Overwatch 2 PvE Is No More, Blizzard to Focus on the Game’s Live Service
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The team working on Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 announced that they are no longer releasing the promised PvE Hero mode that was revealed when the sequel was announced in 2019. They are now going to divert all their efforts to the game’s live service and release story-based content in future seasons.
You can watch the full dev stream here.
This is a rather disappointing announcement as I was looking forward to playing a PvE-focused Overwatch, which many believed justifies the game getting a “2” at the end of its name.
In an interview with Gamespot, plans simply changed since the reveal in 2019 as the team struggled to maintain the multiplayer side of Overwatch 2 while building this entirely new experience equipped with a skill tree and Hero progression.
“In the years following our announcement at BlizzCon 2019, we had a really large portion of our team working on the PvE side of that game, and I think players of our live running game could feel that because we eventually stopped making content for it. It's been maybe two and a half years since the last hero that we launched, and we don't want to be back at the point where it's another three and a half years since launching a PvP map. “ says game director Aaron Keller.
“The interesting thing about it is, it's such a difference releasing content for players that are playing your game instead of saving up all of that content for one big release that you're going to do later. So we came to the realization that this wasn't the right way to be developing for all of Overwatch. It was about a year and a half ago that we made the decision to really shift strategy. That's when we rapidly shifted the resources on our team to work on launching Overwatch 2, and that's what came out last October.”
Realization seem to have hit the team halfway as what they were trying to build was too ambitious and difficult to balance while maintaining a live service side currently live to the public. Overwatch 2 currently has over 35 Heroes available right now and each one will have to be tuned for a completely new game and fitted with their own talent trees and progression. Two separate games. One team. Now, their justification for having a sequel is now being questioned.
When Overwatch 2 launched last year as a free-to-play title, it consumed the original game and the changes to the multiplayer side felt more like a long-overdue patch that fans have been waiting for as the first game had a long drought of no new content.
Overwatch’s 2023 Roadmap revealed
But not all is lost as there will be PvE-focused content released in the form of Story missions each season, which kicks off in Season 6. Alongside the news of scrapping the PvE portion if Overwatch 2, they revealed the game’s 2023 roadmap which you can see below.
Season 4 is currently underway and it looks like Season 5 will feature a medieval-fantasy setting and a limited-time event called Questwatch, plus the return of Summer Games.
Season 6 is where Story Missions begin, the release of another Support hero, an event called Flashpoint, a player progression system, and a firing range.
Season 7 and beyond has a lot of features coming in the future. We’ll soon get an Omnic Tank hero, a rework for Roadhog and Sombra, a new Control Map, and more.
The upcoming seasons seem standard, but time will tell if all the new content can make up for the cancellation of the game’s PvE.
Overwatch 2 is currently available as a free-to-play game on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC.
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