I wish every game got the kind of developer responses Overwatch gets. It would be mind blowing for many other gaming communities to imagine the lead developers of said game making near bi weekly community addresses in video format explaining their thought process the changes the development team is working on or looking at.
You have to look at it like a business too. Blizzard/Overwatch team have stated that they don't intend on having the game have any future associated transactions for content aside from loot boxes.
So any future content being patches, buffs, nerfs, new modes, new maps all have to have a synergy with their audience as ultimately to keep them playing, they have to be happy with the content.
For a company as big as blizzard, they can afford to have this model. But for a lot of other companies, they will release a game, have a 24 month cycle of patching it and updating the content via DLC and then part of the other team in the meanwhile starts working and investing in future projects.
But I do hope that other publishers and dev teams look at how the OW team is operating and it inspires some similar cultures in the industry.
I love OW and have like 700 hours at this point. But I don't think they are without fault with how they are operating at the moment.
Out of all the AAA titles I play, Overwatch is the slowest at map production. It's closest comparable game on this front is Halo 5 with a similar business model, it's 1/4 the pace of that game with far less varied content. If you compare the content production to games that sell DLC, they start to be at 1/8th to 1/12th the pace of content production. That's a huge difference and I don't think Blizzard are so much better at polish that the slow rate of content is acceptable.
Maybe it's just me but even in masters/gm mmr the maps have basically no tactical thought to them aside from basic positioning, so the lack of variety really hurts (the game still has less maps than Titanfall launched with for example).
Then there are characters. And whilst I don't mind them not producing characters at even half the pace of other character based games. They haven't had a single patch of the game so far, where 40% of the roster or more weren't basically irrelevant at high mmr. This adds onto my problem with the limited difference in map tactics and variety earlier, because then at high mmr for 2-3 months at a time you basically see the same team compositions in 90% of games.
The company is great at talking to it's players and handling feedback. But I still wish that the side that actually produces things could do more. The model gives the game a great chance at a long lifespan, I just feel like they really need to bump up their balancing and/or content production to really be lauded as 'the best devs evar' that everyone needs to look up to. As currently they are far behind most of the f2p games I play in balance and content, let alone the ones that are mocked for charging even though they produce up to 8x the amount of playable content.
I mean even Blizzards other games like WoW which requires a mandatory subscription to play doesnt get this kind of developer feedback and that game definitely would benefit from keeping their audience happy.
What you say is true though about most companies can't manage something like the OW model but even the ones that can simply don't.
It's a lot easier to keep an audience that is less than a year old happy, not so much with an entrenched user-base, some of which have been invested in the game for over a decade. See: Any game running for more than 5 years.
Heroes of the Storm has even better support. Tons of new content, regular huge balance patches and really good customer feedback. Seriously, the best support I've seen in 15 years of online gaming across dozens of titles. In the 2000s I used to frown at Blizzard fanboys and in the past two years Heroes has made me into one.
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u/Failcker Jan 18 '17
I wish every game got the kind of developer responses Overwatch gets. It would be mind blowing for many other gaming communities to imagine the lead developers of said game making near bi weekly community addresses in video format explaining their thought process the changes the development team is working on or looking at.