Board 8 > Blizzard cancels Overwatch 2 PvE mode

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/overwatch-2s-pve-mode-is-being-scrapped-blizzard-explains-what-happened-and-why/1100-6514242/

theyre never going to beat the just an Overwatch 1 patch allegations

Truly the studio to copy if you want success. Kill your IP for about 4 years, relaunch it as a sequel patch that makes it impossible to go back to the old game, cancel the content you claimed the sequel was made for and throw in thousands upon thousands of dollars of microtransactions. OW is a fantastic IP, but unfortunately is in the hands of trash so this is just really sad to me. The sequel is more of a beta to the original game with how much content was removed compared to added

changmas posted...

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/overwatch-2s-pve-mode-is-being-scrapped-blizzard-explains-what-happened-and-why/1100-6514242/

theyre never going to beat the just an Overwatch 1 patch allegations

Ah but now they can release Overwatch 3 with the promise of PVE content!

An absolutely unbelievable move. Just how much worse than OW1 must the game be doing right now?

I know they launched big, but I feel like it's been an absolutely decimating decline in discussion. The Overwatch 2 topic on this very board not only purged, but for nearly a solid month literally nobody but the topic creator was posting in it, and that was right after release!

Overwatch? More like it's over, watch them fall apart.

what the fuck

then what was the point of any of this

what were they doing for years

what was the point of OW2 then

Punnyz posted...

what was the point of OW2 then

The reason Jeff and other OW1 staff left. The point of OW2 was to push a FOMO cosmetic shop & Battle Pass. The original staff didnt want OW to be the garbage it is now so they bailed and this is what us players get rewarded with lol

lmao

I remember a lot of people (the consensus?) were
eh on the pvp, thinking it'd be just Overwatch 1.2, but we're hyped for the PvE and thought it'd change the game

They were half right!

After the Microsoft/Activision merger finally goes through, what are the odds Microsoft just nukes the remaining staff at Blizzard and starts from scratch?

yea the point of OW2 was to change the monetization of the PVP and make more money

they just said it was about the PVE

But how can the game make money if they don't have any players

they may have made a bunch of unpopular changes, edit: didn't charge anyone money actually (my mistake), and bailed on the one feature that was meant to make it worth the charge, but you really have to hand it to the boys at blizzard for

excuse me

i'm recieving word that you do not have hand it to the boys at blizzard

ivysnow posted...

charged everyone forty bucks again for the same game

?

it is free

Literally the one saving grace is that they made it free to play yea

Not that that really amends all the other shit done but, hey

Wow. It was clear the PvE development was having serious problems, but cancelling outright after all this time is such a disappointment. What absurd mismanagement. OW2 is technically still in "Early Access" and it's like, without the campaign what else is there to add?

They say they're adding story missions and co-op/single player missions as special events, but I don't expect them to be that fleshed out. The Starwatch thing was fun, but only for like a handful of games, and it felt like something that was just cobbled together like Workshop game.

oh for some reason i thought that it was a paid upgrade! my bad

game still bad but i can't hold the money thing against them

Bane_Of_Despair posted...

Literally the one saving grace is that they made it free to play yea

Not that that really amends all the other shit done but, hey

True. I mean, as a free to play game it's pretty great. The game is fun, you get a lot of content, and there's no major paywalls (the only important thing that costs money is the ability to get the new characters early, but that's honestly minor despite how upset people got over it). It just doesn't feel like a "sequel". The PvE would have a great new burst of energy for the game, but now it's like... where's the game's identity?

Eh being free probably adds more downsides than the game having been a true paid sequel and unlike most other games OW cant survive on this model without a healthy player base or matches wont happen. Considering everyone can now see its just a worse OW1 and not gonna do anything exciting that doesnt requiring micropaying I think its just gonna stay on a downward spiral til it equals OW1 at its most dead or worse.

Grand_Kirby posted...

The Starwatch thing was fun, but only for like a handful of games, and it felt like something that was just cobbled together like Workshop game.

The Halloween thing they did is closer to what I'm expecting for these story missions. Scripted cutscenes, little objectives, and unique enemies.

But that was also only fun 1 or 2 times before it got old so IDK. Trying to turn Overwatch into Destiny with 40 playable characters was maybe always a bad idea.

swordz9 posted...

Eh being free probably adds more downsides than the game having been a true paid sequel and unlike most other games OW cant survive on this model without a healthy player base or matches wont happen. Considering everyone can now see its just a worse OW1 and not gonna do anything exciting that doesnt requiring micropaying I think its just gonna stay on a downward spiral til it equals OW1 at its most dead or worse.

OW2's player count has gone up every month since November.

Is there a non-Blizzard source to that because Im unwilling to believe anything they say about OW in a positive light ever again. I could believe there being a lot of FOMO players still, but now that theyve shown theres nothing to separate OW2 from 1 other than paid cosmetics and mostly hated new stuff I wouldnt be surprised if it looks like OW1s most dead after a year or two. Theres basically nobody left who feels positive about this game

what a joke

I can see the player count going up since free to play happened, but are they PROFITING from it? I just don't see that, at least, more than they would have with OW1

I can see someone buying a costume pack, but..usually they don't do any much more than that from what I've seen

and these people don't tend to stick around to buy any more than that either

PeaceFrog posted...

But how can the game make money if they don't have any players

whales

beep beep

Dang, this is a massive bummer, my most looked forward to game for years, besides TotK.

That talent system and slightly randomly generated replayable content, sounded so fun. I super enjoy the PVE modes but just needed a little bit of progression to spice it up.

I have a feeling this is partially due to the "return to office" stuff in the last couple months, and a lot of people quitting from that. I heard WoW just had to cancel a lot of ideas they were working on for upcoming patches as well.

I mean obviously it wasn't going well in the first place, since it's been taking them years and years, and obviously there's all the other Blizzard setbacks too.

It sounds like it was internally canceled last year and they're just announcing the cancellation now.

I'm shocked they formally announced it instead of just never referencing it again.

I'm shocked they didn't formally announce it alongside a new LGBTQ character.

they're rolling out a pride collection about it, don't worry
https://twitter.com/Blizzard_Ent/status/1658515697360678912?s=20

MacArrowny posted...

It sounds like it was internally canceled last year and they're just announcing the cancellation now.

Yup. Cancelled before they even released the game, while they were still promoting it.

AriaOfBolo posted...

they're rolling out a pride collection about it, don't worry
https://twitter.com/Blizzard_Ent/status/1658515697360678912?s=20

Lmao the pink letters spell out "LIAR".

Epyo posted...

I have a feeling this is partially due to the "return to office" stuff in the last couple months, and a lot of people quitting from that. I heard WoW just had to cancel a lot of ideas they were working on for upcoming patches as well.

Lol no. Blizzard is just trash now. Dont give them that much credit

Leafeon13N posted...

Lol no. Blizzard is just trash now. Dont give them that much credit

Plus this was cancelled before OW2 even launched

AriaOfBolo posted...

they're rolling out a pride collection about it, don't worry
https://twitter.com/Blizzard_Ent/status/1658515697360678912?s=20

this shirt is fire tho, def would've worn it before the company imploded

I'm uninformed, isn't overwatch 2 just a free upgrade from overwatch? Is it different than another game releasing a 2.0 patch?

GTM posted...

I'm uninformed, isn't overwatch 2 just a free upgrade from overwatch? Is it different than another game releasing a 2.0 patch?

Essentially, they released a new game so they could revamp the monetization, lied that it was to add a PVE mode(this was canceled before it released) and then deleted access to the original

also they said OW1 would run at the same time as OW2 so people wouldn't get the new changes forced on them, essentially nearly advertising as OW1 multiplayer OW2 PVE

then they closed OW1, forcing the changes on everyone

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

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/3/4/AABtbFAAEfe-.jpg

So the explanation here is the story campaign is still going to be in the game, just not the MMO-style "do missions over and over to level up your character" concept.

So is this bad messaging? Or just more lies? Which one of these were people looking forward to the most when OW2 was announced?

There's no universe in which that was worded the way it was and it took this long to correct, definitely a face saving attempt.

Imagine claiming you put the community and game first in your fake apology statement.

It's amazing how much Overwatch has been fumbled, and how terrible Blizzard in general has been managed.

Diablo 5 is probably going to be the tipping point depending on how it shakes out.

Diablo 5? In 2034?

Are we only on Diablo 4? I haven't paid attention to that franchise in forever.

Blizzard is already completely unrecoverable in any case without nuking them to the foundations and rebuilding.

Also, this is interesting...

To give you some context for this change, I'd like to talk about the past and the origins of Team 4. The Overwatch team was founded in the wake of a cancelled game at Blizzard called Project Titan. That game had many facets, but at its heart, it was an FPS MMO. The Overwatch team, especially at its inception, considered itself an MMO development team. As we transitioned away from that original concept and started creating Overwatch, we included plans to one day return to that scope. We had a crawl, walk, run plan. Overwatch was the crawl, a dedicated version of PvE was the walk, and an MMO was the run. It was built into the DNA of the team early on, and some of us considered that final game a true realization of the original vision of Project Titan.
When we launched Overwatch in 2016, we quickly started talking about what that next iteration could be. Looking back at that moment, it's now obvious that we werent as focused as we should have been on a game that was a runaway hit. Instead, we stayed focused on a plan that was years old. Work began on the PvE portion of the game and we steadily continued shifting more and more of the team to work on those features.

So Overwatch 1 was basically the beta for the planned MMO-style game they wanted to do instead?? Almost everyone knows about the history of Project Titan, but it's news I think that they never stopped holding a torch for that concept. That said, the leaks and rumors of "Overwatch 2" have been there for ages, long, long before it was ever announced... Yeesh.

Basically they're Foernite if they'd kept internally prioritizing the default survival mode.

98% of my excitement for the PvE was the individual hero talent trees, so yeah, it's cancelled

An anonymous insider source shared some info about the cancellation. Might take it with a grain of salt, since it's from the word of a third party and it's uncertain how much of it is true, but apparently there's confidence in the information:

https://youtu.be/Nbpvq8k9gj8?t=146

Some take away quotes:

"the cancellation was, quote, 'a 1000% upper management/exec issue"

"the decision to scrap the PvE was very much a decision motivated by Blizzard's profit margins, and that the success of Diablo on mobile, reportedly making over 2 million dollars a day, shifted the expectations of the higher-ups of the company"

"management kept starving the teams of resources without shifting the expectations to compensate, meaning when the time came to cut loose the PvE it was 'technically' because the devs 'couldn't meet their deadlines'. [..] Although it was once possible to finish the project, management eventually made it impossible"