What still bugs me is that junkrat and roadhog have something that could pull them into the main cast (that being junkrat treasure he found which could so easily be turned into something talon or overwatch wants) but its like the team forgot about this entirely
Yeah like you could pretty easily pull him more into it. Soldier's already looting a bunch of old Overwatch weapons caches, just have Junkrat and Roadhog run into him when they try to rob one to take the fight to Junker Town, or have the treasure be some sort of MacGuffin that connects to the Omnics like some sort of relic of the God AI programs or something that the others will want back. Now that Ramattra and Null Sector are major factions, it's especially strange because if you're Ramattra wouldn't Junkertown/New Junk City be basically your number 1 target? Send Ramattra down to the Junkers, send Overwatch to try to defend Australia, and then you could maybe have some fun conflict between Junkrat and Roadhog because they'll view the problem differently and might pick different sides.
@@TheViveroswe actually know what it is now, its some kind of jet or airplane thing that junkrat and roadhog gave to JQ so she wouldn’t execute them. This is in the heroes ascendant story.
He most likely got one of the Omnium cores. We have had two allusions to the Omnium cores: The image of the Omni giving one to Satya Volskaya and the one Mondatta is holding in his statue. We know new junk city is built in the middle of an Omnium, so he most likely journeyed into the lower levels of it and found it.
I've never played an fps game and never intended to. Lore is what brought me into Overwatch. Its just sad seeing alot of heroes being left in the dust. Junkrat's lore could've been one of the most emotional in the game. How did he survive the wasteland as a young child? Where did his leg go? What drove him into insanity? But instead we're stuck with nothing. I feel like the devs forgot there can be more than one narrative going on at the same time.
@dezymond9860 Maybe we could see more specifically what drove him insane and lost his leg? Like at the very least we saw JQ's origin and a little on how she survived out there with her family.
You forgot according to certain characters they kept asking about junkrats treasure. Like it was a mystery. All we could figure out from dialog was A. Most likely was Ominc related. B. Its definitely not money.
Crazy how they had a perfect opportunity to develop a backlog of 5+ heroes and have narrative write good stories about them and instead they lied about PvE 💀
They could have if they didn’t waste so many resources on the scrapped talent system, you had the same people making heroes designing entire detailed skill trees of 50+ entirely unique mechanical talents, it was an impossible task coinciding with other new heroes simultaneously
@@gengothecannoliking9655 Yeah, not to say it couldn't be done...but I DO think their idea of PvE was a much bigger task than it seemed to a lot of players. In addition to the garbage the company was doing unrelated to OW
You know what I forgot about? Sombra's origin story had said she was looking forward the group that actually controlled the world. I think Blizzard regretted that story beat as I don't it's ever followed up after that comic staring the Russian female character.
They could've easily written this via small influences from said group. Like Sombra describes, the whole world is a web and information is what ties the web together. Who's enabling Talon and Vishkar and so many factions to exist, who got Overwatch shut down, who's really to benefit from the conflicts, etc. There are so many plot points to drive from, but Blizz didn't even try.
@@inplane9970 Hell, they could easily have Sombra revealed to be a double agent, leaking information from Talon to a third party or a secure server, with a dead-man's switch that would expose the entire conspiracy, hence why Talon keeps her around
The setting for Overwatch would have worked better as a comic book universe, you have a group of A list heroes directly involve with the Overwatch vs Talon conflict, but you also have a bunch of B and C list heroes with their own things going on.
Ive been thinking about this for a while. Another facet is that overwatch cannot have an "end" due to the demand to keep adding content. I think thats why they made null sector the villains for "season one" of the overwatch story, allowing them to keep talon around and immediately availiable once null sector is defeated. Because of the nature of overwatch as an in story organisation it only makes sense to use them to stop global threats, because it would be ridiculous to send them after los muertos or the junkers without elevating those groups to a huge threat. Its the same issue as the avengers has, with blizzard wanting null sector to be their loki in avengers, with a bigger bad pulling the strings all along, which creates a loop of world ending threats just to introduce new factions for maps and heroes
That is the problem of superhero media that goes on for a long time. It's not designed to end there will always be another big bad. You can still tell smaller-scale stories with los muertos or the junkers without elevating them to a global threat, (i think making them a global threat would be lazy writing) not all stories in the ow universe have to be about overwatch.
It's rather insulting that you are both implying that us Junkers & Wastelanders (Australians) are "Bad Guys". Worse yet, assuming we are small fry Gangers like the Los Muertos. Not one nation's military had ever successfully taken out an Omnium alone, except for the ALF. The UN struck a peace deal with the Omnics after the Omnic Crisis, they gave them the Australian Omnium and much of the land & resources surrounding it to them as "Reserve" for em. Us Aussie's clearly didn't like getting screwed after yet another global conflict so we did what the rest of the world bloody well couldn't and took out the Australian Omnium by ourselves. And you both have the gaul to put us on the same rung as the petty thugs in the Los Muertos? The Junnkers & Wastelanders are a potential global threat, we just ain't interested in anything more than keeping what's already ours. Rat & Hog went on a world tour crime spree. Not one nation they went to could stop em. They are just two of us, not one nation could stop em. How do you think yall would fair against all of us, the only nation to take out an Omnium by ourselves, if we REALLY wanted to be "Bad Guys"? Yall call for back up and alliances when fighting Omnic Forces, I think it's laughable that you think any one organisation/force stands a chance against us.
Honestly that doesn't need to be the case, especially since the PvP in-game doesn't really make much sense anyways. Like in the PvP Reaper and Winstken can right on the same team against Tracer and Widowmaker, all of which would presumably hate that, with everyone pushing carts or standing in certain spots to win. Besides, barring that they could always just set the PvP in the past. Like look at tf2's story: the comics have already gone well past the main PvP in the games. They've gone through MvM and past that too. Now the official story has already gone to the penultimate comic leading to the finale (haven't got it yet). You could always just set the PvP in the past. It's not like the Avengers where everything needs to be there now.
@@lilwintery6434Yeah, and world-rnding threats can get boring because there is no logical way the writers are going to actually let the bad guys win on that scale. On a smaller scale? Possible.
Problem is slightly deeper. Plot not only can't have an end, it can't even move forward too much. We will forever be stuck in same "overwatch just recently got back together" moment, and at best we will be getting more back stories. Because moving plot forward means change, means characters developing and changing.
This is why I don't like live service games. Most of my favorite games are RPGs or visual novels, and those tend to have deep, intricate stories with themes and messages relevant to the real world and characters you can get attached to because of how well they're written. Yahtzee put it best in his Extra Punctuation video when he said that the concept of "games as a service" is incompatible with the concept of "games as art." I had fun watching Overwatch's cinematic shorts and reading the comics, but I kept waiting for the day when Blizzard started tying it all together (a friend helped me lay the groundwork for a Star Wars-style generational saga), and it's clear to me at this point that they're never going to go there. Either it's just not in their plans, or the game will suffer enough losses that the plug will be pulled before they can get there.
Hire a person to do a job? Are you fucking nuts? That would cost Blizzard money (for a company posting revenue in the *Billions*) and that's money that would come DIRECTLY out of Bobby Kotick's designer sock budget. Completely unacceptable.
Went from Overwatch heroes to anti-capitalism. Never change! But seriously, it's good to finally have a content creator that acknowledges the issues with Overwatch systemically. I imagine that because they chose to make Overwatch 2 a "live service update", the story of Overwatch will never be completed and they'll only shoehorn more heroes in the game that have no business being in the story into the main narrative of Overwatch.
"A game's sequel might replace the old cast with a mostly new one that allows you to explore different dimensions of existing factions" Oh pog. I loved that premise for Zero Time Dilemma. Worked wonderfully. Joke's aside, I think that the devs are floundering at the prospect of trying to push the narrative forward the way that they are. They would need an off-season (maybe 2 at this point) in order to even catch up. The best thing I feel they could do is hedge bets, and move more towards the style of writing common in sitcoms. A core cast thrown through different scenarios that require interaction with the world, and very occasionally, that interaction will push the overarching plot along. Taking that approach would also allow time to flesh out some of the more underdeveloped characters in safer environments. Alas, I think they've written themselves into a corner now, and any time they don't address the elephant in the room in something, people will be like "Okay but what about this?". They don't have a solid foundation, but are trying to write like they already did 1-2 episodic seasons worth of legwork. It's flawed.
Basically, yeah. It doesn't help that the early writing for Overwatch was completely deranged with zero plan that every subsequent writer has had to try to write around lmao
Basically it's becoming the MCU. Introducing characters and locations too fast and out of order because something went wrong, so everything suffers. Phase 4 had nothing connecting the various plots and factions running around, and phase 5 is looking no different. Illari has nothing to do with any of the other characters.
Kind of unrelated but if there was an overwatch tv show Id like to see talon as like a team rocket group. Maybe have sigma moira or mauga be actually threatening but like reaper sombra and widow just seem like they would make a good team rocket.
Imma have to disagree with you about sigmas character. Honestly I think he’s very well developed. Old man Scientist who went mad crazy by his own experiments. The only people who take him in are talon who plan on using him and then his relationship with sombra is so cute. Like a daughter looking out for their old man.
This is hands down one of your best videos despite (as always) going on a rant about capitalism. You bring some really valid points and information (I didn't know that Ram and Mauga releases were swapped). Props
I would actually argue that Moira is more in camp 3. She was a character that was added later, shoe-horned into the narrative (via Blackwatch and then Talon) and basically given stuff to do. (Her experiments on Widow and Reaper.) But, she is consistently abandoned by the narrative. Talon doesn’t acknowledge her existence and we know next to nothing about the Oasis and her role in the leadership position she holds there. Declassified seemed to suggest that her footprints exist throughout the narrative, but her story is not clear, and is constantly forgotten. (See, her being left out of Mirrorwatch completely.)
Overwatch is somewhat of an assemble of heroes and villains, and as those stories goes, it's hard to have them all be protagonists of the story, so for all characters, besides their interaction with the main plot, I think it is important to notice their own stories, the ones that are made for you to care for the character despite they being a grain in the lore desert. And doing so a lot of characters become assimilated to the plot through their importance for one of the heroes in the plot. In this way we could make a fourth camp, of heroes that are not part of the story but are foils to heroes that are, within it having - Symmetra(Lucio's Opposite), - Hanzo(Actively searching for Genji, The One who Killed), - Zenyatta(Genji's Mentor, the One who Saved), - Orisa(Actively hunting Doomfist), - Ashe(Cassidy's past and current problem) some others the were left in the second also could easily go to this fourth camp given Blizzard do anything with them with Wrecking Ball as a possible direct foil to Winston, if they ever decide to have the canon world discover that there's a hamster inside that hamster ball and Kiriko, as they made her be fundamentally connected to Genji, but forgot to give her any objective.
I think the good part about the Group 2 heroes is that it can somewhat tell the story through world building. At least specifically with the Junkers, we can see the other fallout from the Omnic Crisis. All three of them have slightly different pain from the Crisis, the same Crisis that Overwatch and Talon are dealing with. And even though we dont know what all Junker Queen is doing for the narrative, her perspective and comments on the established characters can flesh out the world in a way that more central characters wouldn't.
Zenyatta is one of the most tragic characters for neglect. He's a fan-favorite character, has been there since the release of OW1, but didn't get ANYTHING until recently with the first batch of PVE missions, and even then it was only a short cinematic. He has a connection to an iconic OW character in Genji, but only got passing mentions at best. Hell, we don't even truly know if his abilities are canonical or not. He's never used any of them in-universe. In OW1, it was implied they were strictly gameplay purposes by Michael Chu way back in the day, but I guess they realized Zenyatta would be kind of lame power-wise if that was the case so in OW2, they leaned more toward them being legit. Even then, he's gotten a comic with Symmetra that was okay but nothing special (beautiful art though) that showed his extra arms I guess. Why hasn't he gotten a full animated cinematic? They keep setting up this dude with points of interest but never go in on any of them. I thought with Rammatra's release, Zen would finally get something as a companion piece, but nope.
I honestly just wish they’d make an animated show at this point. Their cinematics are always so good. Iirc, that was their original vision, but making a video game at the time would have been cheaper, so they did that. Besides, I just wanna see my Ramattra in that sweet animated short CGI.
-one of my biggest pet peeves is when grand scale fictions don't establish anything beyond the immediate settings, characters, etc. but an even bigger pet peeve is when the writers do establish characters, settings, etc, then don't connect them to the overall narrative; so they're left there like differently themed rides at theme park with no connection between them, other than being at the same theme park. - 19:33 and "nothing goes wrong" means they still make money. like how almost every AAA game comes out with glitches that make me believe no one test played them. but the games make money, so "nothing went wrong". -overwatch story has been mismanaged for so long that if they announced a hard reboot for it, i don't think anyone would complain. -that (25:58) meteor strike.
About 5:30 in, Vishkar is about to be in the main lore, as teased in the missions tab in game at the moment. Like Null Sector and Talon, it's going to be one of the antagonists of a set of story missions
I wouldn't be shocked, but I also wouldn't hold my breath. I want to see it finally matter but the pace of things has made me feel like it's kinda necessary to wait until it actually gets released before treating it as fact.
As a league player, learning all this is absolutely wild. I only interact with Overwatch via your videos and would love to get into the lore but I know it’s a mess. At least Riot mostly gets releases right and has backup plans they’re usually vocal about. Like rn we’re waiting for Skarner’s VGU and since it got pushed back we got a Jax ASU earlier. They clearly have a pipeline of (nearly) completed projects that can be swapped around relatively easily and it’s insane Blizzard wouldn’t do that.
Funny how so many of my frustrations with overwatch (and life in general) come from capitalistic greed. Great video; I appreciate your story breakdowns of overwatch. I always learn something new from these videos.
This reminds me in how in 2014 League of legends restructured their lore and their story. They basically removed the in universe explanation for what happens in game and made the game itself non connonical like in the case of Overwatch. The problem is since there are a lot of characters even by then some still aren't integrated in the current lore a decade later, since lore integration does not sell skins
Holy shit I thought I was crazy. I know it’s not popular but imo I think we could’ve removed characters from OW TO OW2. Either narratively or mechanically some characters didn’t belong in OW2 and a tighter cast would make for easier balance and storytelling.
You know, in regards to the story of overwatch 1/2, I think a good comparison is if like star wars had an expanded universe, but no main line movies to tie everything together. Without the mainline movies, you'd be missing the context of the most important aspects of this world. Over watch feels like that, kind of.
The way the OW lore is going makes me remember of what Riot did to League during the Ruination event. The biggest narrative event theyve created with the perfect rooster of champions... was reduced to a complete mess and with a rooster of champions that were only there cuz they sell skins. What ? This champion have nothing to do with this plot ? Put him in the good guys team and change his personality to fit a stereotype. What ? It doesnt makes sense turning this champion into a villain ? I dont care, she looks great in this evil outfit. What ? We created an Champion years ago that would be Very important to this story ? Nah, lets create another one especific to this story and finishing his history at the end making he basically impossible to fit in any other story. Thinking about when you said that its espected that Winston and Junkrat have similar plot relevance since theyre playable its something that LOL suffers, cuz you have Champions that have basically 0 lore or are just minions while you also have Champions with an 20 pages lore. League and Overwatch are more similar than people think. The difference is that League have better lore, while OV have better characters
Honestley i think its because most people wanna play the fps shooter not read/watch the lore. The blizard is at a point where they have to constantly have to satisfy the people who play the PvP game since theyre the people that make the money for them and thats over watches brand. Sadly us who want lore are just a minority :(. They can completley try to change how theyre operating to actually focus on making a resolution to all this stuff but thats a huge risk
I personally think that's just shameful, cuz they made a cast full of unique characters and a world setting with some kind of potential to be developed outside the main game to just don't give a shit about any of this (I mean they make comics sometimes but I don't think that's enough to show everything about the OW's world) I wish ppl who wanted to know the lore were a majority so Blizz would actually care to make actual content for their characters lmao
Heh, funny that this video was recommended to me as i was wondering what the purpose of Venture is. With most characters you can at least vaguely place them together, but iliari and Venture just vibe here
Blizzard is also reluctant to release anything besides cinematics. Maybe they could create a certain style of lore videos for side heroes instead of being only about the main narrative heroes? The videos could all be in different art styles. Just anything to give story content. A good example of this is Katsuwatch. Blizzard collared with the channel to put out an official lore video about 76 and Ana told in the form of cats. That was super creative and gave us some story content, even if it wasn't as polished or quality as the cinematics. That's what I want. Or even the fucking Anime. Don't just stop at dawn, they should keep it going for goings sake if it means side characters get some story.
What you are forgetting about the camp 2 characters is that a good chunk of them are parallel characters. Characters designed to be the counterpart to another. This is why Symmetra is required. To be a parallel to Lucio. But there are characters in camp 2 who are not required at all due to lack of connections, like the three new supports and venture all having minimal or no connections whatsoever. Having doomfist without orisa completely devalues him as a villain.
i think it’s an FPS and the story is entirely secondary, maybe even tertiary, considering they washed the PVE mode. we’re coming at this with the lens of criticizing a narrative storytelling game, this is an FPS made by a company who clearly will never prioritize the narrative elements of the characters.
Is that Toyota method you mentioned in the video called “Six Sigma”? The new higher ups in my company really got into that recently. Sounds like that’s a bad idea
also I'd never seen that Space Ranger concept art but I've been looking at the OW concept artists' work on ArtStation and as a result I could immediately tell who drew that (his name escapes me rn)
Destiny at least has somewhat of a stable direction and wasn't considered dead for three years, although at some points it did come pretty close to being considered dying or dead. I started playing d2 after I started playing Overwatch, and the difference in approaches is noticeable. Especially in lore and narrative department, Overwatch barely moved theirs while Destiny is about to close the main arc and already dealt with a few major ones. Although recent layoffs may be a shift to an even worse situation, and thats after the Lightfall fiasco.
As someone who likes to read books, I dont see the issue with the long pauses between story beats. I've had to wait YEARS for the next book to release and it never takes away from how good or bad it is when it comes out. Gamers are just impatient.
I don't mind long waits, I think the issue is less that gamers demand too much and more that the companies aren't really reckoning with the limitations of the medium when it comes to telling their stories. They're trying to do too much when they can't.
You're one of the only TH-camrs I've personally seen talk about the game industry's decline as a inevitable symptom of our form of capitalism. Whenever I talk to my friends about this stuff they just say "it's not that deep." But shocker anything that makes that much money is absolutely that deep.
I never minded characters that didn’t tie to the main story directly, but more through the connections that allow you to see how they could tie into it. Lifeweaver & Symm > Vishkar > Sanjay > Talon > Overwatch > New omnic Crisis. Illari has always bugged me though since she has zero ties into it any connections at all. That’s probably why I just don’t enjoy her as a character. Every other character is a thread in a tapestry, but she’s just kind of there.
That's pretty similar to how I initially viewed the story, but I think over time it's come to look more like a whole bunch of threads waiting to be woven into a tapestry rather than parts of one that's already been made. They definitely *can* be tied in, and you can see the routes that they would need to follow to get tied back into it, but it needs to actually happen at some point or else it's all just theoretical.
@@TheViveros true, but at least for the most part all characters can be tied in except for Illari, which I hate cuz it was so random. They could’ve done something like when omnics invaded her village, the stress of seeing her people die caused that explosion of power. Otherwise it’s so out of place.
Second time a video of yours popped up on my feed, and a second time I’ve been impressed by your analysis of Overwatch. Easy click of the subscribe button
Despite hiccups that have happened in the past (ruined king event), riot games somehow handles its narrative without this issue despite running a live service model. Essentially, how it works right now is that there are 3 teams that work with characters. Champ design, who makes characters for the game, writers, who create stories, and the IP management, who are in charge of lining things up between all the different teams. How this works in practice is that writers have made a massive universe with dozens of characters who can potentially join the game, the IP team can get the writers to build up a character if the champ designers want something, or the IP team can get the champ designers to start making something if the writers are building up to something. What if there are design hiccups on the champ design side? well, there's a balance team and redesign team that are seperate from the champ design team. The balance team focuses on game balance, and is further subdivided by role, while the redesign team is focused on updating art assets for old champions and reworking champions that ended up just not working for the game.
Sounds great but I feel like that approach would just be too expensive for a small indie game dev like Blizzard. I don't know if they could even fit that many teams inside their HQ.
Zenyatta finally gets some place in the lore after 8 years w/out being someones tutor thanks to Ramattra. A character who has been in the game since day 1 and always meme'd to be the one with absolutely NO backstory to him. With these hero releases and a flopped PVE it's very disappointing that he gets some attention but feels it would flop because they prioritize monetizing the game over anything.
I wasn’t expecting the random vTuber who I clicked on for a time-killer killing game VN review to have strong leftist commentary, but I am very pleased with this result
Have you gotten the new book? Are you thinking of making a video about it? I’m broke as hell, so I’m waiting for it to go on sale or… online, yaknowwhatimean? 😂 About the video, I agree this is best treated as an anthology, let’s say a comic book series (or any format, I just love comics so it’s just an example): Overwatch as the main series either graphic novels or an ongoing weekly/monthly series; Talon/Null Sector, Volshkaya/Vishkar+Lucio (The Shady Businesses (tm) I guess 😂), and The Junkers could all be secondary, shorter runs that can connect into the main plot or not; then The Shimadas+Kiriko, Meka squad, Numbani, Deadlock, and Illiari can all have some even shorter runs that can connect to the main plot or not, think a volume or two at most. I think keeping characters in the expanded lore won’t work very well because the players start asking for them. Look how people wanted Mauga, or how they ask for Maximilian. All Blizzard does is give us crumbs and then disappear, so every inconsequential character and event gets blown out of proportion by a starving playerbase. It’s only now they realize how hungry for lore we’ve been, and even then they really just acknowledge it. It sounds stupid, but when the PvE got cancelled (reworked?) I was kind of expecting the missions to drop more regularly. It really is Archives in steroids, bestie, they really have nothing in storage 😭 This is a yearly ordeal nauuuurrr P.S. Don’t attack me, but I think both the story and game would benefit from having a closed roster. Like, stop at 50 or something like that. Then for balancing they could focus on reworking the heroes we already have, and for variety, maps and game modes are way more interesting than we give them credit for. Say what you want about The Overwatch Drought of 2021, but the game was balanced. Had they kept releasing cosmetics, game modes, Archive events, maps, and what not, I think we’d remember this period more positively than we do.
I have not gotten the book bc I am a broke bitch, but I'd like to check it out some time. Honestly, I think part of the issue is that the original roster and story weren't meant to be so broad, and the anthology idea probably wouldn't have worked as well - but over time, the roster kept getting bigger and broader, and now you've got a universe that's outgrown its story. And I agree, I think the big thing with the content drought was that we weren't really getting anything at all. People like getting new characters and maps and stuff, but if Blizzard had said "No new characters, we'll be spending a couple years working on OW2 and developing the existing characters in the meantime" I think it would've been a lot more positively received. Part of why the PvE stuff still seems so sporadic is, I'm guessing, the fact that they didn't know which characters would be added and when, so they couldn't tell which stories to tell. In fact, I bet it's a big part of why they've locked down the next year of heroes already with Mauga, Venture, Space Ranger, and whoever the next tank is after them - it forces them to stick to their guns with these guys.
The mauga n ramattra swap is extra funny because before ram reveal we thought it was mauga n when ram was revealed a whole lotta smart ass in the community where like “dUh u thInK thEy’D RevEAl sOMe rAndOm TaLOn HeaVY BeFOre nUlL seCToR LeADer” but look at us now
I would say that Zenyatta is part of the main story tbf. He is more or less the embodiment of Omnic sentience post-Aurora and is Genji’s mentor (someone you put in Group 1) Edit: seems i was a little impatient and very defensive of Zenyatta lol. Should have just finished watching!
I really wished they would slow with the new characters and make then more worth while. The only ones that are actually contributing to the story are the tanks and even then they were originally designed in overwatch 1. Even if the missions are no longer happening just hire a story writer and actually tell the stories instead of just giving up completely.
Kiriko isn't related to Genji. She isn't important to either Genji and Hanzo's story or character, and is more so just shoved into it. Hanzo, however, is actually related to Genji, and has actual reasons and motives to be a part of Camp 1
I think genshin needs an off-season or at least a slow season where not much happens. This is what genshin Impact and honkai Star Rail does, The big update adds a ton of new content (what could of been pve) followed by small updates that drip release characters from that story content and smaller bits of story, then things die out till the next big update, and its strange overwhelming hasent done this. Altho admittedly HSR or GI charachters prob dont take as time to make as overwatch ones nor the balance but simple making thier design and story to be used in story.
The thing is capitalism does work, but only if the incentives aren't skewed. Toyota, the company you mentioned, is a prime example. The whole reason companies relentlessly work on stock price instead of fundamentals comes down to the governments around the world unwillingness to let the stock market collapse, and for corrections to take place. Wanna know why stock prices have no bearing on reality? We haven't allowed the market to work since the great depression.
What happened before the Great Depression? If capitalism worked, Toyota wouldn't be the only car company on the planet to know the importance of superconductors and plan accordingly. The reality is that capitalism inevitably leads to this outcome because the incentives at all levels are to maximize profits, and once you have enough money, you can use it to influence governments and regulators (or just bribe them) into changing the rules to benefit you. The reason why the incentives get skewed is because it's in the best interests of the individual capital holders to manipulate the system to accumulate more capital - there's no way to do capitalism without it becoming crony capitalism.
@@TheViveros if you look at the history, of at least the US, panics and the like are nothing out of the ordinary, but tend to solve themselves in 1-2 years, without government intervention. One of the biggest reasons the great depression lasted so long was the government kept intervening to save industries that should have failed, thereby not allowing the process of capital reallocation into more successful business models. In fact, lots of companies keep extra stock of essential items. It's kinda why the price of onions, potatoes, and grain didn't go up like 10x, or how firearms and ammo manufacturers almost immediately were able to increase production despite the enormous spike of demand caused by the coof, or the fact that electronics were still readily available during the height of covid, and whose prices didn't balloon out.The examples are numerous throughout modern history of companies being incentivized by the market in keeping rainy day stock. You just have to look.
So as a supply chain major, i take issue with the "criticism" you have of the JIT model and the halfhearted segway into a criticism of capitalism Fundamentally everything engineers do is based on tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a free lunch. You would have us plan for a once in a century event. Fine. But what is the cost of that? You dont think about that. Cost increases about 10-20% everywhere and to everyone for an entire century. Same thing about capitalism. Ford isn't incentivized to make the best car ever. Fine. But what was the alternative to that? We know what happens when someone forces the entire economy into creating the perfect xyz. Read up about GDR and how they destroyed their own economy because of their foolish semiconductor quest.
I love that you think you’re the only person who’s studied this stuff. This was my major for years, and while this video isn’t my dissertation into the subject, it absolutely comes from a position of being informed. There’s a difference between running a reasonable business and hyperfixating on being as lean as possible to the point where failure is a sick day away at all times, and as the video points out, the actual original JIT model can work as it has for Toyota. The problem is the misunderstanding and misapplication of it, which is what I was criticizing. The critique into capitalism isn’t “half-hearted”, either. It’s talking about how the outcomes we are presently experiencing are the result of the processes we currently follow and how the incentives of those processes lead to negative outcomes in this context. It’s not a full lecture because that’s not what this video is about, but I also have the sneaking suspicion that it wouldn’t matter how I presented the critiques of the current system - it’s not like socialism is making Blizzard produce worse games and write stories poorly. Anyways, thanks for your “criticism” of my video essay. It was a half-hearted bad-faith attempt to respond to half of what I said, but I appreciate the engagement all the same 🥰
I think you make very good and insightfull content but I think it would benefit you if you spoke slower and with more diction, maybe its just a me problem, maybe it's just because Im not a native english speaker but sometime I have hard time understanding what you're saying
Agree with you about stupid business major though, but don't you think its a little hypocritical to rant about anti-capitalism on a capitalist platform. what's the your solution? Communism, Monarchy, Anarchy? All those fundamental fail: Socialism doesn't work i.e Jamestown, USSR. neither does Monarchy i.e France(before the French Revolution)? And labor unions are capitalistic so i'm confused. IS your solution just better managed capitalism
In what world is it hypocritical to critique capitalism on TH-cam? Is it hypocritical for an American to critique privatized healthcare while paying for health insurance? Is it hypocritical to critique landlords while renting a home? No. Sometimes you have to make do with what you've got, and there's no contradiction between using the platforms available under the current conditions to argue that we deserve better conditions. Also, no, labour unions are not capitalistic. I have no idea where you got that from, but labour unions are very much so not a capitalist thing and I'm not going to get into an argument about economic systems with someone who seemingly thinks that the Teamsters are as capitalistic as Amazon and Walmart lmao
The man issue with this argument is that it assumes the gameplay services the narrative rather than the other way around. In reality, the story exists only as a flavor text for the gameplay. It’s clear that they don’t really care about the lore lol
What I heard is that Overwatch is a poorly managed soap opera.
Pretty much
I never thought of it like this before but you're absolutely right lmao
"The in universe narrative or the way it's produced?"
"Yes"
What still bugs me is that junkrat and roadhog have something that could pull them into the main cast (that being junkrat treasure he found which could so easily be turned into something talon or overwatch wants) but its like the team forgot about this entirely
Yeah like you could pretty easily pull him more into it. Soldier's already looting a bunch of old Overwatch weapons caches, just have Junkrat and Roadhog run into him when they try to rob one to take the fight to Junker Town, or have the treasure be some sort of MacGuffin that connects to the Omnics like some sort of relic of the God AI programs or something that the others will want back. Now that Ramattra and Null Sector are major factions, it's especially strange because if you're Ramattra wouldn't Junkertown/New Junk City be basically your number 1 target? Send Ramattra down to the Junkers, send Overwatch to try to defend Australia, and then you could maybe have some fun conflict between Junkrat and Roadhog because they'll view the problem differently and might pick different sides.
@@TheViveroswe actually know what it is now, its some kind of jet or airplane thing that junkrat and roadhog gave to JQ so she wouldn’t execute them. This is in the heroes ascendant story.
He most likely got one of the Omnium cores. We have had two allusions to the Omnium cores: The image of the Omni giving one to Satya Volskaya and the one Mondatta is holding in his statue. We know new junk city is built in the middle of an Omnium, so he most likely journeyed into the lower levels of it and found it.
@TheViveros This sounds like an epic asf story. Hy hasn't Blizzard done this!?
I've never played an fps game and never intended to. Lore is what brought me into Overwatch. Its just sad seeing alot of heroes being left in the dust. Junkrat's lore could've been one of the most emotional in the game. How did he survive the wasteland as a young child? Where did his leg go? What drove him into insanity? But instead we're stuck with nothing. I feel like the devs forgot there can be more than one narrative going on at the same time.
based off what we've seen of the state of australia and the other junkers most of these questions could just be solved with "hes a junker"
@dezymond9860 Maybe we could see more specifically what drove him insane and lost his leg? Like at the very least we saw JQ's origin and a little on how she survived out there with her family.
You forgot according to certain characters they kept asking about junkrats treasure. Like it was a mystery. All we could figure out from dialog was A. Most likely was Ominc related. B. Its definitely not money.
Crazy how they had a perfect opportunity to develop a backlog of 5+ heroes and have narrative write good stories about them and instead they lied about PvE 💀
They could have if they didn’t waste so many resources on the scrapped talent system, you had the same people making heroes designing entire detailed skill trees of 50+ entirely unique mechanical talents, it was an impossible task coinciding with other new heroes simultaneously
@@gengothecannoliking9655 Yeah, not to say it couldn't be done...but I DO think their idea of PvE was a much bigger task than it seemed to a lot of players. In addition to the garbage the company was doing unrelated to OW
You know what I forgot about? Sombra's origin story had said she was looking forward the group that actually controlled the world. I think Blizzard regretted that story beat as I don't it's ever followed up after that comic staring the Russian female character.
They could've easily written this via small influences from said group. Like Sombra describes, the whole world is a web and information is what ties the web together.
Who's enabling Talon and Vishkar and so many factions to exist, who got Overwatch shut down, who's really to benefit from the conflicts, etc. There are so many plot points to drive from, but Blizz didn't even try.
@@inplane9970 Hell, they could easily have Sombra revealed to be a double agent, leaking information from Talon to a third party or a secure server, with a dead-man's switch that would expose the entire conspiracy, hence why Talon keeps her around
The setting for Overwatch would have worked better as a comic book universe, you have a group of A list heroes directly involve with the Overwatch vs Talon conflict, but you also have a bunch of B and C list heroes with their own things going on.
I fucking love the entirely unrelated Thatcher roast 😭
Sometimes a Tory follows me by mistake and I just like to make sure to clear them out periodically lmao
@@TheViveros You're being more responsible with your platform on that alone than most other people lol
Ive been thinking about this for a while. Another facet is that overwatch cannot have an "end" due to the demand to keep adding content. I think thats why they made null sector the villains for "season one" of the overwatch story, allowing them to keep talon around and immediately availiable once null sector is defeated. Because of the nature of overwatch as an in story organisation it only makes sense to use them to stop global threats, because it would be ridiculous to send them after los muertos or the junkers without elevating those groups to a huge threat. Its the same issue as the avengers has, with blizzard wanting null sector to be their loki in avengers, with a bigger bad pulling the strings all along, which creates a loop of world ending threats just to introduce new factions for maps and heroes
That is the problem of superhero media that goes on for a long time. It's not designed to end there will always be another big bad. You can still tell smaller-scale stories with los muertos or the junkers without elevating them to a global threat, (i think making them a global threat would be lazy writing) not all stories in the ow universe have to be about overwatch.
It's rather insulting that you are both implying that us Junkers & Wastelanders (Australians) are "Bad Guys". Worse yet, assuming we are small fry Gangers like the Los Muertos.
Not one nation's military had ever successfully taken out an Omnium alone, except for the ALF.
The UN struck a peace deal with the Omnics after the Omnic Crisis, they gave them the Australian Omnium and much of the land & resources surrounding it to them as "Reserve" for em.
Us Aussie's clearly didn't like getting screwed after yet another global conflict so we did what the rest of the world bloody well couldn't and took out the Australian Omnium by ourselves.
And you both have the gaul to put us on the same rung as the petty thugs in the Los Muertos?
The Junnkers & Wastelanders are a potential global threat, we just ain't interested in anything more than keeping what's already ours.
Rat & Hog went on a world tour crime spree. Not one nation they went to could stop em. They are just two of us, not one nation could stop em.
How do you think yall would fair against all of us, the only nation to take out an Omnium by ourselves, if we REALLY wanted to be "Bad Guys"?
Yall call for back up and alliances when fighting Omnic Forces, I think it's laughable that you think any one organisation/force stands a chance against us.
Honestly that doesn't need to be the case, especially since the PvP in-game doesn't really make much sense anyways. Like in the PvP Reaper and Winstken can right on the same team against Tracer and Widowmaker, all of which would presumably hate that, with everyone pushing carts or standing in certain spots to win.
Besides, barring that they could always just set the PvP in the past. Like look at tf2's story: the comics have already gone well past the main PvP in the games. They've gone through MvM and past that too. Now the official story has already gone to the penultimate comic leading to the finale (haven't got it yet). You could always just set the PvP in the past. It's not like the Avengers where everything needs to be there now.
@@lilwintery6434Yeah, and world-rnding threats can get boring because there is no logical way the writers are going to actually let the bad guys win on that scale. On a smaller scale? Possible.
Problem is slightly deeper.
Plot not only can't have an end, it can't even move forward too much. We will forever be stuck in same "overwatch just recently got back together" moment, and at best we will be getting more back stories.
Because moving plot forward means change, means characters developing and changing.
This is why I don't like live service games. Most of my favorite games are RPGs or visual novels, and those tend to have deep, intricate stories with themes and messages relevant to the real world and characters you can get attached to because of how well they're written. Yahtzee put it best in his Extra Punctuation video when he said that the concept of "games as a service" is incompatible with the concept of "games as art." I had fun watching Overwatch's cinematic shorts and reading the comics, but I kept waiting for the day when Blizzard started tying it all together (a friend helped me lay the groundwork for a Star Wars-style generational saga), and it's clear to me at this point that they're never going to go there. Either it's just not in their plans, or the game will suffer enough losses that the plug will be pulled before they can get there.
Why can't Blizzard just hire someone to keep track of all of this shit.
Its ridiculous how the fans know the lore better than blizzard 😂
Hire a person to do a job? Are you fucking nuts? That would cost Blizzard money (for a company posting revenue in the *Billions*) and that's money that would come DIRECTLY out of Bobby Kotick's designer sock budget. Completely unacceptable.
why pay someone extra to keep the story and releases on check when you can hope it all works out
They did, but they fired them recently. Not like they were doing a good job anyway
Shit like this is the reason why Kiriko's age is incompatible with her backstory with Hanzo and Genji.
Went from Overwatch heroes to anti-capitalism. Never change! But seriously, it's good to finally have a content creator that acknowledges the issues with Overwatch systemically. I imagine that because they chose to make Overwatch 2 a "live service update", the story of Overwatch will never be completed and they'll only shoehorn more heroes in the game that have no business being in the story into the main narrative of Overwatch.
Tl:dr Overwatch needs a tv show
"A game's sequel might replace the old cast with a mostly new one that allows you to explore different dimensions of existing factions"
Oh pog. I loved that premise for Zero Time Dilemma. Worked wonderfully.
Joke's aside, I think that the devs are floundering at the prospect of trying to push the narrative forward the way that they are. They would need an off-season (maybe 2 at this point) in order to even catch up. The best thing I feel they could do is hedge bets, and move more towards the style of writing common in sitcoms. A core cast thrown through different scenarios that require interaction with the world, and very occasionally, that interaction will push the overarching plot along. Taking that approach would also allow time to flesh out some of the more underdeveloped characters in safer environments. Alas, I think they've written themselves into a corner now, and any time they don't address the elephant in the room in something, people will be like "Okay but what about this?".
They don't have a solid foundation, but are trying to write like they already did 1-2 episodic seasons worth of legwork. It's flawed.
Basically, yeah. It doesn't help that the early writing for Overwatch was completely deranged with zero plan that every subsequent writer has had to try to write around lmao
Basically it's becoming the MCU. Introducing characters and locations too fast and out of order because something went wrong, so everything suffers.
Phase 4 had nothing connecting the various plots and factions running around, and phase 5 is looking no different. Illari has nothing to do with any of the other characters.
Kind of unrelated but if there was an overwatch tv show Id like to see talon as like a team rocket group. Maybe have sigma moira or mauga be actually threatening but like reaper sombra and widow just seem like they would make a good team rocket.
Imma have to disagree with you about sigmas character. Honestly I think he’s very well developed. Old man Scientist who went mad crazy by his own experiments. The only people who take him in are talon who plan on using him and then his relationship with sombra is so cute. Like a daughter looking out for their old man.
This is hands down one of your best videos despite (as always) going on a rant about capitalism.
You bring some really valid points and information (I didn't know that Ram and Mauga releases were swapped).
Props
Capitalism sucks though. It really is the basis for Blizzard's problems.
I would actually argue that Moira is more in camp 3. She was a character that was added later, shoe-horned into the narrative (via Blackwatch and then Talon) and basically given stuff to do. (Her experiments on Widow and Reaper.) But, she is consistently abandoned by the narrative. Talon doesn’t acknowledge her existence and we know next to nothing about the Oasis and her role in the leadership position she holds there. Declassified seemed to suggest that her footprints exist throughout the narrative, but her story is not clear, and is constantly forgotten. (See, her being left out of Mirrorwatch completely.)
Overwatch is somewhat of an assemble of heroes and villains, and as those stories goes, it's hard to have them all be protagonists of the story, so for all characters, besides their interaction with the main plot, I think it is important to notice their own stories, the ones that are made for you to care for the character despite they being a grain in the lore desert. And doing so a lot of characters become assimilated to the plot through their importance for one of the heroes in the plot. In this way we could make a fourth camp, of heroes that are not part of the story but are foils to heroes that are, within it having
- Symmetra(Lucio's Opposite),
- Hanzo(Actively searching for Genji, The One who Killed),
- Zenyatta(Genji's Mentor, the One who Saved),
- Orisa(Actively hunting Doomfist),
- Ashe(Cassidy's past and current problem)
some others the were left in the second also could easily go to this fourth camp given Blizzard do anything with them
with Wrecking Ball as a possible direct foil to Winston, if they ever decide to have the canon world discover that there's a hamster inside that hamster ball and
Kiriko, as they made her be fundamentally connected to Genji, but forgot to give her any objective.
can’t wait to get a ramattra animated short in 20 years. capitalism truly does ruin everything.
I think the good part about the Group 2 heroes is that it can somewhat tell the story through world building. At least specifically with the Junkers, we can see the other fallout from the Omnic Crisis. All three of them have slightly different pain from the Crisis, the same Crisis that Overwatch and Talon are dealing with. And even though we dont know what all Junker Queen is doing for the narrative, her perspective and comments on the established characters can flesh out the world in a way that more central characters wouldn't.
Zenyatta is one of the most tragic characters for neglect. He's a fan-favorite character, has been there since the release of OW1, but didn't get ANYTHING until recently with the first batch of PVE missions, and even then it was only a short cinematic. He has a connection to an iconic OW character in Genji, but only got passing mentions at best. Hell, we don't even truly know if his abilities are canonical or not. He's never used any of them in-universe. In OW1, it was implied they were strictly gameplay purposes by Michael Chu way back in the day, but I guess they realized Zenyatta would be kind of lame power-wise if that was the case so in OW2, they leaned more toward them being legit.
Even then, he's gotten a comic with Symmetra that was okay but nothing special (beautiful art though) that showed his extra arms I guess. Why hasn't he gotten a full animated cinematic? They keep setting up this dude with points of interest but never go in on any of them. I thought with Rammatra's release, Zen would finally get something as a companion piece, but nope.
Zenyatta is right at the very top of the list of heroes who deserved a better game
He’s becoming relevant!
Man, I was pretty lucky to catch this so early! Love your content dude!
congratulations first commenter 👑
I honestly just wish they’d make an animated show at this point. Their cinematics are always so good. Iirc, that was their original vision, but making a video game at the time would have been cheaper, so they did that.
Besides, I just wanna see my Ramattra in that sweet animated short CGI.
-one of my biggest pet peeves is when grand scale fictions don't establish anything beyond the immediate settings, characters, etc. but an even bigger pet peeve is when the writers do establish characters, settings, etc, then don't connect them to the overall narrative; so they're left there like differently themed rides at theme park with no connection between them, other than being at the same theme park.
- 19:33 and "nothing goes wrong" means they still make money. like how almost every AAA game comes out with glitches that make me believe no one test played them. but the games make money, so "nothing went wrong".
-overwatch story has been mismanaged for so long that if they announced a hard reboot for it, i don't think anyone would complain.
-that (25:58) meteor strike.
2:08 😭😭 the genji who solo bladed u is so me when i catch a sombra lacking
My only regret is that I didn't get the Mercy before she rezzed him, but I think he was pretty fed up with me by that point lmao
1:53 nah that play was NOT ok 😭😭😭
The Ana stealing the kill from the Genji at the end is my favourite part, like he wanted it bad and just couldn't get it himself lmao
About 5:30 in, Vishkar is about to be in the main lore, as teased in the missions tab in game at the moment. Like Null Sector and Talon, it's going to be one of the antagonists of a set of story missions
I wouldn't be shocked, but I also wouldn't hold my breath. I want to see it finally matter but the pace of things has made me feel like it's kinda necessary to wait until it actually gets released before treating it as fact.
yeah how's that working out for you buddy lol
As a league player, learning all this is absolutely wild. I only interact with Overwatch via your videos and would love to get into the lore but I know it’s a mess.
At least Riot mostly gets releases right and has backup plans they’re usually vocal about. Like rn we’re waiting for Skarner’s VGU and since it got pushed back we got a Jax ASU earlier. They clearly have a pipeline of (nearly) completed projects that can be swapped around relatively easily and it’s insane Blizzard wouldn’t do that.
Zenyatta is part of the central narrative, he literally shows up at the end of Invasion. Smh my head.
Babe wake up an new Viveros video dropped!
Funny how so many of my frustrations with overwatch (and life in general) come from capitalistic greed. Great video; I appreciate your story breakdowns of overwatch. I always learn something new from these videos.
SEATED
This reminds me in how in 2014 League of legends restructured their lore and their story. They basically removed the in universe explanation for what happens in game and made the game itself non connonical like in the case of Overwatch. The problem is since there are a lot of characters even by then some still aren't integrated in the current lore a decade later, since lore integration does not sell skins
Holy shit I thought I was crazy. I know it’s not popular but imo I think we could’ve removed characters from OW TO OW2. Either narratively or mechanically some characters didn’t belong in OW2 and a tighter cast would make for easier balance and storytelling.
who would be on the coping block first?
Brigitte, Baptiste, Orisa, among others
You know, in regards to the story of overwatch 1/2, I think a good comparison is if like star wars had an expanded universe, but no main line movies to tie everything together. Without the mainline movies, you'd be missing the context of the most important aspects of this world. Over watch feels like that, kind of.
The way the OW lore is going makes me remember of what Riot did to League during the Ruination event. The biggest narrative event theyve created with the perfect rooster of champions... was reduced to a complete mess and with a rooster of champions that were only there cuz they sell skins. What ? This champion have nothing to do with this plot ? Put him in the good guys team and change his personality to fit a stereotype. What ? It doesnt makes sense turning this champion into a villain ? I dont care, she looks great in this evil outfit. What ? We created an Champion years ago that would be Very important to this story ? Nah, lets create another one especific to this story and finishing his history at the end making he basically impossible to fit in any other story.
Thinking about when you said that its espected that Winston and Junkrat have similar plot relevance since theyre playable its something that LOL suffers, cuz you have Champions that have basically 0 lore or are just minions while you also have Champions with an 20 pages lore.
League and Overwatch are more similar than people think. The difference is that League have better lore, while OV have better characters
Zenyatta slowly moving over to camp 3 with the recent cinematics.
I came here to know why overwatch lore is in shambles not a masterclass of why capitalism sucks, one of the best videos I have ever watch.
Honestley i think its because most people wanna play the fps shooter not read/watch the lore. The blizard is at a point where they have to constantly have to satisfy the people who play the PvP game since theyre the people that make the money for them and thats over watches brand. Sadly us who want lore are just a minority :(. They can completley try to change how theyre operating to actually focus on making a resolution to all this stuff but thats a huge risk
I personally think that's just shameful, cuz they made a cast full of unique characters and a world setting with some kind of potential to be developed outside the main game to just don't give a shit about any of this (I mean they make comics sometimes but I don't think that's enough to show everything about the OW's world)
I wish ppl who wanted to know the lore were a majority so Blizz would actually care to make actual content for their characters lmao
I laughed at that margaret thatcher line
Heh, funny that this video was recommended to me as i was wondering what the purpose of Venture is.
With most characters you can at least vaguely place them together, but iliari and Venture just vibe here
This is why workers should own the places they work and the means by which they make stuff.
Blizzard is also reluctant to release anything besides cinematics. Maybe they could create a certain style of lore videos for side heroes instead of being only about the main narrative heroes? The videos could all be in different art styles. Just anything to give story content. A good example of this is Katsuwatch. Blizzard collared with the channel to put out an official lore video about 76 and Ana told in the form of cats. That was super creative and gave us some story content, even if it wasn't as polished or quality as the cinematics. That's what I want. Or even the fucking Anime. Don't just stop at dawn, they should keep it going for goings sake if it means side characters get some story.
I see you're also a based Art Deco Symmetra enjoyer.
I was very happy when it got added to the anniversary shop thing, it was one of the ones I was most sad that I couldn't get with free credits earlier.
What you are forgetting about the camp 2 characters is that a good chunk of them are parallel characters. Characters designed to be the counterpart to another. This is why Symmetra is required. To be a parallel to Lucio. But there are characters in camp 2 who are not required at all due to lack of connections, like the three new supports and venture all having minimal or no connections whatsoever. Having doomfist without orisa completely devalues him as a villain.
i think it’s an FPS and the story is entirely secondary, maybe even tertiary, considering they washed the PVE mode. we’re coming at this with the lens of criticizing a narrative storytelling game, this is an FPS made by a company who clearly will never prioritize the narrative elements of the characters.
Man I love capitalism. Ruining human lives since 1622.
Undefeated champion of making everything worse for everyone except for, like, twelve people who get to be trillionaires
Is that Toyota method you mentioned in the video called “Six Sigma”? The new higher ups in my company really got into that recently. Sounds like that’s a bad idea
also I'd never seen that Space Ranger concept art but I've been looking at the OW concept artists' work on ArtStation and as a result I could immediately tell who drew that (his name escapes me rn)
I've been bothered by destiny 2's story for years and this tracks onto it so well too
And destiny manages to be somewhat functional compared to overwatch since its new characters can be introduced based on what makes sense in the plot
Destiny at least has somewhat of a stable direction and wasn't considered dead for three years, although at some points it did come pretty close to being considered dying or dead. I started playing d2 after I started playing Overwatch, and the difference in approaches is noticeable. Especially in lore and narrative department, Overwatch barely moved theirs while Destiny is about to close the main arc and already dealt with a few major ones.
Although recent layoffs may be a shift to an even worse situation, and thats after the Lightfall fiasco.
twinky winky ate this up and soloed your faves fight me 😘
We need a lore update tbh, preferably a tv show
As someone who likes to read books, I dont see the issue with the long pauses between story beats. I've had to wait YEARS for the next book to release and it never takes away from how good or bad it is when it comes out. Gamers are just impatient.
I don't mind long waits, I think the issue is less that gamers demand too much and more that the companies aren't really reckoning with the limitations of the medium when it comes to telling their stories. They're trying to do too much when they can't.
Cant they just do it like fnaf does it
Just
Tell a story, but just not in order?
You're one of the only TH-camrs I've personally seen talk about the game industry's decline as a inevitable symptom of our form of capitalism. Whenever I talk to my friends about this stuff they just say "it's not that deep." But shocker anything that makes that much money is absolutely that deep.
Ayo! Was that the Fuzion Frenzy song in the intro!? ❤
It was! I actually just did a whole video about Fuzion Frenzy lol
@@TheViveros awesome! I did watch that after this video lol (I HAD to 😆)
I never minded characters that didn’t tie to the main story directly, but more through the connections that allow you to see how they could tie into it. Lifeweaver & Symm > Vishkar > Sanjay > Talon > Overwatch > New omnic Crisis.
Illari has always bugged me though since she has zero ties into it any connections at all. That’s probably why I just don’t enjoy her as a character. Every other character is a thread in a tapestry, but she’s just kind of there.
That's pretty similar to how I initially viewed the story, but I think over time it's come to look more like a whole bunch of threads waiting to be woven into a tapestry rather than parts of one that's already been made. They definitely *can* be tied in, and you can see the routes that they would need to follow to get tied back into it, but it needs to actually happen at some point or else it's all just theoretical.
@@TheViveros true, but at least for the most part all characters can be tied in except for Illari, which I hate cuz it was so random. They could’ve done something like when omnics invaded her village, the stress of seeing her people die caused that explosion of power. Otherwise it’s so out of place.
love that margret thatcher rant 😭
Second time a video of yours popped up on my feed, and a second time I’ve been impressed by your analysis of Overwatch. Easy click of the subscribe button
Despite hiccups that have happened in the past (ruined king event), riot games somehow handles its narrative without this issue despite running a live service model.
Essentially, how it works right now is that there are 3 teams that work with characters. Champ design, who makes characters for the game, writers, who create stories, and the IP management, who are in charge of lining things up between all the different teams. How this works in practice is that writers have made a massive universe with dozens of characters who can potentially join the game, the IP team can get the writers to build up a character if the champ designers want something, or the IP team can get the champ designers to start making something if the writers are building up to something.
What if there are design hiccups on the champ design side? well, there's a balance team and redesign team that are seperate from the champ design team. The balance team focuses on game balance, and is further subdivided by role, while the redesign team is focused on updating art assets for old champions and reworking champions that ended up just not working for the game.
Sounds great but I feel like that approach would just be too expensive for a small indie game dev like Blizzard.
I don't know if they could even fit that many teams inside their HQ.
Zenyatta finally gets some place in the lore after 8 years w/out being someones tutor thanks to Ramattra. A character who has been in the game since day 1 and always meme'd to be the one with absolutely NO backstory to him. With these hero releases and a flopped PVE it's very disappointing that he gets some attention but feels it would flop because they prioritize monetizing the game over anything.
It has always massively bothered me that they keep adding characters to Overwatch with no connection to Overwatch
So what you're telling me is that Overwatch needs to be hit with the Arcane treatment
I wasn’t expecting the random vTuber who I clicked on for a time-killer killing game VN review to have strong leftist commentary, but I am very pleased with this result
Gotta keep you on your toes
Have you gotten the new book? Are you thinking of making a video about it? I’m broke as hell, so I’m waiting for it to go on sale or… online, yaknowwhatimean? 😂 About the video, I agree this is best treated as an anthology, let’s say a comic book series (or any format, I just love comics so it’s just an example): Overwatch as the main series either graphic novels or an ongoing weekly/monthly series; Talon/Null Sector, Volshkaya/Vishkar+Lucio (The Shady Businesses (tm) I guess 😂), and The Junkers could all be secondary, shorter runs that can connect into the main plot or not; then The Shimadas+Kiriko, Meka squad, Numbani, Deadlock, and Illiari can all have some even shorter runs that can connect to the main plot or not, think a volume or two at most. I think keeping characters in the expanded lore won’t work very well because the players start asking for them. Look how people wanted Mauga, or how they ask for Maximilian. All Blizzard does is give us crumbs and then disappear, so every inconsequential character and event gets blown out of proportion by a starving playerbase. It’s only now they realize how hungry for lore we’ve been, and even then they really just acknowledge it. It sounds stupid, but when the PvE got cancelled (reworked?) I was kind of expecting the missions to drop more regularly. It really is Archives in steroids, bestie, they really have nothing in storage 😭 This is a yearly ordeal nauuuurrr
P.S. Don’t attack me, but I think both the story and game would benefit from having a closed roster. Like, stop at 50 or something like that. Then for balancing they could focus on reworking the heroes we already have, and for variety, maps and game modes are way more interesting than we give them credit for. Say what you want about The Overwatch Drought of 2021, but the game was balanced. Had they kept releasing cosmetics, game modes, Archive events, maps, and what not, I think we’d remember this period more positively than we do.
I have not gotten the book bc I am a broke bitch, but I'd like to check it out some time. Honestly, I think part of the issue is that the original roster and story weren't meant to be so broad, and the anthology idea probably wouldn't have worked as well - but over time, the roster kept getting bigger and broader, and now you've got a universe that's outgrown its story.
And I agree, I think the big thing with the content drought was that we weren't really getting anything at all. People like getting new characters and maps and stuff, but if Blizzard had said "No new characters, we'll be spending a couple years working on OW2 and developing the existing characters in the meantime" I think it would've been a lot more positively received. Part of why the PvE stuff still seems so sporadic is, I'm guessing, the fact that they didn't know which characters would be added and when, so they couldn't tell which stories to tell. In fact, I bet it's a big part of why they've locked down the next year of heroes already with Mauga, Venture, Space Ranger, and whoever the next tank is after them - it forces them to stick to their guns with these guys.
Great vid as always. Game Workers Unite!
The mauga n ramattra swap is extra funny because before ram reveal we thought it was mauga n when ram was revealed a whole lotta smart ass in the community where like “dUh u thInK thEy’D RevEAl sOMe rAndOm TaLOn HeaVY BeFOre nUlL seCToR LeADer” but look at us now
I would say that Zenyatta is part of the main story tbf. He is more or less the embodiment of Omnic sentience post-Aurora and is Genji’s mentor (someone you put in Group 1)
Edit: seems i was a little impatient and very defensive of Zenyatta lol. Should have just finished watching!
And also personally connected to Ramattra, who I’m pretty sure is a major character lol
hey man your thumbnails look pretty good lately, is everything alright at home?
smh i can’t believe i’m wearing my mental illness on my sleeve like that
I didn't watch Blizzcon what's the big thing about communication that you reference in regards to it
I really wished they would slow with the new characters and make then more worth while. The only ones that are actually contributing to the story are the tanks and even then they were originally designed in overwatch 1. Even if the missions are no longer happening just hire a story writer and actually tell the stories instead of just giving up completely.
kiriko and hanzo are related to genji if you didn't know, so they are in first camp
Being connected to a character who's in the narrative isn't enough to actually be a main character in the narrative, though.
@@TheViveros ok but he's not just a random dude. he's connected to overwatch
Kiriko isn't related to Genji. She isn't important to either Genji and Hanzo's story or character, and is more so just shoved into it.
Hanzo, however, is actually related to Genji, and has actual reasons and motives to be a part of Camp 1
how illari is camp 2. she never exist until they release her. i think bap is camp 2 no since he is related to talon
Wake up babe new viveros vid just dropped
Before watching the video, my opinion is that the biggest problem is the size of the cast.
I think genshin needs an off-season or at least a slow season where not much happens. This is what genshin Impact and honkai Star Rail does,
The big update adds a ton of new content (what could of been pve) followed by small updates that drip release characters from that story content and smaller bits of story, then things die out till the next big update, and its strange overwhelming hasent done this.
Altho admittedly HSR or GI charachters prob dont take as time to make as overwatch ones nor the balance but simple making thier design and story to be used in story.
I think you meant to say overwatch needs an off season
banger vid
Babe wake up Viveros posted
The thing is capitalism does work, but only if the incentives aren't skewed. Toyota, the company you mentioned, is a prime example. The whole reason companies relentlessly work on stock price instead of fundamentals comes down to the governments around the world unwillingness to let the stock market collapse, and for corrections to take place.
Wanna know why stock prices have no bearing on reality? We haven't allowed the market to work since the great depression.
What happened before the Great Depression?
If capitalism worked, Toyota wouldn't be the only car company on the planet to know the importance of superconductors and plan accordingly. The reality is that capitalism inevitably leads to this outcome because the incentives at all levels are to maximize profits, and once you have enough money, you can use it to influence governments and regulators (or just bribe them) into changing the rules to benefit you. The reason why the incentives get skewed is because it's in the best interests of the individual capital holders to manipulate the system to accumulate more capital - there's no way to do capitalism without it becoming crony capitalism.
@@TheViveros if you look at the history, of at least the US, panics and the like are nothing out of the ordinary, but tend to solve themselves in 1-2 years, without government intervention. One of the biggest reasons the great depression lasted so long was the government kept intervening to save industries that should have failed, thereby not allowing the process of capital reallocation into more successful business models.
In fact, lots of companies keep extra stock of essential items. It's kinda why the price of onions, potatoes, and grain didn't go up like 10x, or how firearms and ammo manufacturers almost immediately were able to increase production despite the enormous spike of demand caused by the coof, or the fact that electronics were still readily available during the height of covid, and whose prices didn't balloon out.The examples are numerous throughout modern history of companies being incentivized by the market in keeping rainy day stock.
You just have to look.
this is great and all but honestly i dont think overwatch's story is a big deal, especially rn
I've seen this happen with Paladins. It's happening guys I hate this.
you didn't need to get so based around the 20 minute mark jeez
From "the story in my favorite game is shit bcs..." To *socialist propaganda*
honestly I feel like I should apologize for commenting so much on your videos they're just very comment-on-able
So as a supply chain major, i take issue with the "criticism" you have of the JIT model and the halfhearted segway into a criticism of capitalism
Fundamentally everything engineers do is based on tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
You would have us plan for a once in a century event. Fine. But what is the cost of that? You dont think about that. Cost increases about 10-20% everywhere and to everyone for an entire century.
Same thing about capitalism. Ford isn't incentivized to make the best car ever. Fine. But what was the alternative to that? We know what happens when someone forces the entire economy into creating the perfect xyz. Read up about GDR and how they destroyed their own economy because of their foolish semiconductor quest.
I love that you think you’re the only person who’s studied this stuff. This was my major for years, and while this video isn’t my dissertation into the subject, it absolutely comes from a position of being informed. There’s a difference between running a reasonable business and hyperfixating on being as lean as possible to the point where failure is a sick day away at all times, and as the video points out, the actual original JIT model can work as it has for Toyota. The problem is the misunderstanding and misapplication of it, which is what I was criticizing.
The critique into capitalism isn’t “half-hearted”, either. It’s talking about how the outcomes we are presently experiencing are the result of the processes we currently follow and how the incentives of those processes lead to negative outcomes in this context. It’s not a full lecture because that’s not what this video is about, but I also have the sneaking suspicion that it wouldn’t matter how I presented the critiques of the current system - it’s not like socialism is making Blizzard produce worse games and write stories poorly.
Anyways, thanks for your “criticism” of my video essay. It was a half-hearted bad-faith attempt to respond to half of what I said, but I appreciate the engagement all the same 🥰
Video starts 2:08
I think you make very good and insightfull content but I think it would benefit you if you spoke slower and with more diction, maybe its just a me problem, maybe it's just because Im not a native english speaker but sometime I have hard time understanding what you're saying
Great video.
How is there a 28 min video for no narrative at all😭😭 overwatch story fell off before overwatch 2 but at least we got shorts
Agree with you about stupid business major though, but don't you think its a little hypocritical to rant about anti-capitalism on a capitalist platform. what's the your solution? Communism, Monarchy, Anarchy? All those fundamental fail: Socialism doesn't work i.e Jamestown, USSR. neither does Monarchy i.e France(before the French Revolution)? And labor unions are capitalistic so i'm confused. IS your solution just better managed capitalism
In what world is it hypocritical to critique capitalism on TH-cam? Is it hypocritical for an American to critique privatized healthcare while paying for health insurance? Is it hypocritical to critique landlords while renting a home? No. Sometimes you have to make do with what you've got, and there's no contradiction between using the platforms available under the current conditions to argue that we deserve better conditions.
Also, no, labour unions are not capitalistic. I have no idea where you got that from, but labour unions are very much so not a capitalist thing and I'm not going to get into an argument about economic systems with someone who seemingly thinks that the Teamsters are as capitalistic as Amazon and Walmart lmao
Based
I love how nearly all of your videos boil down to capitalism is at fault😪
shockingly, the dominant economic model we live under has a lot of ripple effects
based
The man issue with this argument is that it assumes the gameplay services the narrative rather than the other way around. In reality, the story exists only as a flavor text for the gameplay. It’s clear that they don’t really care about the lore lol
And what do you know? Venture also has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of this world and may as well not even exist.