The Overwatch 2 game director tries to smooth things over and calms things down. There’s still PvE and it’s coming soon – only one mode is missing.
The last week has been quite a disaster for all Overwatch fans. In a stream that is actually one of the current events, the Overwatch 2 development team said “in passing” that the “hero missions” for Overwatch 2 have been cancelled.
Now the game director tries to put the shambles aside and clarify a few things. After all, Overwatch 2 still gets PvE missions – even if they are different than previously announced at BlizzCon.
What were the hero missions? The hero missions should be a highly replayable PvE content. Here it should be possible to level up the characters individually and to change them with special abilities in the form of a talent tree – basically the dream of every MMO fan.
Even if there are a few voices that are still positive and full of expectations, the majority of the community is negative – and that’s putting it politely. Everywhere it rains insults and great disappointment. What most simply cannot grasp is that the main feature that should define Overwatch 2 will not appear.
Overwatch 2: The animated short film about the fox heroine Kiriko
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PvE in Overwatch 2 – That’s coming
However, it is true that Overwatch 2 has not eliminated all PvE. Blizzard plans to “advance the story of Overwatch” for the first time in the coming seasons. That means there are “big” PvE missions with cutscenes and a clear focus on the story. Aaron Keller calls it more precise in a blog post:
Story missions focus on fast-paced co-op gameplay as well as story, cinematics, and cutscenes that expand the world of Overwatch. Story Missions tell a linear storyline about the heroes of Overwatch reuniting and fighting the new Null Sector threat. This will advance the story of Overwatch for the first time since the game’s original release.
These missions take place on large maps with new enemies and new cinematics. We will start releasing them in Season 6. The work that’s been done here is fantastic and far exceeds anything we’ve had in PvE before and I can’t wait for our players to see that.
Whether the PvE missions can really convince and satisfy the hunger for co-op PvE without the “hero missions” remains to be seen. So far, Blizzard has been reluctant to provide specific information about the scope of PvE.
The big concern is that there are only “snippets” of content here – one or two small missions per season that might entertain 15-20 minutes. But that too remains to be seen.
The Overwatch 1 debacle – What happened?
In retrospect, it seems strange how Blizzard handled Overwatch after the release. For almost two years there was regularly new content and fresh content before the stream of new products was stopped. The reason for this was then revealed at BlizzCon 2019 – Overwatch 2 was meant to have a deep PvE campaign, full co-op experience with talent trees and customization.
For this reason, resources were withdrawn from live development and more and more developers were assigned to Overwatch 2 and the PvE content.
The result: Overwatch 1 was completely neglected, the months passed without major innovations and the community continued to shrink. This was certainly reinforced by the fact that the Overwatch League didn’t really want to ignite either, which was probably less the fault of the developers than of Blizzard’s eSports team. Participation in the league was expensive and complicated – and the great commercial success was largely absent.
Most fans can’t seem to understand what actually happened.
With Overwatch 1 you had a game and a new franchise with a great future.
Many ask – and rightly so – why Blizzard has not expanded the team around Overwatch. A better decision would have been to continue development of Overwatch 1 with regular updates and to have a larger team work on the PvE content, rather than let Overwatch 1 “die” entirely.
You’re always wiser in hindsight, but you should have known that beforehand – at least that’s the prevailing opinion on the forums and Reddit.
Community and streamers are shocked
The big streamers have also expressed their views en masse on changing Overwatch 2’s plans. As in the community, the general tenor here is rather negative.
Asmongold said about this:
The main thing Overwatch 2 should do is not going to happen. You know, the one thing to look forward to in Overwatch 2? That’s not coming.
xQc was also quite shocked by the developers’ announcement. In his reaction video on YouTube he said:
If they don’t work on PvE and don’t do it anymore, where has all that time gone?! We’re talking about thousands of hours just gone. Where are the?! I’m confused! Brother… because Overwatch 2 wasn’t even an update. It just wasn’t. That was just… the updates the main game never got, that just came at the same time.
What do you think of the current Overwatch 2 debacle? Not so bad that the hero missions are deleted? Or is the game “dead” for you?