Overwatch 2’s development is going fantastic.
Couldn’t be better.
All you need to do is just ignore a few things like:
- Battle for Azeroth being an absolute shitshow of an expansion due to not taking on player feedback from the beta, and releasing the game as-is to the point where the game’s director had to issue an official apology over how bad the game, and their communication, was.
- Mike Morhaime, one of the original co-founders of Blizzard, decided to bail after 27 years. This was quite telling and certainly hinted at all the problems the studio was experiencing behind the scenes.
- Panel of WoW figureheads being outright assholes to a guy in the audience and insulting his intelligence by saying that “he thought he would want WoW classic, but he really doesn’t” only to release WoW Classic not long after to a fair bit of success.
- Diablo Immortal sort of screwing over long-time fans of the series, a PC series mind you, to shill
to the international mobile phone gaming market with the infamous quote from Wyatt Cheng: “‘Do you guys not have phones?!” - Blizzard then decided to kill off the entire pro scene that had developed around their MOBA, Heroes of the Storm. With every pro team, every player, every person who worked on the series, like the casters, production staff, and support staff finding out just before the 2019 series was expected to start – “Oh yeah, you guys don’t have jobs and we’re putting the game you’ve dedicated your careers to on life support. LOL soz guys about the late notice. Our bad”. No prior communication, they just pulled the plug, and screw you all, I guess.
- Blizzard employees getting the sack over not being team players when, in fact, they were subjected to such abuse that many were diagnosed with major depression and severe anxiety attacks due to their working environment.
- Blizzard letting go of around 800 staff while their CEO raked in big million-dollar bonuses year after year after maintaining that they can’t pay their employees. Then, they banned a Hearthstone pro for having the audacity to be upset that Blizzard laid off his wife. All heart, guys.
- Another co-founder, Franky Pearce, stepped down after 28 years. I mean, you can get why. It’d be hard to
watch your baby develop such an amazing reputation only to then become the drunk, rapist, frat boy of the video game development world. - The Blitzchung Hearthstone controversy that they were forced to backtrack on once they realised that the people playing and buying their games were actual humans who felt empathy.
- Warcraft 3: Reforged. So far potentially the worst re-release of a video game in the history of the universe. And subject to some pretty flagrant false advertising. You know how ostriches stick their head in the sand when something bad happens? Well, Blizzard pretty much did that in response to the outcry on how bad Reforged was.
- Another example of how working at Blizzard resembled being in a frat house came out when they finally sacked long-time WoW developer Alex Afrasiabi because he couldn’t stop sexually assaulting people at the office. I’m glad they sacked him but they took their own sweet time doing so.
- Then there was that thing were the employees at Blizzard were sort of up in arms after sharing with each other their pay-scales and finding out how much they were getting screwed over, while CEO, Bobby K., was raking in the big bucks.
- The super big one for Overwatch when Jeff Kaplan left Blizzard. Literally, the last strand of goodwill the company, and the game in general had, left the studio. Don’t forget, Jeff Kaplan is the reason you didn’t have to buy each hero in Overwatch 1, and was the biggest voice in the room advocating for skins to carry over to the second game without having to buy them again. He was the only reason people still tolerated Blizzard and he had enough of the BS and left.
- Overwatch 2 gets changed to 5v5, eliminating the “off-tank” role, and devastating the established pro scene and pro players that have dedicated their professional lives to the game and that role in a change that, really, no one asked for. And by the reaction of the internet at large, no one really likes either. It seems like the sequel is a straight downgrade for pro and casual players alike, but with a story mode.
- Then the release date of Overwatch 2 gets very little information or vaguely swept under the carpet. With the result that Overwatch 1 has been abandoned without any content or meaningful patches for longer.
- Then there’s the most recent, the most obvious one, and the one you’re most likely to be familiar with. The State of California filed a lawsuit and suing Blizzard after a two-year investigation into the disgusting amount of sexual assault and harassment cases that they let slide for forever and a day – to the point where TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED of their OWN employees wrote an open letter condemning the horrendous behaviour Blizzard leadership knew about and turned a blind eye to.
But if you ignore all that stuff, put it in a little corner in your mind, and pretend that the last four or five years haven’t made Blizzard’s existence a terrible burden on humanity, well, then the development of Overwatch 2 is going great!
They’ve just hit one little snafu in that sources inside the development team for Overwatch 2 have let slip that the game’s launch isn’t likely to occur until 2023. Talk about missing your launch window.
The actual quote is: “From what I can gather, a launch in 2022 no longer seems likely”.
Now, at face value, this might seem like a really bad thing, especially for those who are really looking forward to the game. But in truth, considering the changes they’ve made to Overwatch, there doesn’t really seem to be much to look forward to, so no biggie.
But apart from that…
DEVELOPMENT OF OVERWATCH 2 IS GOING GREAT.
Credits
| Program | Founding Writers |
| Author | Luke Cowling |
| YouTuber | Luke Cowling |
| Publisher | MGN |
| Game | Overwatch 2 |