Blizzard has revealed a roadmap of what’s to come in Overwatch 2 in a recent developer update stream.
But the most important takeaway is the original vision of Overwatch 2– a replayable PVE mode with a talent tree only available there and a story campaign- is now gone.
Game Director Aaron Keller said this in the stream:
“We announced Overwatch 2 in 2019 and part of that presentation was about this ‘always-on, deeply replayable’ PVE experience. And as work slowly continued on Overwatch 2, we began to pull more and more of our focus and energy away from the live game and all of the people that were playing it. We had players that were excited to be playing that game and they just wanted more of it.
So, we had a difficult choice to make. We could continue working on our original vision for Overwatch 2 without a definitive end date in sight or change our strategy and get something in front of players sooner.
We chose the latter and we released Overwatch 2 last October with new heroes, new maps, new modes and regular seasonal updates.
But more than that we shifted our values for how we want to develop the game. No longer would we store content up for really big releases and leave the game sort of languishing on the side.
Now we made a commitment to always prioritise the live game and all of the people playing it and to devote our development efforts there. This game is nothing without all of you.
Executive Producer Jared Neuss also said that the development of the PVE mode “hasn’t made the progress that we would hope”. Both Neuss and Keller said that the development of PVE has “no end in sight”.
As such, PVE mode with talent trees has been cancelled. In place of that, there will be PVE limited-time events that kick off a new story arc of Overwatch, with the first one coming in Season 5. Some of these events will be non-canon, like Starwatch, some will canon and progress the story.
This would explain a lot about the sudden pivot to free-to-play.
Overwatch 2 was initially revealed as a whole new game, that requires a purchase just like Overwatch, with the selling point being the whole new PVE mode. The plan was to support both games by having the multiplayer experience being the same between the two games- which extends to sharing the same matchmaking pool.
But Overwatch 2, as we know it today, is nothing like that. It’s a free-to-play game, and has made Overwatch redundant as a result. It has a heavily reworked multiplayer (with 5v5 instead of 6v6), and a seasonal model with battle passes. And it has regular updates, including more balance updates than seen previously.
Blizzard waited until they can announce a PVE story event is coming before announcing the original Overwatch 2 is no more- four seasons into the release of Overwatch 2. It’s odd to not just commit and communicate this focus on live service, instead of shipping a new product as was promised, early on. It’s even more odd that Overwatch 2 was even announced, with a playable build, if the game that was shown there was never be able to be shipped in the first place.
Still, if you’re still playing Overwatch 2 and is content with the current drip feed of content, expect more to come including another limited-time event (Questwatch), the aforementioned story missions, and a support hero coming in Season 6.