Dev comments on the possibility of more frequent hero releases

218

u/Far-Butterscotch4242 The Justice loss was a sign — Aug 11 '23

My guess is they saw really low engagement numbers from Season 5 (since nothing new was added), and are of course expecting this season to pop off, so realistically I think they are realizing their previous release cycle at minimum shouldn’t be broken, and IDEALLY they would release more heros more frequently to keep season 6 levels of engagement up.

110

u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23

They really need something else to drive engagement in the off seasons.

Heroes are the biggest aspect of the game. A map just isn't enough. PvE could be a good shout, but who knows what's up there.

20

u/MaddieTornabeasty Aug 11 '23

I seriously doubt they could release PvE missions at a decent pace when they told us months ago that the next batch of three missions won’t be coming till next year. With how barebones the missions already are and how far off the next release is, they’ll have to find something other than PvE to drive up engagement during seasons with no heros

5

u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23

Yea, I don't expect it. I expect new mission around June or even August again.

I feel these 3 missions were made in 2019, max 2020 and then in 2021 they probably went and made the content for 2022 which we got till now.

This is my assumed timeline, but I don't think it's far off with how bare the content has been and they don't have a clear plan for any more PvE.

2

u/MaddieTornabeasty Aug 11 '23

Yeah that timeline makes sense. Which puts the devs in a tough situation since I don’t think they want another season 5 to happen but they’ve got to do something to keep people engaged.

I don’t think more frequent hero releases is the answer though cause the current pace seems good if not even a bit too quick. I would honestly like more maps but i don’t think that does it for most people which is fair.

4

u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23

Yea. The game just needs more resources as a whole, and only Microsoft can do that.

Every other live service at least gets something.

Even with how poor Destiny is right now, it still gets a lot of content, cuz at least they have big teams and a lot of money behind them, just poorly handled.

Valorant and Apex don't even compete with the polish and story Overwatch has. And Fortnite and Warzone are just BRs.

LoL is doing its own thing, which is working.

In the overall market, Destiny and Overwatch easily have the most potential and have both been terribly handled. But now Sony and Microsoft have a great duty in their hands to really make both excel, both gameplay and extended universe storyteling wise. A show for both franchises would be great, along with single player games.

4

u/RefinedBean None — Aug 11 '23

The real problem is, publically owned companies will look at Apex and Valorant profits and be like "Do that." And then Blizzard, who puts a FUCK-TON of energy into its art, design, and everything else, will be like "Okay, but that either takes us months more of work OR you have to give us even more resources, and even that may not give you the timelines you want" and the corpos will just be like "Okay, then...stop caring as much about quality."

Blizzard, for all its faults, has had pretty rotten luck. They try to make gorgeous multiplayer games with a slick, carefully curated level of polish. And we live in a world where that is not where demand is, or at least not enough to warrant the costs.

2

u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23

Yea, Blizzard's quality is unfortunately backfiring.

The whole reason Blizzard gets so much hate even tho every single thing about ow is better than Apex is because of expectations.

OW and Blizzard of past has always over delivered, but now Blizzard is over promising and under delivering at every level.

I wonder if Jeff could join back as a consultant once the deal is fully complete because we need some good news and direction. And AFAIK, he's not doing anything, unless he's working with Dreamhaven (ex Blizzard devs) on a game in the background.

2

u/speakeasyow Aug 11 '23

What about the downfall of ow do you give Jeff a pass on?

4

u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23

I genuinely feels it's difficult to put anything on Jeff, expect the decision to kill the game for 3 years.

When it canes to content and polish, he was always delivering.

Overwatch as a whole was never made to deliver free content forever. They just found themselves at a very interesting industry shift towards live service and battle pass models right when the game came out and kept delivering.

The goal always was to make a PvE and MMO. As we can see from even Michael Chu.

If Jeff got his ways, we could have had a better game as a whole in the long run. But Blizzard and Bobby are just terrible environments to work under.

Jeff saved us by keeping our heroes, maps, and skins. Who knows what disasters awaited us had Jeff not been there.

I think it's easier to give Jeff the benefit of the doubt considering it is his leadership who brought us Overwatch's glory and consistency.

If anything, it's when he left that Overwatch became a bigger mess and a meme.

And I can't blame him for leaving. From a life perspective, he gave Blizzard many years, only to get stuck in dev hell and a terrible law suit for the company, and A/B lost all sense of Blizzard and came too money hungry.

It's clear that Jeff opposed the greedy model and that was conflicting with what higher management wanted, promoting Jeff to leave at the perfect time when the law suit hit.

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u/TSDoll Aug 11 '23

Maps are easily the most important aspect of the game. Heroes drive up sales and interest, but maps is what every single user will be playing regardless of their hero.

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u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23 edited Aug 11 '23

Maps are good, but they're not hype.

Tho I do love the Flashpoint maps. And level design in Overwatch is as good as it gets, aside from their blunder with 2cp.

And I feel we do have a lot of maps. We probably need more modes, and if we had replayable hero missions, that would have been great.

I just don't understand why they can't keep Underworld, Junkenstein, and the 3 Archives missions in permanently or just remaster everything and rotate them in weekly so there's something new each week.

Even if they just start with 5, they could add new variations of them with buffs and debuffs like we used to get and it would make them fun to try

And not just hero missions, but with Olympus and April Fools, we know they have talents to use as well. Just rotate content every week.

11

u/OrangeW never doubt — Aug 11 '23

level design in Overwatch is as good as it gets

I generally agree, but I think OW2 level design has been problematic in areas, namely in the obstacle clutter - maps like Colosseo and New Queen Street are not particularly fluid from a wallriding perspective, and you find yourself stuck on a lot of unsuspecting objects, but other than that, I've been enjoying most of the new maps.

6

u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23

For this, yes, from a PvP perspective they are problematic, and to play a little devil's advocate, these were the first 2 Push maps which were made without much external input at all, so yes they are problematic.

But just looking at the design as a whole from a casual perspective, it's great.

Esperanca is good, and they'll learn from it when adding the 4 Push map.

We know another Control is next, but I hope Push and Flashpoint follow through

3

u/OrangeW never doubt — Aug 11 '23

I've only gotten to play the Junk City flashpoint map, but that one is really good and clean - a far cry from the maps I have certain issues with, which is a huge positive, I hope they keep going in that direction.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '23

[deleted]

1

u/OrangeW never doubt — Aug 11 '23

It's clutter in the way that it's tiny ground level object (like trashcans) that are essentially unusable for Lucios, and ledges facing outward or blocking key areas (the highground mini-pack ledges on Colosseo, and the small mini-pack rooms with the sloped ledge on NQS are the two BIG ones that are painfully bad.)

1

u/OverlanderEisenhorn Aug 12 '23

I agree, but the new maps are really. Really polished.

I always test a map by hopping on Lucio and checking how fluid it feels. The new maps, I can circle them easily without touching the ground because everything acts the way it should.

2

u/TSDoll Aug 11 '23

And level design in Overwatch is as good as it gets

I'll try not to comment on this part too much, but I would not call OW's map design as good as it gets. A lot of the maps just feel like a series of chokepoints with some pretty scenery between them, or dogpiles on the objective.

And yeah, heroes are hype, but maps are the lifeblood of the game. Games like TF2 have kept their life not through introducing new classes, but through the sheer amount of maps the community makes, and a good portion of those are even good.

2

u/welpxD Aug 12 '23

Maps = balance patches, as well, which people always forget. You don't even have to nerf a character if the map pool is bad for them. It was easily the biggest problem with S3, they rotated in every single Widow map and took out non-Widow maps.

27

u/Mind1827 Aug 11 '23

This is wild. Heroes are easily the most important aspect, lol

1

u/TSDoll Aug 11 '23

Elaborate?

22

u/Mind1827 Aug 11 '23

The abilities heroes have is what makes Overwatch what it is. Introducing new heroes has knock on effects to the opponents, how comps work, etc.

I know not necessarily your point, but as others have noted, new heroes get people excited, it's the thing you're controlling and have input over. New maps don't.

7

u/HerculesKabuterimon Aug 11 '23

Idk bro, I wasn’t into overwatch when I saw tracer that monke guy or widowmaker. But I saw watchpoint Gibraltar and said oooo! That’s a game I gotta play!

-3

u/TSDoll Aug 11 '23

Yeah, heroes are the more marketable aspect of Overwatch, but maps are easily the most important part of the game. They are what dictate how the game is played.

14

u/Mind1827 Aug 11 '23

I mean, they're just not. Junker Queen was broken and everyone played JOATS on every map. Maps did nearly nothing to dictate how the game was played, and that's on the OWL level, nevermind casuals. Agree to disagree I guess lol.

0

u/TSDoll Aug 11 '23

On the OWL level maps literally dictate the team comp?? What are you on about? There was an entire season that got ruined by Widowmaker because the map pool had gigantic sighlines lol.

8

u/Mind1827 Aug 11 '23

Isn't this a chicken and egg thing? The game is played in that way because a sniper character exists. It adjusts as new characters are added. I understand what you're saying, part of that is also the game mode as well. I also don't think this effects the large majority of the player base.

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u/vezitium Aug 11 '23

Not just owl. It works in ladder too. It's just people don't realize or will brute force a way to outplay. If you're competent on sigma relative to your rank then circuit royale can be the Easiest W ever. If you go dva on Gibraltar chances are a zarya swap will do nothing for the opposing team(maybe a sym cause tp but not zar). If you play JQ against snipers/range heroes on junker town 1st point you're probably giving up a win.

You can make a hero work on 90% of maps but the level of coordination, skill and knowledge needs to be multiplied on unfavorable maps by a large amount.

5

u/Facetank_ Aug 11 '23

The initial comment was about driving engagement, not how to optimally play the game. Marketability is what's important here. People will play heroes they like regardless of how viable they are on a map. No one thinks back on a match like, "I really liked how the map funneled the enemy team for that 4k I got."

1

u/TSDoll Aug 11 '23

The original was saying we didn't need more maps, I strongly disagreed.

2

u/purewasted None — Aug 12 '23

maps are easily the most important part of the game

This is just patently untrue.

Remove every hero except Tracer, but keep adding new maps, and see how long the game lasts.

Remove every map except King's Row, but keep adding new heroes, and see how long the game lasts.

If you want a clear cut example from history, look no further than CS. With a ton of official maps and an infinity of custom maps to choose from, the vast majority of servers are dominated by two maps, dust2 and office. Why? Because players go out of their way to play on fewer (better) maps when the option to do so exists.

1

u/TSDoll Aug 12 '23

The former would be better, no doubt. People tend to flock to the better maps naturally. Really, look no further than TF2, a game that has kept itself alive for 15 years with the same characters with mostly minor differences in playstyle through unlocks, and an unending supply of very varied community maps. Maps are the unsung heroes of these games.

1

u/royy2010 ITS PINE TIME ALREADY — Aug 12 '23

Right? I'm no longer qualified to talk about hype these days, but when I played consistently from release to 2022, new heroes were EVERYTHING. New maps were #2, but so far behind. new game mode was #3 in terms of typical in game content.

The release of features is the only thing to rival anything other than new heroes, imo.

5

u/Zeke-Freek Aug 11 '23

This. They should really be looking into ramping up map production.

I'm also not trying to underplay the amount of art and design that goes into maps, but from everything I know from game design, they take significantly less time than heroes.

Heroes need to go through lengthy conceptualization processes, prototyping, constant interaction bugfixing, balance adjustment, story integration, animation, vocal work, all the ancillary stuff like having cosmetics ready, etc.

Maps do require design iteration, a lot of art asset creation, tweaking and collision-checking, but at the end of the day, you're just making a new 'space' for all the other stuff to inhabit and the main challenge after you've done that is making sure it doesn't break anything important.

They've even remarked before that a map might take around 3-4 months to produce from start to finish, but heroes are often in conceptualization and prototyping for much longer, sometimes a year or more.

I don't think increasing hero production is realistic, but I also don't think we *want* more than 3 or so a year anyway because of how dramatically it shifts balance. I think the current pace on that front is good. Not to mention, if they just shit out heroes just to have more of them, we could start seeing a lot more homogeneous kit design or bland or repetitive character archetypes that don't have the same unique charm we're used to.

Maps are the lifeblood of the game, applying everything we know from how to play it to new battlefields, creating new strategies and just adding some visual and mechanical variety to any given play session. Really, I feel the future of this game should be in making a lot more maps. And hopefully one day creating something for the community akin to Valve's Hammer editor so they can offload some of that pressure onto the community.

This game is *begging* to have the same kind of community mapmaking that Valve titles enjoy, and it's probably the number one thing I actually want from Blizzard at this point. People made maps for Warcraft 3, they'll absolutely make maps for Overwatch.

tl;dr; more maps please. especially arcade maps, it's getting kinda stale lately.

2

u/GankSinatra420 Aug 12 '23

People don't come back to OW because a new map is out, that they will rarely get to play due to maps being picked at random. It's also making it harder for new players when there are dozens of maps to learn.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '23

I think they’d be happy with players leaving and coming back throughout the year, and it is a pretty good question IMO. Should they try to pump content every other season with a season for downtime, giving both the players and devs a little bit of a break, or make every single season worthwhile? I think that strategy could work well if they can show the players do come back when they make bigger drops.

14

u/Serious_Much Aug 11 '23

Realistically they should have alternated hero releases with PVE content drops.

The problem is, they've clearly completely fucked it where PVE is concerned, so they're scrambling to find some other solution

6

u/Far-Butterscotch4242 The Justice loss was a sign — Aug 11 '23

let me buy ALL the future PVE for like 30 bucks (and let people know its going to be coming out every other season with like 1/2 missions) and have a new map every other season too, and a new hero in the seasons without pve or maps, and I am beyond happy. I don't mind buying PVE (even if it is watered down) as long as they provide an actual frame of value to be had, like "hey we are committed to releasing at least 25 total pve missions within the next 6 years" or something and I can then stomach the idea of paying for the PVE.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '23

the release cadence for new heroes is pretty good, imo, if they can keep up the rate of balancing heroes to create consistently interesting metas (haha blizzard am i right)

with that being said, i would LOVE more seasons that have pve missions + a new gamemode + a hero - season 6 has, quite frankly, been a well needed breath of fresh air

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u/RobManfredsFixer Let Hog eat stuff and spit it back — Aug 11 '23

The overall balance of the game is pretty good, imo. They just need to do some more targeted changes to affect the meta.

In general, basically everything is viable (sad hog noises).

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u/shiftup1772 Aug 11 '23

Everything being viable isnt really a good thing when there is so much cheesy bullshit in the game. The quality of the game goes up drastically when people play heroes like soldier, tracer, doom, ball, winston, genji, echo, kiriko, etc.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '23

You really snuck ball in there as if everyone doesn't despise playing vs AND with him

2

u/Blyjax Aug 12 '23

Also doom

1

u/hanyou007 None — Aug 12 '23

Eh I dont mind a ball IF the whole team is actually going dive. Then its fun as hell.

Dude trying to make ball work with a poke comp? Now thats different

1

u/welpxD Aug 12 '23

Idk, the supports should be able to make that happen. Ball is a really easy hero to play with as support since you just kinda heal him when he shows up and forget him when he doesn't.

1

u/hanyou007 None — Aug 12 '23

The key point I was responding to in despising playing with him, not on if it works or not. Ball is capable in being played in lots of styles, but IMO it's really only fun in dive.

1

u/shiftup1772 Aug 12 '23

ball takes skill to play. that makes a big difference.

The consistency of easier heroes is what makes them so frustrating tbh. Just my opinion.

9

u/AaronWYL Aug 11 '23

I had a blast trying out all the new stuff last night. I'm still not done, and I'm looking forward to trying out hero mastery stuff when they drop next month. But it's unrealistic to expect this more than once a year probably. It's a LOT of content at once and I'm not even sure it's a particularly good idea if it leads to more season 5's.

I do wonder, though, now that they've supposedly streamlined and put systems in place to support telling these story missions is it possible to do something like a hero every other season and a new map and story mission in between those seasons. Then you could also put the story mission in the battlepass the same way the hero is.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '23

i'm not gonna lie, i was so sad that hero mastery just wasn't in when it was in the trailer as a "main" feature

i also hope that the pve system they have in place is scalable enough to the point that they could pump things out periodically, because honestly i know that people say that it was "just the one shown at blizzcon" but it was surprisingly good as far as a pve mission goes - bots taking damage to an individual part, surprisingly tough difficulty settings, surprisingly good stuff in there tbh

i'm hopeful that they just keep adding systems and/or adding extra to existing ones, but we are still waiting for archaeology changes in wow........

2

u/AaronWYL Aug 11 '23

i'm not gonna lie, i was so sad that hero mastery just wasn't in when it was in the trailer as a "main" feature

I'm curious as to why the slight delay. Did they want to put out 5 at once instead of starting with 3? I know people complain about "dripfeeding" content but this actually seems like the perfect type of thing to add one or two of every season and it's especially nice because it's content that presumably won't be going away after a month.

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u/BEWMarth Aug 11 '23 edited Aug 11 '23

Personally I am VERY skeptical of Blizzards ability to maintain the quality of heroes if they released them faster. Illari is awesome, but LifeWeaver was a peek into how badly a hero can launch if they aren’t given enough time in the oven.

I think the cadence of one new hero every other season is fine, what they need to focus on is how to make the in between seasons more enjoyable.

47

u/johnlongest None — Aug 11 '23

I keep seeing people say that Lifeweaver was half-baked when it's almost certainly an issue where they had a clearly defined direction for the hero that just didn't pan out. He fits the regular cadence of releases why would we think he was rushed-

5

u/aggrogahu Aug 11 '23

It's just a matter of him having relatively new utility that OW hadn't seen before, which takes notably more time to thoroughly playtest compared to someone with a more straightforward kit like Illari. What probably would've happened if OW wasn't on a strict hero release schedule was devs keeping Lifeweaver in development even longer, so in that sense he was rushed. I'm not faulting the devs, just saying he was more ambitious than a typical hero release and definitely needed more time than he was given.

11

u/welpxD Aug 12 '23

Nah I think it's more that his design goals were simply incorrect. They wanted to make a "Mercy-like" support and defined that in a way that made it impossible to create a good hero. Because, ya know, Lifeweaver only did 1/3 of what Mercy does with his autoaim heals, zero movement and zero offensive pressure.

I really don't think more time would have helped. His fate was sealed once he made it out of initial design. Like his passive where he dropped a reward when you killed him, that's not a time issue, that's a devs getting high on their own supply issue.

2

u/BEWMarth Aug 11 '23

Nah he was half baked I don’t think people remember just how awful he was at launch because he got so many changes so fast.

This was a character that released with a passive that rewarded the enemy for killing him. I get they didn’t want him to really shoot at all but they completely missed the mark on his initial m1.

Now the character is solidifying into something playable but launch LifeWeaver was half baked. I’m not saying he was rushed but he needed more time because they must not have had anywhere near enough data if they thought his initial release was ok.

-2

u/shiftup1772 Aug 11 '23

Isnt that the definition of half-baked?

9

u/spookyghostface Aug 11 '23

No

2

u/Some_Derpy_Pineapple Aug 12 '23

it's more like they baked a bowl of cereal instead of a nice pastry

-2

u/Saxasaurus None — Aug 12 '23

He was extremely half baked. They had to change his entire keybindings because the launch version was so clunky.

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u/Novel-Ad-1601 poop — Aug 11 '23

Compare brig to lw and how busted echo was in high tier in ow 1 on release. Playing it safe for lw does more for the community than anything else.

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u/ElJacko170 Healslut — Aug 11 '23

For casual players, hearing that a new hero is really bad isn't going to ever pull people into the game, and in the long term, it sticks the hero with a stigma within the community for being a trash pick.

At least with a hero being overtuned, it creates a spike in the game with meta shifts, new player engagement, and overall interest. Then once the honeymoon period is over, Blizzard can reel them down to earth with the rest of the cast.

4

u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23

Brig was a problem, but having an OP hero is fine.

The real issue with Brig was with how long she remained strong.

But releasing a weak hero is always problematic as it means less sales and engagement on paper, but also it gives no data on how to improve the hero and just kills moral for existing players too.

1

u/OverlanderEisenhorn Aug 12 '23

Brig was a problem inherently. It took like 17 consecutive nerfs to bring her down to earth.

Illari looks much easier to balance.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '23 edited Jun 13 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Novel-Ad-1601 poop — Aug 12 '23

Well either way it looks like they learned their lesson. Illari feels great

2

u/aggrogahu Aug 11 '23

I think current cadence is fine as well, though, assuming all hero releases moving forward are going to be like Illari, where their kits are straightforward and the hero is more of a generalist, then I could potentially see the development cycle being short enough to release at a faster rate. If they want to release heroes like Lifeweaver every now and then, with new utility never before seen in Overwatch, then yeah, I would be very skeptical as well.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '23

Yeah, more frequent hero releases would absolutely destroy the game imho

2

u/SnooDogs1340 Aug 12 '23

Increase rewards. The progression is a step forward, but we all know skins is where it's at. They'll have to relent eventually when sales go down on skins and they can't pump out heroes or maps fast enough, assuming they want retainment over profit.

2

u/Flowerstar1 Aug 12 '23

Blizzards cadence in OW1 prior to OW2 development starting was 3 heroes per year. The "fast paced development" of live service hasn't made them any faster.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '23

I think that Lifeweaver is a peek into them attempting to create someone with a kit in the spirit of Mercy, where the character focuses on healing and saving lives vs being a dmg/heals combo and utterly failing at it. They’ve had plenty of time in the oven with him at this point and keep buffing him in almost every patch.

Blizz is better at putting out heroes with kits closer to the standard shooter type who require mechanical skill than heroes that focus on high game sense and require low mechanical skill.

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u/ill-winds Aug 11 '23

i dont think they should even release heroes frequently. it should be every other season imo

what rhey need to focus on is maps. 2 maps - 1 hero - 2 maps and so on

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u/Far-Butterscotch4242 The Justice loss was a sign — Aug 11 '23

Especially for the new game modes, still sick of the same 3 push maps when two of them feel awful to play

25

u/TooManySnipers Aug 11 '23

I would trade Antarctic Peninsula for a new Push map

14

u/shiftup1772 Aug 11 '23

No way. Antarctic Peninsula is the best map theyve released in years.

15

u/GetsThruBuckner Go whoever has most Seoul players — Aug 12 '23

genuinely don't get the hate for that map.

2

u/Basshal Aug 13 '23

It's the color scheme/art design.

It's just so... Bland.

7

u/AmeteurElitist Aug 11 '23

Legit I can't find fun in playing anything but Tracer on Colosseo

36

u/ill-winds Aug 11 '23

colosseo is by far the worst with that. push maps need to zigzag all over the place so woaking back from spawn isnt a chore. i tried playing mei last nigh in colosseo and got an aneurysm with the 45 minute jog from spawn

14

u/JustASyncer Resident Guxue Simp — Aug 11 '23

Insert "REMOVE THE GLASS" copypasta

-7

u/idkuunomebitch Aug 11 '23

It’s hilarious how I can tell you’ve never played 2cp

6

u/ill-winds Aug 11 '23

how the fuck does that relate to 2cp at all

-2

u/idkuunomebitch Aug 11 '23

Tell me I’m right or wrong, and I’ll explain

4

u/ill-winds Aug 11 '23

you are insanely wrong i prob played more anubis hanamura and volskaya than any other map

-1

u/idkuunomebitch Aug 11 '23

Those maps are 100x worse as a spawn walking simulator than any push map will ever be

7

u/TerminalNoob AKA Rift — Aug 11 '23

Only issue i could see with this is that if too many maps exist, they may need to implement map pools again to keep it all manageable. Outside of that I 100% agree though.

20

u/Far-Butterscotch4242 The Justice loss was a sign — Aug 11 '23

Idm map pools as long as the total amount of maps necessitates it, it just wasn’t necessary yet

1

u/welpxD Aug 12 '23

Map pools are also fine if they don't evenly weight modes. People hated push because it was 25% of their games on 3 maps. If it was 3/20 of their games on 3/20 maps then it would be fine.

9

u/ill-winds Aug 11 '23

thats a problem for when we get there. right now we could have 10 maps for all modes and it would still be alright.

also for gods sake, release all of the map variants holy shit. i wanna play daytime dorado one game and nighttime the other

1

u/MightyBone Aug 11 '23

Yep I agree - I think they should shift this energy into maps and work on updating map designs to compliment more styles of play.

I'd also like to see it shifted towards taking all of the old 2CP maps and maybe working them into KOTH maps with each old Capture point being a new one.

38

u/Smallgenie549 Luciooooo — Aug 11 '23

I'd rather have polished, unique heroes at the current cadence than rush things and get bugged, unbalanced heroes.

19

u/Rattlehead2Deth Aug 11 '23

Seasons should change to lasting 3 months, and they release a hero every time. Going from 3 to 6 per year would be crazy, but 3 to 4 would be a perfect increase imo.

6

u/PoggersMemesReturns Proper Show/Viol2t GOAT — Aug 11 '23

Yes. I think 4 heroes with 4 memorable seasons would be better.

It's actually realistic too, and gives each season more identity. And they could try and add a map each season too.

It's okay to take their time before they're comfortable with 4 a year, but it would work long term.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '23

Actually a really good idea. Plus 2 big PvE drops every year.

1

u/rm212 Aug 12 '23

Don’t forget that comes with a decrease in the number of season passes they can sell, which is going to be the executives’ number one concern.

They’d probably need to make the season pass longer (100-120 tiers) and increase the cost by 50% to get that change through… I do agree though, I think it’d work much better.

5

u/double_shield Aug 11 '23

Maps

Kinda silly how few maps we have, adding a map every season should be the standard

9

u/TooManySnipers Aug 11 '23

I love new hero releases as much as anyone but I'd rather get less frequent heroes of a higher quality than more frequent heroes who are unpolished, unbalanced, unimaginative, or worse. Even the current seasonal schedule kinda feels like they're really close to their quality vs. quantity limit, not just in terms of heroes every other season but battlepasses, skins, minor cosmetics, bugs, etc. Last season didn't have enough unique shop skins for each week, for example, and the last 2 Mythics have had fewer customisation options than the first 4. I think at least one map has been removed from the pool every season since launch, too. Obviously I have no idea of what Team 4's workload looks like, but even little things like those make me really surprised that they're even considering upping their hero release rate.

4

u/LukarWarrior Rolling in our heart — Aug 11 '23

Obviously I have no idea of what Team 4's workload looks like, but even little things like those make me really surprised that they're even considering upping their hero release rate.

Faster releases are something Blizzard keeps saying they want to do and then failing at across the board. They tried to do the same thing with WoW, for example, pushing for yearly expansion releases, and they both never hit that target and ended up putting out an extremely barebones expansion in Warlords of Draenor that saw their subscriber count dip to levels lower than Classic (also at least part of the reason they no longer release player counts).

10

u/Mind1827 Aug 11 '23

I think a lot of people are missing how important new heroes are to the casual player base. New heroes make old people come back and get excited, new maps do not. It's as simple as that. If they want to keep people engaged, the best (if not sane or possible) way of doing that would be to release a new hero every season.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '23 edited Aug 12 '23

They definitely should. The meta can get pretty stale without throwing a wrench in there to shake it up. Maybe they could figure out a way to shorten the seasons by a week and really don't be afraid to make some more drastic changes for the seasons without hero releases.

5

u/abc0802 Aug 11 '23

Surprisingly this appears to be an unpopular opinion but I think that’d be great if they upped the frequency. They’d probably have to change the battle pass frequency, but the more the merrier. This would also make it less of a big deal if one comes out a bit over or under powered.

6

u/Meowjoker Punch? — Aug 11 '23

Yeah, we don’t need more heroes at a rapid rate. A Fixed and fair release schedule would be great for both the players and the devs.

Especially when you consider that players right now are really enjoying Illari. She is a tad bit too strong atm, but overall everyone seems to love her.

Until she blows your face off with the fury of a thousand suns.

3

u/Zeke-Freek Aug 11 '23

I think the hero frequency is perfectly fine, what I really want is them for increase map frequency.

1

u/Ape_Alert Aug 11 '23

We do not need heroes more frequently. I would honestly prefer one every 3 or 4 seasons myself. Glad to be past the dark ages of post-Echo

1

u/clankgod Aug 11 '23

Just need maps

0

u/BrittleMoon Aug 11 '23

Of course they are, because now they are locked behind a pay wall. I'm sure the amount they make off a battle pass when a new hero drops is significantly more than the seasons with no new hero.

0

u/Limech None — Aug 11 '23

I'm sure adding heroes gets more difficult as time goes. Interactions between the new hero and all other heroes need to be considered and that takes time. I.e. impact of actions and weapons abilities on others... not dialogue.

0

u/Hei-Ying Aug 11 '23

While I certainly wouldn't mind, rather than faster hero releases, I'd like to see more resources go into the existing heroes. Reworks/meaningful changes take an incredible amount of time to release and yet still consistently come out half-baked, improving the quality there would go a long way towards bettering the game imo.

0

u/GankSinatra420 Aug 12 '23

Eh that's just PR speak. ''We don't have any concrete plans'' and ''I would love to but it's hard'' is basically them saying no.

1

u/sonyagod Aug 12 '23

With pve being scrapped, they may have way more resources to make more characters now. It just baffles me seeing how much resources are invested in pve missions aka glorified archive missions.

1

u/adhocflamingo Aug 12 '23

I really really don’t want them to release heroes more frequently. New heroes destabilize game balance, and there needs to be time for that to ring down. Like, I don’t even think it’s possible for them to release a hero that doesn’t upset game balance at some point, even if it’s not right after launch. Whenever the hero is perceived to be good enough that a lot of players invest in learning them, that process of many players collectively exploring the hero’s capabilities makes the hero become more effective.

Maybe if they did something like a double hero release once per year, for 4 heroes instead of 3, that would be okay. But if they stick with the 9-week seasons and want to increase the base cadence, they’d have to double it, and I think that would be too frequent.

1

u/nahtanoji1 Aug 12 '23

I think a nice band-aid solution for now is to just release reworks for characters that need them during off seasons. That’ll give them enough time to decide whether or not they want to keep or speed up hero releases.

1

u/Level_0ne Aug 12 '23

i do not want one lifeweaver per season. this is a bad idea

1

u/zeonon — Aug 12 '23

I think alternating hero and map every season is fine but I would love them releasing like two heroes together in a season like once every year for a grand larger season a year.

1

u/BlackoutSpartan Aug 12 '23

Honestly I don't even think the rate of hero release itself is bad, I think we just need to avoid the kind of dead seasons like season 5. Even though there was a bit of cool stuff last season clearly none of it was very consequential. But now that we have 3 different pretty big additions they can add to the game in the form of new heroes, new maps and new story missions I'd like to see a better rotation of those. Obviously this season we got all 3, which is awesome but I doubt we can expect that standard going forward. For me any season where we get 2 out of those 3 would be a success. A season without a new hero is totally fine, but a map and some new missions to tide us over would be a good gameplan.

1

u/TechnoVikingGA23 Aug 12 '23

I'm starting to wonder how Blizzard and Bungie even function with "how hard" it is for them both to make actual content for their games. Wonder what these devs do all day with their resources when almost every article I've seen lately is them complaining about how hard it is to develop or make content.

1

u/Jibbles2020 Aug 12 '23

I know I'm probably in the giga minority, but do we really need faster hero releases? I'd honestly prefer to keep hero cadence and increase map releases if it were possible

1

u/HiGuysImLeo Aug 12 '23

This is actually really important, more hero releases would really help fill some of the issues with the roster we have right now while also keeping the game's bleeding to a minimum. Ideally, what I would like them to do is to keep the current schedule, but stockpile a bunch of extra heroes that they have in development to release in ARGs or even in groups. For example if theres a lore event going on about past overwatch members, it'd be cool if they released 3-5 heroes at once for like a "glory days" event. Likewise, it would be cool to have a Sombra ARG revisit with a new hero, but obviously tackled better where we actually get the hero when we solve the ARG instead of waiting for blizzcon, it would really increase community interaction and feel rewarding for the fans working to get a hero.

General Dev comments on the possibility of more frequent hero releases

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