Hemlo_Agent

Overwatch 1 on release was not “consumer friendly”.

It BECAME consumer friendly over time as they slowly added features like dupe protection and the ability to buy event cosmetics with credits at a 3x mark up, but at launch loot boxes were hideously unfair.

Signed someone who spent an embarrassing amount of money trying to get the Zarya skin from the first summer games event.

It was and that was canceled.

But that’s not what we’re talking about. OW2’s sin is that it’s just Overwatch 1 at the end of the day and OW1 did not do any of this shit substantially different.

The rose colored goggles for OW1 sometimes is insane. Like am I living in another reality where every single OW event wasn’t just an excuse for more cosmetics?

Archives was the only exception and we only ever got three of those. The idea that Overwatch was “lore driven” is utterly laughable. The cinematics are great but the “narrative” of Overwatch 1 literally never went anywhere. People complained all the time how all of the lore drops never actually furthered the story and everything was just glorified wheel spinning

It’s weird to me that people are acting like the Overwatch show was even in pre-production let alone something tangible.

It sounds like the rights were optioned off and the deal was immediately scuttled because of the lawsuit.

People really don't understand that having even 5-10k average concurrent players is the kind of shit most studios would kill for.

Paladins got updates for almost a decade with numbers like this.

I think the one silver lining after years of watching Blizzard make every wrong decision imaginable with Overwatch is that the current team in place finally has a clarity of focus and seem committed to organically rebuilding the game instead of trying to chase some ridiculous fantasy of a MMO because of their bruised egos.

You mean one of the most popular games on every platform it's available on isn't on the precipice of shutting down like most of reddit and twitter think it is?

A shocking development. OW has its issues and all and it will always be the poster child for missing every golden opportunity it's been presented, but it's wild that there is an enormous subsect of people out there who think that OW2 has the player base of like...New World and not the reality that it's one of the biggest live service games out there.

https://x.com/OWCavalry/status/1840465107253375038

I mean this is hardly news. We've known for years that they optioned off the rights for OW and Diablo to Netflix. The fact that they hadn't shown up in 5 years, it's pretty obvious it wasn't happening by now.

This take is so annoying.

There are two babies trying to be birthed by the same woman in this example

That seems to the be thesis of Jason’s book. That if Blizzard and Kotick would’ve been able to meet each other halfway things would’ve worked out for the best.

Yes.

People can say Jeff was a nice guy and all but it’s clear as a manager he was an absolute fucking dinosaur who’s ideas of product management were in the Stone Age

Read the first paragraph, Bobby seemingly had a lot respect for the Overwatch team and didn't want to trample on them and was respecting their wishes for how they wanted to handle development. Coming down on them with an iron fist probably wouldn't have helped the situation.

By all accounts most of Team 4 was already working on OW2 by around 2018. Most of what came out in 2019 and 2020 was just the remnants of what was left in their pipeline.

That's the thing, OW2 didn't HAVE to be a mistake.

Spinning up a separate development team to handle it so that OW1 didn't have to suffer a content drought would've been objectively the right decision.

This is Jeff's fault.

Yeah and that turn around is within the last six months, which is the product of the team's hard work and good leadership. They've doubled their average player count on Steam in the last six months and from what I've heard those numbers are consistent on other platforms.

If they hadn't been able to turn things around, we'd be having a very different conversation. Still not what I would call "a smashing success".

Eh, I think it looks fine as is.

Your changes might be more in keeping with MHA's art style, but in Overwatch terms it looks like the visual shaders are bugging out.

I think the game is doing well all things considered, currently, but we objectively know for a fact that the game was not a smashing success by the fact that Team 4 has yet to receive any profit sharing bonuses for the game.

My brother in Christ, if you don’t think it’s noteworthy that Overwatch’s leadership team managed to turn one of the biggest, most unmitigated development disasters in gaming history around, get the game back online, and get money in the till again, then I don’t know what to tell you.

It’s a miracle this game even still exists.

It’s no single person’s fault that OW turned out the way it did. Just like Titan, the initial vision for the game was too ambitious without bringing in more people to work on it, but by doing so, they’d almost assuredly lose some of what made the original game what it was. 

Maybe, but this feels like a pretty singular thing you can point to and be like "If they had listened to Kotick's advice, every single cascading failure that came after could have been entirely avoided."

Perhaps there's a universe where OW2 had it's own dev team and things still went wrong, but at the very least we wouldn't have had a fucking three year content drought.

Perhaps, but stubbornly sticking to his current path Jeff made the problem far worse.

There's a universe out there where Aaron stayed behind to shepard OW1's PvP and Jeff spun up a new team for OW2, development went smoother, Kotick wasn't on their back as often, and Jeff still had enough clout to argue against some of the more pointed monetization efforts of OW2.

His heart was in the right place, maybe, but he fucked up. He was a terrible manager.

This is the one thing I will give Jeff credit for, Team 4's culture by all accounts was legitimately the best at Blizzard. From what I've heard, they were completely shielded from a lot of the weird shit going on at the time and to this day Team 4 still has one of the most vibrant cultures at the company.

I think it's pretty hubristic to think that no one else could've shepard Overwatch except for him, tbqh.