All of your leaks around Overwatch 2 made Jeff Kaplan very sad. You probably already know that, since he made a point out of it during the opening ceremonies at BlizzCon 2019, but Kaplan went into more detail in an interview with Kotaku Australia. As he put it, leaks aren’t remembered after the fact, but it leaves the developers struggling to put context to the leaks about things that aren’t made clear just from the leak itself, like working overtime to reassure existing Overwatch players that the sequel won’t leave them behind.
When you’re trying so hard to deliver something for somebody and to have it be spoiled in a way that’s not coherent… That’s the part that bothers us the most, where people are not given all the information and all of the context that they need to understand what we’re doing.
Of course, in another interview Kaplan stressed that it took some convincing to have Overwatch 2 carry cosmetics forward from the original game. This isn’t without precedent; it took some convincing to ensure that all Overwatch updates would be free for owners of the existing game. Seeing as the title still has no release date, expect to be hearing about this a lot for the next couple of years.
I try to tell them if we do what’s right by the players, they will be happy, we we will have a better game, and we will end up in a better place in the long run. Rather than having this short sighted thinking that’s usually driven by anxiety of “the only way to get players to play Overwatch 2 is to cut off all the Overwatch 1 players and starve them out and force them to come over” and, you know, make that game just sort of die on the vine.
