Another nail in the coffin for Blizzard's PvE ambitions.
The hits just keep coming for Overwatch 2’s PvE ambitions. Its initial plans—which included talent trees and long-term progression—were scrapped in May. Then we found out they’d be charging $15 for a less elaborate version of its promised story campaign. Now, as reported by Gamesradar, they’ll be released at a snail’s pace.
The announcement came from the game’s executive producer Jared Neuss on a Twitch appearance with streamer Emonng. “Don’t expect the next [round of missions] in the next season or the next season after that. It’s trying to find that balance between getting them in front of players quickly because we love story stuff, and [we want to give] ourselves enough time to make changes or add features.”
He later outlines plans for a more piecemeal story approach: “We’re trying to make it so that it doesn’t feel like ‘and then there’s nothing’ for a long extended period of time. It’s more like ‘there’s this cool thing!’ and ‘there’s this other narrative thing’, ‘there’s this other narrative thing’—we keep telling interesting stories and moving that all forward.”
The response from the community has been an expected mix of anger, disappointment and exhaustion:
Guys I think you can just stop now https://t.co/altByr5B8YJuly 2, 2023
I’m gonna wait and see what this replayability looks like, but for a team that loves the story so much and has been working on it siiiiince 2016… it doesn’t seem to be the main focus. That was supposed to be the whole point of @PlayOverwatch 2. https://t.co/QAIpvuDiV6July 2, 2023
Overwatch 2 is a social experiment to see just how much disappointment human beings can take before they finally give up https://t.co/OgDeTcwfs5July 3, 2023
While I certainly don’t envy the devs inheriting this mess, Overwatch 2 was announced in 2019, and its PvE component was explicitly something the team had been focusing on even after the first game launched. To hear that they need time to “make changes or add features” to content that didn’t launch with a reboot of a game they’d intended to use as a platform for it is downright exhausting. How much more time is needed?
From where I’m standing, Overwatch 2’s PvE is now less in-depth than promised, more expensive than anticipated, and slower to release than anyone expected. Perhaps in 2024—given each season lasts about nine weeks—we’ll be given a new story mode with some proper polish to it, incorporating feedback from their initial test run. But we’ll never see the fully-realised PvE mode that Blizzard promised, and that’s a damn shame.
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