https://www.ign.com/articles/overwatch-2-engagement-and-player-investment-is-declining-activision-blizzard-admits?
Activision Blizzard admits in its recent earnings report that the engagement and player investment in Overwatch 2 is declining.
I was an extremely avid fan of OW1. Thousand of hours poured into it.
OW2? Just less than 100 hours played.
This is my subjective opinions
It’s almost like Blizzard is trying to use the same monetization strategies for every game to drive profits above all else. It’s annoying.
Numbers 1 and 4 are just baffling to me. Blizzard's strengths have always been (or at least previously were) game balancing and writing interesting stories with compelling and complex characters. Overwatch 1 was a departure from the writing front, but Overwatch 2 seems to be where they just chucked it all out the window.
Their main story writing (not side quests or side-characters) have increasingly read like Mary Sue fics from FanFiction.Net.
Whomever is their main writer seems kind of bad, so I wouldn’t bet on them writing anything decent in terms of story.
I still play from time to time cause a friend, for whatever reason, only plays OW2. I dunno how anyone still plays and has fun. Playing 5v5 now, you can tell it was the easiest way to deal with difficult problems. It doesn't work, the team with the better tank wins the match almost always.
More than half the quick play matches now have revolving players. Even Comp has a ridiculous number of leavers. And nothing is being done about it cause there's barely anyone playing anymore. Balancing, I don't know what happened to it but it's like they're pushing out whatever.
But you can always find new skins and items in the shop, as bad and useless as 99% of them are.
Across all platforms I probably have around 3000 hrs on OW1, but looks like they're letting OW2 die cause they can't or won't put in the work necessary to make it good again.
And not the mention the insane toxicity. If I reported toxic chat in ow1, I always got a notice a day or two later. But literally from ow2, none of my reports have come back. And I've reported some pretty disgusting chats, racism, sexism etc. And nothing. At all. I know the notices are still a thing cause I've seen screenshots of people getting them. But I also noticed that generally it was the pc players. I don't think I saw a screenshot from console players.
And I hate that crossplay is now a thing. Yeah cool, our me against like 1 playstation player and 4 pc players in comp. That's really a fair match when my team is either all PS or one pc player.
And the volume of hacking and bots now is ridiculous. Again, no reports come back. Even on rein with an aim bot. It was so bad the dude would spin when he was near more than one character. Literally spinning round like a fucking Beyblade... But sure blizz, that's fine.
6v6 and two cap maps were awesome. Now I'm lucky if 2 cap pop up in arcade. Sigh. And they promised ow1 would stay, right until just before release then they trolled and ow2 was forced onto us.
OW2 was just a cash grab cleverly marketed. They said they would never add a battle pass or sell heroes in Overwatch. In order to keep their promise they had to make a new game.
New game? But won't everyone stay on OW1? Yes. So they made the new 'game' a mandatory patch. They wouldn't get away with just patching in a store though, so they had to change things to justify it, which is where they started blind firing on random things and the promise of pve.
The game was made for 6v6, it was balanced by the end largely for 2 tanks, 2 damage and 2 support, even though the original design philosophy was to be constantly changing heroes to counter the enemies, the role lock kinda worked well (notbperfect, I think they needed to keep 1 rank and allow people to swap roles mid match) and the balance was good, well as good as it can be from blizzard.
OW2 deleted a tank spot to make it 5v5 and this completely ruined all balance the game had. They randomly changed heroes that didn't need touching, once you start fucking with core heroes that the game was balanced around, then you know its over. They removed mccrees flashbang, citing "there's too much CC in the game", but then at the same time changing orisa to have even more disgusting CC. There's so many examples of shitty changes, all made for one reason, to make each hero feel strong to the user, in order to sell skins.
The game doesn't need new heroes, it didn't need them since after Ana was released, but they wanted to sell them, so they create some strong bs and whack it in the store and in a battle pass, its new, it's strong, people are gonna wanna buy it, they cant help themselves.
They removed random systems, tried hiding others, they changed maps randomly, removed the 2CP mode only to replace it with something far worse and they destroyed the UI across the board. The game lost all its charm.
All to sell skins and battle passes. The worst thing? It was a success. People love spending $25 on skins that they only see the arms of 90% of the time.
They could have released a PVE DLC, I imagine they wanted to, but others at blizzard had other ideas. Either way, blizzard is gone, the good devs moved on or were involved in controversy. Its a skeleton crew remaining, pushing lifeless updates to the game. Overwatch is dead.
Hmmm who would have thought that if you don’t follow through with promises (pve) then people won’t choose you over others
Blizzard sure did fuck around and find out? I bought a new GPU a few months ago. It came with a free OW2 battle pass. Guess what never got redeemed? And I had hundreds of hours in OW1.
I deleted my Blizzard account after the Hong Kong fiasco and have not found a good reason to create a new account for any of their games.
Didn't delete the account, but uninstalled everything after the sex abuse lawsuit. Don't miss anything from it.
OW2 was a scam, everyone who worked on it needs canned at the top. The only good battle pass is Deep Rock Galactic’s
OW1 was possibly my most played game ever. Something in the range of 2,000+ hours. I played OW2 for maybe 4 hours, before I called it quits permanently. They really messed up by not following through on the original plans for OW2 and doubly so by killing OW1.
It is very satisfying to read news about a declining Ow2.
They killed my all time favourite game, that I maybe played most ever since. But 5v5 and f2p where such bad ideas. Season 1 started, I played it one more week after and quited. I miss it, but I now there is no fun in this game for me.
Looking forward to new bad news about the game.
Man I really miss the first year of OW1. Thinking back it really reminded me of the halo 3 era of bungie. Constant dev updates, lots of content to sink your teeth into(for the first while at least)
The gameplay was relatively solid overall but the things that ultimately killed it for me was the big character changes that completely changed how certain characters played. That long content drought, and the playerbase as it became super sweaty. I was on the verge of going diamond but then dropped it after I had a full afternoon of toxic players. Then after the Hong Kong situation I didn't want to play the game anymore.
I really miss this kind of competitive game but I'm not sure there's anything out there for me at the moment. I think my biggest thing is finding a game that I jive with and then somehow ignoring toxic players