Two more things I find baffling:
-The fact they are finally removing lootboxes only to replace them for something worse (20 dollar skins and a battlepass to keep the addicts playing)
-Their development times being atrocious, your sequel which was initially advertised as having a co-op component is launching without it, come the fuck on. Six years and your game has barely changed.
The last one is the most baffling to me since blizzard isn't some small indie company, even valve realised their development times were atrocious and decided to correct that after the shitshow that was artifact and L4D3 AND THAT WAS OVER 4 YEARS AGO. Even paladins, which was mocked as an overwatch ripoff by all the blizzard fanboys and idiots parroting the opinions of youtubers, managed to have constant updates.
It's not baffling at all if you consider Blizzard, Overwatch, and Overwatch 2.
Overwatch 1 is an
extremely limited game - to a point where they have to force a 2 tank/2 heal/2 DPS meta on even casual games. Making new heroes is extremely tedious because they all have to fit int one of three roles and there's an extremely strong meta in place. Overwatch cannot even support (or be played in) a deathmatch mode. No FFA, no TDM, no PvE, nothing besides a
single line of objectives in a straight line. The game doesn't support any strategy besides team fighting and there's no major harassment that you can do to an enemy (you cannot destroy their teleporter if they have one, you cannot steal or siphon ultimate charge) that matters. Valorant, Apex, Counter Strike, TF2, Battlefield, Call of Duty and basically every other game in existence has way more modes - with some of those "side modes" being deeper than Overwatch is.
Despite all of this - Overwatch was a big success, most likely the last gasp of goodwill for Blizzard as a company - but the money came pouring in on what was literally a salvage project. Jeff Kaplan eventually literally performed alchemy and turned shit into gold for the company. Blizzard wants
more money and decides a bunch of features loosely promised for OW1 (PVE content, more skins, etc) will be in the sequel - but the issue shows up
instantly -
what the fuck would you possibly do in Overwatch 2 that you couldn't just do in an Overwatch 1 Expansion. You can't take Overwatch 1 and suddenly make it a deeper and more dynamic game without changing what Overwatch is. You can't change the roles, you can't change the characters, so what do you do? The magic was already spent making Overwatch - and even then a lot of the "groundwork" was taken from the earlier "Titan" project.
Well, for a string of game directors of OW the answer was simple - quit the company and never look back. Each time it happened it set development back 6-18 months as the new director then has to try and find new ideas of OW2, realize there's nothing, and then quit. They couldn't figure it out and frankly still haven't. The only "drastic" change for OW2 is changing from 6v6 to 5v5 - which isn't drastic enough to even justify an expansion. I can scarcely imagine how many beta builds have been made, tested, and deemed incredibly unfun and thrown in the trash for OW's PVE content. The balance is so tight on OW the PVE content would
drastically change in difficulty if your "tank role" player picked someone like DVA instead of Reinhardt - and if your tank is extremely good vs extremely bad as a player will drastically change any hypothetical PVE experience. You also cannot design encounters around abilities because there are
35 heroes with different abilities - you can't assume that every "party" will have a Mercy in it because you can pick other characters. It's an extremely
stupid thing to promise to release without having anything resembling a proof of concept first.
You might think "well what's the benefit of releasing OW2 if it's so feature bare and unfinished" - well, that's how OW1 released and it made them piles of money. Of course they're going to try that shit twice. Overwatch 2 is a salvage game, just like Overwatch 1 was - only this time Overwatch 2 is salvaging Overwatch 1 instead of "Project Titan". The people making financial decisions feel they can shit out OW2 and the "core audience" will just eat it up, aggressive monetization be damned and honestly? After Diablo - Immortal made ungodly amounts of money - I think they're right.
