Lol. After all these years they’re thinking of rolling back the 5v5 changes. To quote someone from Reddit:
PVE was dropped, heroes are free again, and now 6v6 is back. Blizzard spent the last couple of years turning overwatch 2 back into Overwatch 1.
Edit: See also the developer’s blog post about this, which goes into great detail explaining their decisions over the year and how we got here. Really worth a read if you are (or were) an OW player.
Next they’ll drop the “2” in the name and went full circle.
It was to disguise their excuse to add macrotransactions. “It’s a new game! Not a shit patch!”
Well, they also sell weapon skins that cost as much as the entire game used to cost. So I’m sure they are just trying to do damage control while also not changing their monetization.
I don’t personally mind microtransactions as long as they are cosmetic only. What I do mind is how matchmaking got terribly bad.
I don’t mind it if the game was always free to play. They gotta make their money somehow if that’s the case. The problem I have with Overwatch and the microtransactions is that they went free to play after they already made a fuck ton of money off of loot boxes and the fact that you used to actually have to buy the game. It’s just a cash cow and gameplay (including matchmaking, like you said) has suffered considerably. Not only that but they charge as much money as entire games for skins. Games like Overwatch when it first came out.
I don’t mind microtransactions in free to play games, I really don’t. It’s just the method they are using is just blatantly greedy and targeted for whales that will pay anything for fear of missing out.
I am with you on that one. I was speaking from the point of view of someone who didnt buy ow1 because I only got into the game after ow2 so I completely forgot it wasnt free before. Its sad how nowadays you cannot ever have “complete” games. Most games just few unpolished and unfinished and they just throw things at it trying to make money. Which for me is so ironic because I think ow has a solid gameplay mechanic - it just gets completely shadowed by all the financial decisions.
I stopped playing shortly after OW2 came out. They killed my favorite role (tank) by throwing one of the tanks away, making the tank role miserable to play since the team fights were always on my shoulders. Then, on top of that, they unbalanced everything even more, and had to update maps for 5v5, forever removing some of them from the game.
That was all after the slap in the face that was taking away a game I paid money for to replace it with a broken, microtransaction-ridden experience.
I might be willing to look past the microtransaction BS and play again if they bring 6v6 with some of the original, unmodified OW1 maps.
The biggest issue is that IMO, even nowadays balance isn’t remotely as good as it was before the change, owing to the massive imbalance on all ends the 5v5-switch introduced, and them only working through that at a glacial pace. But even more so, this is annoying because of how it essentially undermines the reason they did this.
Sure, the queue time argument still stands. Yeah. But on a balance level, “Double tanks were problematic for game balance” is a bit of a moot point in hindsight. Yeah, they were, sure. Less so than 5v5 is, it turns out.
Overwatch was so fun, the devs just kept adding and changing shit that we didn’t need. OW2 is a complete distaster though, they can keep their predatory macrotransactions, just revert to the OW1 patch for everything else.
What macrotransactions? The game is free and the only this that’s monetized is cosmetics.
Yeah I realize that looks dumb now. I was thinking of microtransactions that affect gameplay. You know, the important kind.
You have to buy the battlepass to use the newest characters. And the cosmetics used to be free.
They monetized competitive gameplay elements and cosmetics that were supposed to come with the $60 I spent. Both of these are microtransactions.
They actually changed that a while back, new heroes aren’t in the battlepass any more, everyone gets them for free. I don’t know how that works with the “new player experience” where you needed to win games to unlock the base heroes on a new account though.
Blizz really went downhill after they sold out.
I‘m pretty sure that the Overwatch 2 debacle started before blizzard was sold to MS
