I love the reviews and comments that are not reviews. All it does is give them free advertising while ignoring the real issues. Like OW2 engine performance issues, removal of OW server locations, or even admitted rigged match making to push sales…
Overwatch 2 deserves to be criticized a lot. But this kind of review bombing is dangerous. Now it happened to a game a lot of people (rightfully) dislike. But what if it happens to another game that doesn’t deserve it? Just because it shares different political views or ideologies? Or because it doesn’t include an option for chinese language (it already happens)? Only kids can cheer at something like this, sorry.
I would disagree that public reviews like this are dangerous for games. This is basically the same way reddit or any other social media platform works. Aside from the fact that this is still advertising for OW2, even if it is negative, People will play what they want to play regardless of politics- a là harry Potter game or atomic hearts. Similarly, in the court of public opinion you are allowed to engage in whatever discourse you want, and embrace whatever ideas you’d like. That doesn’t exempt you from the consequences of espousing ideas that are counter to the norm, but it does mean that you’d better be damn sure you mean what you say.
In other news, look at no man’s sky or FF14! Public opinion is far from inflexible, if a dev is willing to put the time and effort into making something good out of a previously universally hated product.
Gamers deserve a good part of that blame also. Splitgate was doing amazing before Infinite drop. Then when it came killed both games. Gamers didn’t go back and support Splitgate. Or when we have things like Operation Harsh Doorstop and people just ignore it hoping again a triple A studio game will save them. I really hope Battlebits lasts.
It was good at release but it’s gone down the shitter hard recently.
The main thing is that they announced and charged people for Overwatch 2 which was supposed to have a whole new PvE mode and shit. But then PvE was cancelled. But then brought back on a shittier form as additional paid DLC.
Then we have the fact that Overwatch 2 made it harder to get skins by playing.
THEN they added new characters BUT you can only get the new characters by finishing the battle pass. To quote, “New heroes will debut for everyone in Overwatch 2 at Tier 55 on the free track of the Battle Pass. They’ll unlock immediately on the premium Battle Pass track.”
So they made the game shittier to try and extract more money from players
I will preface this by saying I still love overwatch, and I think it can be a very enjoyable game if you enjoy competitive shooters and don’t give a shit about cosmetics. The game costs 10dollars every 3 months or so if you want all gameplay mechanics at release.
Ow1 was expected to be a huge failure, designed to recoup costs from a different project that was never released. Because of this it sold for a flat fee and gave out lootboxes like candy. It ended up being a massive smash hit and a few years in they announce ow2, just as some of the competitive limitations of the game started to show up.
Ow2 got delayed a bunch and ow1 stagnated without new content. When ow2 finally released it had a rocky start, it went f2p and it also didn’t deliver on some of the promises and marketing hype. Most of the beloved public faces of the devs left the company and They removed a number of features from the old game, and it was initially quite buggy although I think for the most part they have all been readilded by now (only thing i can think thats missing is lfg, which was frankly aweful in ow1). The cosmetics were given out much less freely and have absurd prices. They also made new heros cost money (although during their season of release you could grind abiut 20hrs to get it, or wait until the season ends and get it in a few hours). They made some controversial game design decisions including reducing the number of players per team by 1, and removing some cosmetic features that were mostly ignored in ow1.
The biggest of which was a pve mode, which some people extrapolated to believe was going to be a whole single player game. For some this was the primary reason to wait for ow2. This was heavily scaled back, although this season we are now seeing the remnants of what that looked like a few years late and without some of the biggest features (like skill trees).
All this happened while blizz was having a massive sexual misconduct scandal, which obviously garnered a lot of negative sentiment, but also made the lawyers lock down all communications (ow1 had a very open and informal set of communication with the community), shook up their dev teams, forced them to rename a character (he was named after one of the rapists) and made them the victim of several ddos attacks.
There’s also a bunch of stuff with the pro scene that I dont follow much, but essentially in ow1 they monopolized the pro scene which they had total control over, they forced teams to use country / city names instead of the standard egaming organization. This pro scene has, by all accounts been a big failure and now they are paying the engaging orgs to leave the league so they can kill it entirely.
As much as I agree with the communities disdain for Overwatch 2. Blizzard knocked it out of the park with steam integration. No launcher, just sign into your account and it links them and you have your friends lists available. I hope that blizzard keeps this up and releases more games through steam this way.
But the difference is that blizzard moved from bnet to steam and companies like Ubisoft/ea tend to make steam a launcher launcher. DRG devs (rock and stone!) Build up from nothing with steam so it’s easier to convince them to do it. They didn’t start with a launcher so making one doesn’t make sense.
The problem is a large portion of the “target audience” are literal CHILDREN who not only don’t have their own money but can’t think on this level & don’t understand that they are being scammed.
There is also a lot of indifferent people as well. The vast majority of people online complain about these companies, but they are a minority of players.
If people keep buying those games, that means that they are okay with the model, or the model isn’t shitty enough yet.
But it’s naive to be in this echo chamber thinking that your opinion applies to the majority of the player base.
It is now objectively a worst product for the people who paid full-price. They retroactively made all the previous skins very hard to obtain, and you no longer get new heroes without paying or grinding. That’s it, that’s Overwatch 2. Everything else has been canned.
Exactly this. People are so blinded by their bubbles that they think that these companies are actually having a hard time. And every single time they go like: “How often do we have to teach you this lesson?!”
There.is.no.lesson! This whole BS works. They have never made more money.
Continue to vote with your wallet. Don’t support crooks, throw your dollars at companies like Larian and hopefully the others will follow suit and start making good games.
I did too, but I got back in when they gave you a pretty easy achievement-based unlock the next season after the hero drops. I don’t love it but it means you’ll get the heroes at most 1 season late if you’re not active enough to complete the free-tier battle-pass.
So it’s not nice but at least there’s no FOMO. It’s more like unlocking weapons in TF2 in terms of difficulty than true “pay to win”.
To me the big pisser is that the OW1 gameplay of 2-2-2 is no longer available. 5 players is not large enough team for a game with a respawn timer and slow rollouts - losing one player (especially the tank) means the teamfight is over. That much pressure is just bad gameplay for a game that was originally supposed to be an approachable take on TF2.
If they wanted smaller teams, they needed to rework how costly deaths are in teamfights. And OP tanks was just a dumb idea altogether.
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