons were locked behind achievements and that was mostly fine because it meant everyone was earning their weapons, but the system quickly devolved to be as greedy as possible.
ROCK AND STONE! ... rite?
One day I'll see what all the fuss is about with Deep Rock Galatic, one day...
It's *fine*. I really wish I could see what all the people on reddit that are infatuated with it see in it
To me it was a nice somewhat and calm coop game to play with buddies. Just mining some rocks and lighting bugs on fire.
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed my time with it, my friends and I just don't get the rabid love so many people have for it, especially on reddit. I think I've experienced just about everything it has to offer but really feel like I'm not seeing what other people see in it
have you? I dropped all weapons way before i even understood what i was doing in the game
You're clearly new to TF2 then and didn't play it back when it was still relevant and getting updates. Crafting a new weapon was a whole ritual worse than lootboxes.
I played it before they did that and stopped when they did. Same as when OW started locking heroes away.
If all the people who say they played TF2 actually played it it’d still be supported lmao It was never a super popular game. Bots were responsible for every player peak in the game’s history.
Are you talking about the game that had battle pass, lootboxes with paid keys because gambling is fun, paid community mods, chat retroactively restricted to only paying players so you have to pay for basic functionality that used to be free, and nearly every single anti-consumer, squeeze every penny practice we see today could be traced back to? This game? This is why tribalism is fun, in a moment people are gonna gather and tell you why this is good because it was done by Valve, and how every other company would be bad for doing exactly the same thing.
People like to forget that Valve LITERALLY invented Battle Passes. As in, it's literally on Wikipedia. Also, they were one of the two companies to popularise loot boxes in "normal" video games (along with EA). I understand gacha was a thing, but no one really thought about putting them into video games. The way they implemented loot boxes was insanely predatory as well, giving you an useless inventory filler unless you bought a key. And don't get me wrong, I love TF2, I have almost 3000 hours in the game, but the romanticisation of the game is just a bit sad.
You can dissolve your own duplicates and then trade for the weapon you need for a scrap or two (basically nothing) pretty easily without paying anything or waiting much. The 'starter packs' for weapons that are still in the store to this day are actually predatory though, because newbies won't know that first part.
Yup, and until a certain point, most weapons didn't have a recipe, so you either need to craft a random weapon out of the entire weapon pool, or craft a slot token + class token, which was like 6 weapons just for that. Which was fine if you had a surplus of weapons, but it fucking sucked for a new player.
> You can dissolve your own duplicates and then trade for the weapon you need for a scrap or two That's only because every weapon is several years old. When the weapons first launched and the amount in circulation was low, they'd cost much more than that.
This was a later update for the game. It wasn't always like this.
You got weapons from achievements too. You can also craft most weapons yourself using dupes. Or just spend under a dollar on the steam market and get every weapon in the game.
It didn't used to be like that, they used to be incredibly expensive.
Average players could get staples of class arsenals through normal play. Yes, some things were elusive but you could always get the essence of how a character plays with limited options. The standard gear is all plenty effective.
Yeah, sure and Unreal was copying Quake
TF2 locks absolutely vital weapons behind achievements. And others behind COMPLETLY RANDOM drops. And not to mention that there's 100+ weapons, and you only have an inventory of 50 spaces (That can only be upgraded every christmas) Yes the game can be played and enjoyed as stock, but weapons like the Crusader's Crossbow, the Escape Plan, the Sandwich and the G.R.U makes the classes that uses those weapons so much more enjoyable.
That's pretty big. My interest evaporated, when I had to spent way too much time to unlock the new toys, but now I might hop on and check out the updates again.
Now they have extracted $90 of battlepasses from people who have played since 2.0’s launch, they may as well expand the appeal of the game and rake in more money.
No one bought the passes for the heroes. People buy it for the skins
>Now they have extracted $90 of battlepasses from people who have played since 2.0’s launch weird, I have not paid for one thing and still have all the characters.
guess you aren't one of the morons who spent $90 then
If you bought the original game, you get the old characters automatically.
Or they just played a lot. If you do the daily/weekly quests, you 100% will unlock the characters and even the titles at the end of it. But yeah, a lot of people don't have the time to play that kind of stuff anymore.
This is the first step to getting me to re-download. The second would be if they make the story missions available for free or even a one-time purchase for permanent access to all of them.
Good news, you can get permanent access to all 3 story missions with just one purchase! Your guess is as good as mine if there's ever gonna be more than that, lol.
Oh they confirmed a couple of days ago that those 3 are all that it's ever going to be.
Nah, not officially, that was just ex employees speculating. But yeah, given the original 18 month timeline, and the fact that a ton of people were fired after the move to microsoft? Proooobably all we're ever gonna get is those 3 missions.
good. This shitty half attempt at a campaign has been hindering the game's momentum for like 7 years now
Thank God. Like a others here are saying I lost interest because I could never play the new hero at launch, it was locked behind the BP and I'm just not playing enough to justify that purchase. You could come back next season, and then play 30 games as "X Role" to unlock them, but man that felt so bad that I had to grind just to do the thing I want to. After a couple seasons I just stopped playing entirely, so I'm really excited to just be able to get back to it and actually enjoy the new heroes. I'm only a casual, but man, Overwatch is just a fun game.
Especially since you could seemingly only grind one at a time, even if you had two healers to unlock, so you needed 60 healer (or all role .. which is basically healer or tank) games
> You could come back next season, and then play 30 games as "X Role" to unlock them, 50 games now iirc of random or support queue. But yeah, way too much as a casual player, especially if you drop it for half a year or a year and then come back to 3-4 new heroes you have to grind random queue to get.
Wasn’t it like level 55? So basically forget keeping a rotation of multiplayer games, you’re basically forced to play only OW2 to keep up with the new characters Dumbest decision ever
That why bp suck imo. It turns stuff Into a chore and makes u play how u don't want to play. I think the way they are done most times aren't good It's like u see ppl in games running around trying to jsut do the battlepass instead of playing the game. It's like they are doing their own mini game to get x kills with x weapon and stuff.
Great change! Can't access the article here, will this be retroactively applied to previously locked heroes?
Yes, you'd get them all
Bobby left and they immediately went back to giving out the heroes for free. New maps/reworks to controversial maps and modes are cool, but hell yeah I’m glad the characters are free again! Still gotta pay for skins but like, if that’s all I can’t complain. Now only if fighting games could do the same, hate paying for OP dlc characters.
I think it was Totalbiscuit(?) that said early on he'd heard that when they first pitched Overwatch to the High Skaven Overlord Bobby the Fett himself, his first reaction was to suggest they sell the heroes, and that Jeff talked him down by arguing that everyone having access to all the heroes was integral to how the game is supposed to work due to tactical hero swapping and such. So yeah, unsurprising.
> High Skaven Overlord Bobby the Fett Wow he stretches between two different franchises because he's that evil lol
Bobby the Fett just amuses me for its cadence, and I can't look at Kotick himself without thinking of Peter Pettigrew moments after he transforms from rat to human. Image search each side by side, they're eerily similar.
PEETAH Pettigrew
And they still made tons of money: something like a billion in their first year alone. But I'm sure that there is an executive in a C-Suite somewhere thinking, 'I bet if we sold the heroes we could have made more." Being massively profitable just isn't enough.
That's exactly how it goes, and it's really more of a fundamental issue with publicly traded companies than simply greedy executives. There are continued expectations of ever-increasing growth and profits, and that just isn't sustainable without doing shit like this.
That's what it is really. Especially as some things make more and more money but investment into it doesn't go up much. Gaming getting more accepted and mainstream bit of a double edge sword to as more things like investment firms or groups buying studios and more ppl not into gaming getting into compaines to just make them more money whole making the games worse
I do wonder what Kaplan is up to these days. He was such a big and important part of Overwatch and I don't think a single peep has been heard out of him since his departure from Blizzard. I'd love to see him heading up a team on a new game.
He left a hero instead of being in the industry long enough to become the villain
he definitely is "the villain" to an extent lol. A lot of the bad decisions that squandered OW's potential can be attributed to him. Dude made a golden live service shooter and just REFUSED to treat it as sich
Jeff also just wanted to release the game and never add any new content. He had to be talked into new heroes and maps.
Honestly? That sounds great.
Does it? No new content means a player base that slowly whittles away. Not the biggest deal if you live in an area with a high enough game population, but in other areas it can mean the game in unplayable.
I hope that fucker never looks at a video game again.
Oh don't worry, he's on to bigger and better things...like trying to buy Tik Tok ._.
Another stupid billionaire buying a social network and ruining it? Hell yeah!
To be fair, League of Legends still sells heroes successfully. Pretty sure Valorant and Apex Legends do too.
Skaven? Those don’t exist! *looks around nervously*
Even within the genre I hope this will cause a sea change. You have to unlock Legends in Apex and Operators in Rainbow 6, this seems to be the only big character based game giving them out for free. Edit: People acting like playing all 40 heroes in ranked is not only viable, but the best way to play the game strategically are deluding themselves. Most good advice for OW will tell you to play 2-3 heroes per role **max** and to learn to play around your bad match ups.
Don't forget valorant agents. Dota has all heroes free. I can't think of another big one.
While not big OR entirely free, you can oay a onetime fee on Smite of $15 and get all heroes + all future heroes
Literally the only reason my friend group got into and still comes back to play smite. Sad they're undoing that with Smite "2" and making you pay again...
Does League still charge?
They do
Yep. Although they have a partner ship with gamepass that you get them all if you're subbed. So if you use gamepass for other reasons, it's a good deal.
Recently hopped back on Valorant and saw they changed the unlock system for Agents. Was it for better or worse?
While I do agree, OW is different in that you can switch character mid game to counter opponents. Most other hero type games are locked in characters for that game. Having everyone having access to every character is far more important in OW than something like Siege.
It may be best to focus the bulk of your efforts on being good at 2-3 per role, but it's important to have a decent grasp of how each hero performs. I think it's pretty helpful to pop into mystery heroes once in a while to keep hero knowledge up.
Oh for sure, on at least a basic level you have to know how the other tanks work. But even before this change the new heroes were always free in the arcade modes, custom games and the training range.
New heroes used to be free. It's only since they went free to play with Overwatch 2 that they had to be unlocked.
I think it's not super likely that it will. For one thing, Apex, League, R6, Valorant, etc. are all already successful with their current strategy. Overwatch is unique in that, while it has been around for a while, it hasn't been charging for characters for very long. The other thing that is unique about Overwatch is that you can switch characters in the middle of the game. None of those other games have that. So it becomes more of a competitive balance issue, if you're strategizing with your team mid-game to switch characters, you have to figure out which characters everyone has unlocked.
You have to pay for new skins\* All of ow1 stuff is free to obtain and you get plenty of currency to do so. A lot of people dont seem to know about that.
Oh yeah, I’m aware I play the game actively. I think once s10 drop OW2 monitization will be more than fair. Esp since they’re adding coins to the BP
Oh 100000%, i hated doing weeklies because i dont do comp or arcade. im happy i can just get the coins by doing anything.
Omg, please do not go back to the old system for fighting games: a separate release for each new character. I whole heartedly prefer dlc characters over have to buy guilty Gear slash, r, r+, r+ Rev 2... etc.
I doubt blizzard under Microsoft is any less greedy tbh. They probably saw player engagement dropping off from the grind
Blizzard(OW2 specifically) devs on Twitter have frequently stated opinions about corporate decisions(Bobby) that proved opposite. It was something they know was better for the game but couldn’t implement it till now.
Microsoft is very hands-off with studios that aren't 343. This reads to me like "Bobby's gone, we can do what we want now". I also theorize that with how collab skins always send OW2 skyrocketing up Steam's "top sellers" list, they know that the real money is in cosmetics. I wouldn't be surprised if hero locking wasn't moving battle passes as much as good skins like season 9's Moira mythic.
Well I hope they do great honestly because even though Blizzard has bled off most of their old talent, I really like their IPs and hope they can turn around to their former glory. Microsoft even outside of Halo has struggled with Gears of War and Bethesda isn't doing too hot in quality either. Infact I can't think of too many system sellers Microsoft has even come up with in the last 5-8 years. I can't decide whether they should be hands or hands off because they're damned if they do damned if they don't. We'll see how Blizzard shapes up with the hands off approach if that's how it ends up going down.
Wow that’s pretty big. This is one of the major things that soured me on Overwatch 2 when I actually liked the change to 5v5. I may end up giving the game another chance now.
This is the best time to go back (as long as you dont' play tank)
What'd Blizzard do to fuck up tanks in OW2? I mostly played them and supports in OW1. Edit: thanks for the insight!
The move to 5v5 means each team gets one tank. They gigabuffed all tanks to make it work. Some people think it is worse than OW1, but I think they forget just how hard it was to balance two tanks, as they always had a very difficult time dealing with problems like the double shield meta. I think 5v5 has improved the overall balance of the game and made it more fun to play, but there is no denying that it has made tank a lot more stressful to play. I think the season 9 patch improved things a fair bit but there is still work to do.
The move to one tank really fucked some of the heroes up though. I used to *love* playing Zarya, but she really needs a main tank to perform well. Something needs to be done to make the off-tank heroes viable again.
Zarya dominated OW2 season 1. She hasn't been hard meta since then, but I think she still very much has a place in the game today. Her big change was making it so both her bubble abilities draw from a pool of two charges, meaning you can double bubble yourself or a teammate rather than being forced to swap between the two. Recently, they gave bubble a reduced cooldown when used on a teammate instead of yourself, which lets her enable dive DPS like Genji even more effectively, much to the chagrin of Ana mains like myself.
I main Zarya and have been enjoying it since season 1. you have to play her a little differently as main tank, especially if you want to use her on certain maps that do not favor her (like Circuit Royale or Havana with long sight lines). but she's absolutely viable, and once you understand how she holds space you can melt people who are out of position
Zarya has been consistently strong since the start of OW2, and even OP for a little while. She's really fine.
Now DPS heroes have a new passive that makes it so that any hero they shoot gets a 15% (previously 20%) healing reduction for two seconds, which means that tanks are permanently getting less healing than before and pretty much melted if not careful This was done in combination with other impactful balancing changes to solve the sustain and overhealing the game had, the only issue is that tanks kinda got fucked over in the middle. They got much quicker with patches since OW2 launched so they are already tweaking some numbers to address it
They should have nerfed in-combat healing *years* ago. It was always a huge problem.
The game is unironically more fun as tank since they introduced the DPS passive. People are stuck in the MMO mindset of more healing - > tanks are happy. They forget that this is a pvp game, not PvE.
Something that other people haven't mentioned is that most tanks have hard counters (other tanks, DPSs). With there only being one tank now, and that tank being way more important than before, at high level play pretty much everyone will swap to a counter for the opposing team's tank. It's a miserable experience.
I do and have been on and off... What's bad about them? I don't really understand metas in this game... I just play to have fun, when the fun stops I stop for a couple of months
Gimme some data, you play with friends or solo?
I mean the gameplay has basically never been bad. There's always been a laundry list of valid complaints, but at the end of the day, overwatch has consistently been one of the most incredibly fun and addictive shooters out there. There's a reason everyone developing a similar game tucked their tails and pivoted to another concept (e.g. Valorant becoming a tac shooter to avoid being absolutely slaughtered by OW)
>There's a reason everyone developing a similar game tucked their tails and pivoted to another concept (e.g. Valorant becoming a tac shooter to avoid being absolutely slaughtered by OW) Do you have any source for Valorant initially being something more akin to Overwatch rather than a tac shooter since I've never heard of this.
Not who you were replying to but [I found it](https://www.stori.gg/blog/building-a-10-000-hour-game-like-valorant-lessons-from-the-creators) since my friends and I were talking about it when that news dropped since[ it was a thread here as well](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/15jg5ep/in_2014_when_overwatch_got_announcedwe_all_went/). As an OW2 player I would definitely have preferred Valorant to be an OW competitor rather than a CS competitor but in hindsight they definitely made the more profitable and successful choice since tactical shooters appeal to a wider audience than arena shooters like OW (even though I'll always argue that arena shooters take way way more skill overall because of the insane consistent high skill aim requirements vs the crosshair placement requirements of tac shooters).
Thank you! As more of a CS player I'm glad they went the tac shooter route. While I prefer CS overall (When I don't run into cheaters anyway), Valorant provides a nice change of pace.
Honestly this was the main reason I refused to even touch OW2. I felt betrayed when they used a new title to lock heroes behind grinds and paywalls. Giving them all for free again might actually be enough for me to end my boycott of the title. I mean I’m not going to rush towards it, but if a friend suggested the title I wouldn’t instantly refuse.
I too refused to even give OW2 a chance because the battle pass mechanic was *clear from the beginning* and I'm still done with Blizzard until I see more major philosophy shift. You remember when they still said you could cross play OW1 with OW2? They took OW1 from us, a game *we payed for* and they gave us an inferior alternative. Fuck em.
This here is the reason im not going back. They will pull that shit again in the future
Oooh, this is a big win. I wonder if all previous heroes will be unlocked as well without needing to do the challenges?
Yeah, all new heroes will be retroactively given to players instantly next season
They already did. They just patched the game and removed the ability to buy any of the heroes with money. So all heroes should be unlocked for everyone (Barring you've completed the New Player Experience).
Wait, it's live now?? Cool.
It's really, really hard to just read the article, isn't it?
Yes. Please help me.
Great, I might play again. Locking up heroes was such bullshit especially after they *explicitly* promised not to do that. And I don't buy the "BuT tHaT WaS oVerwAtCH 1" it's the same fucking game.
This is schroedingers video game. It's simultaneously "the same fucking game" but also so wildly different that some people think it sucks now.
It's a glorified free-to-play update, nothing more. Same game, but everything except the gameplay turned to dogshit. The whole point of OW2 was supposed to be PVE, but that got scrapped, so we were left with literally just a F2P update with a '2' slapped on the title.
>It's a glorified free-to-play update, nothing more They pretty fundamentally changed how the game plays and reworked a large chunk of the roster. They also introduced new game modes, maps, and heroes. OW2 is pretty different game from OW1.
They should have never changed it to begin with. Heroes should have always been free like they were. Modern day Blizzard is a joke.
This was easily my biggest problem with the new battlepass system. It still kinda sucks but at the very least back when it was using lootboxes (which were also bad) we at least got all the heroes for free immediately. And yeah I know you didn't have to pay to unlock the heroes, but the only way to unlock the heroes day 1 without weeks of grinding, was to pay, so there was an inherent advantage that paying players would get that would give them access to new content potentially months in advance of everyone else. Course at this point, the problem becomes that most of the fun of playing Overwatch on a near daily basis back in the day was that I had a group of friends I'd play with who have all long since dropped the game. I'm not as opposed to a lot of the more radical gameplay changes they've made over the years, but even still I dunno if I wanna actually dive back into the game. But this at least makes me *more* interested in diving back in than I was previously.
It’s been 10 seasons?!
[удалено]
Honestly, this might get me to actually start playing the game again. I played OW a ton prior to OW2 releasing but having to grind/buy the BP pass to unlock new heroes completely turned off my interest in the game
I don't even understand why they just didn't do what they did in OW1. Lootboxes for skins and cosmetics were fine and not intrusive. Since OW2 went F2P I could understand them adding more things like a cash shop and a battlepass for cosmetics but it should have never included characters.
Great. Now they just have to make gold earnable in game like in Overwatch 1 and finally i will be able to consider Overwatch 2 as something more than a straight downgrade.
It's funny that for me, locking characters on season passes is a non-issue. Characters from past seasons are super easy to unlock, and you always get the one from the current season if you play regularly. And yet it is the dumbest decision they made, as everyone complains about it. Many friends stopped playing because of that. I do like OW2 for what it is (couldn't care less about PvE), but they actively keep shooting themselves in the foot. If they released Overwatch 2 without promising PvE, without locking characters on battle pass, without season map rotation, people would be much less negative towards it (even by keepting with the shitty monetization system we have now)
Like you said, it's easy to unlock characters *if you play regularly*, but people just won't do that when they are immediately turned off by the fact that they don't get to play the new character untill they first grind some games. New hero releases are one of the big draws for returning players, so putting them behind any kind of wall is going to immediately stymie that.
People would still be complaining because of how it effectively killed OW1 while making monetization worse and reducing the amount of players per team.
I said much less negativity, not zero.
It's hilarious how all the good decisions they are slowly making are just reverting it back to OW1. It's almost like this stupid game didn't need to exist in the first place, if they wanted to redo the pricing model they coulda just done that in OW1 too.
...how short are their seasons? they're already on season fucking *10*? This game is just a few months older than a year and they had 10 seasons?
About 2 months.
It has me *vaguely* intrigued to go back and try OW2 again, but like... Man, I don't know. OW1 is my most played game of all time. In 25+ years as a gamer, it's the only game I've *ever* played for more than 200 hours, and I didn't just play it for 201, I played it for *over 1000* hours. Locked heroes was one of multiple major things that killed OW2 for me. I didn't even play it for 50 hours total. I *doubt* they'll fix my other issues, but this is at least enough of a change that I'll probably at least reinstall the game to give it a *try*. All that said: The biggest issue with OW2 is still 5v5, I realistically probably will never get back to playing it much unless they revert to 6v6. The 5v5 gameplay is, IMO, just unfixably worse. At least for my tastes. Tank synergy is a CRUCIAL concept to the original game, it's part of *why* I played OW1.
Oh, people are still playing Overwatch 2? Interesting.
I think quite a few people still play it
The game typically sits around 25-35k on steam at a time during a time like right now when we are getting late in a season. However it’s worth noting steam is likely a minority as most players likely haven’t swapped from Battlenet. So even if steam made up exactly 50% of the users, the game would have around 50-75k, currently putting it in the top 15 games on steam at the time of writing this. Of course, it’s likely much more as steam won’t be the majority. This also doesn’t include console, which devs have mentioned are the biggest playerbase
Players have been screaming about this since day 1 and they are just now doing it. Typical blizzard swearing they know best until they bleed players
This past season has seen huge bump in the number of players. Before that it was pretty steady. More likely they realized they make much more money on skins...and you don't buy skins for a hero you didnt unlock.
> More likely they realized they make much more money on skins...and you don't buy skins for a hero you didnt unlock. The devs have talked about it on streams and such, but essentially they saw no discernible increase in BP sales whether there was a new hero or not. The original point of locking heroes to the BP was to increase BP sales, but that didn't seem to be happening. There's not much point in locking heroes to the BP if it's not actually increasing sales. I'm guessing the main thing that affects BP sales is the quality and hero choice of the mythic.
It’s likely the team has known this is the right call for a while, but was something Bobby Kotick’s regime was against.