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.

Most can’t do their own taxes or hold a budget. You expect too much of the average player.

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.

It’s kind of the bare minimum. Nor is it particularly challenging if a small indie dev like those behind deep rock galactic can do the same.

Blizzard knocked it out of the park with steam integration.

Desperation does this. They are so desperatly hoping someone is playing this mess, that they can’t afford to put in even the slightest hurdle.

If only shareholders could see what is happening

They can’t hear over the millions in profit from microtransactions

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.

Activision

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.

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.

Dangerous.

We’re a bit late to do anything about cancel culture tbh