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Overwatch 2 director addresses review bombing on Steam

Draugoth

Gold Member
overwatch-2-g-1280x720.jpg


The director of Overwatch 2 has addressed the review bombing the game has been receiving on Steam since its release on the platform last week.

The game launched on Steam last Thursday and, at the time of writing, has just passed 150,000 user reviews, which Steam says are “overwhelmingly negative”.

Steam’s stats say that only around 9% of the user-submitted reviews are positive, with many players taking the opportunity to criticise the game’s free-to-play structure and its ditching of the much-hyped Hero missions.

In a post on the Overwatch blog, Aaron Keller acknowledged the response, and says he understands the reasoning behind it.

We also launched on Steam last week, and, although being review-bombed isn’t a fun experience, it’s been great to see lots of new players jump into Overwatch 2 for the first time. Our goal with Overwatch 2 has been to make the game more accessible than ever for more people than ever before. Many of the reviews on Steam mention the cancellation of the much larger component of PvE that was announced in 2019 as one of their primary reasons for dissatisfaction with the game. I get that. That announcement was about an ambitious project that we ultimately couldn’t deliver.
 

Arsic

Loves his juicy stink trail scent
They don’t care. The player count went up and revenue likely did too lol.
 

Vox Machina

Banned
Regardless of the RPG-style PvE campaign cancellation I still have a ton of fun with the game. It's firmly in my shooter-game rotation along with Halo Infinite and CoD: MW2 at the moment. The new game mode Flashpoint is really fun too.
 

Corian33

Member
I think it really speaks to poor leadership at Blizzard when they have these huge budgets, massive teams, years of development time, and under deliver on one game after another.

What it really says is that the focus is on how to make money, and there is no clear vision for any of these games beyond that. It’s how you end up with an abandoned Warcraft 3 remaster, Diablo 4 $15 armor sets but no end game, and a sequel to Overwatch where they spent years on development and delivered…???
 

Griffon

Member
As much as I dislike modern Blizzard, sadly OW2 is still the best PvP FPS for me.
The work from the original Kaplan's team is still super amazing and nothing current even comes close to hitting that spot.

I wish another dev could make a better game in that genre. Maybe one of the new studios created by ex-Blizzard staff can tackle this.
 
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BlackTron

Member
As much as I dislike modern Blizzard, sadly OW2 is still the best PvP FPS for me.
The work from the original Kaplan's team is still super amazing and nothing current even comes close to hitting that spot.

I wish another dev could make a better game in that genre. Maybe one of the new studios created by ex-Blizzard staff can tackle this.
I finally played OW2 for the first time. I can't say anything that hasn't already been said by now, but...wow.

First I have to say I REALLY am shocked by how much it's just OW1, but worse. I played 5 or 6 games. All of them were on maps I played on old Overwatch 100 times, except once I got a new map. All my favorite heroes were the same. It was both a pleasing familiarity and a disbelief that this game was "2". Yeah I already know it was the same game but I expected new moves or something...like anything to make it different from 1. Oh wait, there were differences.

The maps had different lighting. I slightly preferred the old version. The music was tweaked to make it "new". I slightly preferred the old version. 5v5 also sucks, ETC...I like the core of 1 that is still there and will probably fire it up once in a while because that core of 1 is still good. But it really is just the first game with 1000 bad tweaks made by incompetent people and turned into a MTX title.

It's so similar, it's hard to believe we will get "Overwatch Classic". This is already the same game. They would need to do what they didn't want, split the live service into two parts and fragment everything. It seems like a nightmare. They would have to un-update Overwatch 2 to make it 1, and have Classic run parallel to 2. Even though 2 is just your old OW account with all your skins and everything already in there. If it did happen, everyone would flock to Classic. Then what? Leave Classic the way it was, and only add new modes and updates to 2? Or be in hell figuring out which updates are appropriate for which "version"?

I think this is just the current state of Overwatch, whether you want to call it 2 or not.

Edit: Having played it a bit more the past week. Despite my initial impression of being OW1 with a ton of tiny tweaks that make it worse plus MTX. The magnitude of one big change that breaks the game set in, 5v5. It upsets the whole game balance in a shattering, unfixable way. The core game takes a massive hit from this change, becoming a shell of itself, the entire game balance was based on 6v6, leading them to an entirely broken game where they have no idea what to do but try more random shit and add more gay characters. With the main essence of OW so tarnished, plus the lack of content/lies about pve, plus the switch to mtx scam while overwriting OW1, yeah no wonder about player engagement lol. They completely ruined it. If they bring back 6v6 though, it'll be like, WTF is the difference? Only meaningful change left from 1 other than the store???
 
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I installed and played a couple matches and overall it was mostly the same old Overwatch. The cosmetic prices on the other hand were absolutely ridiculous and many people complained about the removal of free loot boxes. I was hoping to buy a skin for Reinhart as he's my favourite character, but I held off when I saw the amount of Overwatch coins were required.
 

VN1X

Banned
I still can't believe they did away with the end of game stats to see how you did against your team mates. They basically took OW1 and pissed all over it.
It's what happens when you let Resetera people design a competitive multiplayer title but are too insecure to be confronted by the factual information (😱😱😱😱😱) that is provided by a proper scoreboard. Everything needs to be sanitized to the nth degree as to not make Jimmy feel bad when he went 2 - 19 and didn't contribute whatsoever.
 
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Saber

Member
Calls review-bomb while agrees that criticism was against a promise they couldn't deliver...wow big brain

At least its better than call everyone problematic or homophobic.
 

BlackTron

Member
I still can't believe they did away with the end of game stats to see how you did against your team mates. They basically took OW1 and pissed all over it.

I was really confused by the end of game stats, I thought they moved things around and I wasn't reading it right, or something.

Oh.
 

Interfectum

Member
Calls review-bomb while agrees that criticism was against a promise they couldn't deliver...wow big brain

At least its better than call everyone problematic or homophobic.
No doubt that's how they are coping within the studio. Bunch of 'racist' and 'homophobic' assholes on Steam ruined their week.
 

Sethbacca

Member
All review bombing does is prove how useless review aggregation is. A game being review bombed is going to cause me to take any review about it with many grains of salt.
 
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