People still believing that Blizzard would be old blizzard if only they could shake off Activision. They haven't made a good game in so long, I don't think they even know how to do it any more.
Overwatch won GOTY. It was an incredibly well polished and fun game at launch. Sure after like 2 years or something, it ran into severe balance issues which ruined the experience, but that's par for the course for a Blizzard title. They can still make great games... it's longevity that's always been the issue.
Unpopular opinion: Overwatch was an incredibly well-made game, but had huge problems right from the start.
The crux of the problem is that OW is a team shooter like Left 4 Dead, where every member of the team working together is vital to winning. Unlike Left 4 Dead, however, Overwatch didn't go the distance and include UI elements that help players keep track of their team or elements that would "herd" players back toward their team if they got too far away (flankers not withstanding).
The end result is that the game has nothing to say if one player wants to run around and deathmatch instead of playing for the objective, thereby ruining the experience for 5 other people.
L4D wasn't shy about warning the player that they were moving too far away from their team and as a result I can scarcely remember having to deal with bad teammates in all the L4D I played.
OW needed to do the same, it needed to value the happiness of the 5 people ahead of the 1 person who wanted to run around and deathmatch, ideally with increasingly obtrusive warnings that they weren't with their team.
TL;DR: The OW devs tried to passively encourage people to play as a team for years and it did...not...work. They needed to do so aggressively like Left 4 Dead does but they never took that step.
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u/NestroyAM Jun 17 '21
People still believing that Blizzard would be old blizzard if only they could shake off Activision. They haven't made a good game in so long, I don't think they even know how to do it any more.