In the flurry of good feelings and vibes around the game's industries newest brand of crack/cocaine: Baldur's Gate 3, it can be easy to slip into a daze of happy feelings where it feels like everything is on the up. But not everyone is wanton to the vapours of powdered oblivion. Some people insist on hovering around the misery of a game they don't like with a fury to let the world know just how much they don't like it. And recently that game has been Blizzard's own... Diablo 4. Wait a minute... that's not the game in the title! Whoops, guess I got this whole debacle mixed up with the other Blizzard property which is going down the public gutter of bad relations headfirst. What I meant to say was... World of Warcraft: Dragonflight! Wait, didn't people like that expansion? Only for the first month? They hate it now? Oh, okay... what I meant to say the whole time was Overwatch. (Wow, Blizzard really aren't the people-pleasers they used to be. Are they?)
Overwatch 2 seemed to never quite shake the bewildered suspicion of a public that were never once sold on the game's necessity. It seemed to be announced at a time when Overwatch 1 was perfectly serviceable for the audience it gathered, speak in vague riddles and disappointing terms about what they might bring to a fresh start, and then famously cancelled the biggest portion of that fresh start game before the game went live and simply kept that to themselves to prevent scuppering their launch month. For 'the people's developers', as they were once known, Blizzard are certainly coming off a lot more down dirty and double-dealing these days. And after that last stunt I think it's safe to say that the wizards at Blizzard have once again managed to poison one of their chief brands irrevocably to the point where it will become unsellable to a wider audience. (Well done team. You've got a ruddy gift for screwing up, ain't ya?)
Now what should have been a moment for the history books has rolled around in the worst possible way as Blizzard, possibly in relation to the recent Microsoft acquisition, has expanded their install base to the most plentiful platform in the world. That's right, as of recently you can download Overwatch 2 and buy it's overpriced skins without having to navigate over to Battlenet- because the thing is on Steam now! Steam, bastion of low-effort asset flip trash which makes everyone else's actual work looks good by comparison. Steam, where the general public are actually given the agency of a choice in that they can actively review a game for it's quality and have that aggregate display prominently beneath the game title. Steam, a place where once-launcher exclusive games come to die.
With the coming of Overwatch 2 a flurry of eager players followed to let known their feelings about everything Blizzard has been up to with Overwatch 2 and to save you the quick jaunt over to the page itself- it isn't pretty. Overwhelming Negative only tells part of the story, the rest comes from the fact that with the number of reviews and the less than 10% of recommendations: Overwatch 2 is one of the lowest rated games on Steam of all time, and whilst a decent number of those downvotes are going to be trend chasers, the trend itself was borne out of genuine frustration from a playerbase that have felt abandoned by their champion. Right now Overwatch 2 is being twisted into a vision that wasn't sold to the players and they're unhappy with it, cue the public critical flogging.
But to come back to the top of the article: is Overwatch 2 really bad to the point of being considered the worst game on Steam? I'm being facetious, obviously, Overwatch 2 is an excellently designed hero-shooter based off the foundations of an industry shaker, the game easily jumps over the hoards of trash that make up 99% of Steam's library. But it has proven a constant disappointment since it's inception, and so it might be argued that the amount of consumer dissatisfaction which Overwatch has drummed up is perhaps among the most severe. And the only reason I would even consider that, amidst the dozens of failure stories that pop out of the games industry every year, is because of how good the base package of the game is, and how squandered all it's hopes and potential appear to be.
Overwatch has been unfulfilled potential ever since it launched that very first time in 2016 with a colourful and lively world brimming with authentic and interesting characters both diverse and distinct- and then explored that world entirely with Team Deathmatches and the odd animation about twice a year. Overwatch is built on such a deep and rich world but the team bitterly refuses to explore and present it to the audience, instead leaving it to theorists and obsessives to draw from the little snippets of overheard dialogue like this is Dark Souls or something equally as morosely and Gothically esoteric. Perhaps this was the one of the biggest reasons why Overwatch 2 sounded so appealing. The original game felt emotionally tuned out to a casual audience and those casuals yearned for a chance to actually get involved with what this game was meant to represent. Engage with those themes, meet these characters! And then Blizzard just cancelled all plans to do that when they killed Single Player ambitions.
Of course, to their mind this was done towards the health of the game, because the original vision of a single player/ multiplayer hybrid title was born in a time before Overwatch even launched when the team were apparently working up to >shudder< an MMO. (Cursed be the thought!) Somewhere along the way Overwatch became a multiplayer sensation and suddenly all this work that when into creating this gigantic and diverse world primed to be explored and expanded upon felt pointless. Also hard. How could Blizzard possibly devote themselves to seriously pursuing two largely exclusive gaming demographics at the same time? They didn't have the sort of man power to commit to that, and building up their studio was out of the question. (Because it always is.)
In killing off their Single player ideals, Overwatch 2 can instead focus on bringing the multiplayer offerings up to scratch after years of them being underserved. (Which makes literally no sense to me considering the fact that the decision to cull the single player was apparently made long before launch- but we've had this discussion before, haven't we?) In a way, Blizzard have decided to cut off a sector of it's audience that they had strung along for years by now, and this pushback is the messy break-up being broadcasted all over for the world to see. In essence, the hardcore players who have actually been with Overwatch all this time must be quietly thankful that Blizzard have refocused their way- but I guess this is another instance of a once open and welcoming franchise settling into an insular niche.
Overwatch 2 certainly isn't deserving of the hate it's currently receiving long term- but the team did blatantly lie upon release and lead on it's consumer base far too long before telling them they weren't interested in having us as customers anymore. And as for their other design choices for Overwatch 2? They pretty much preclude the arcade-game spirit which made the original Overwatch such an original and fresh brand in favour for the generic battlepass unlock-hero guff that every hardcore leaderboard shooter and their mothers is doing. Overwatch 2 isn't dissolving into a terrible sludge of awful, it's merely losing it's charm, uniqueness and appeal as it evolves out of childhood into it's moody pockmarked teens. Here's praying for a bit of maturity once adulthood rolls around for 3.
No comments:
Post a Comment