When Overwatch 2 was announced at BlizzCon 2019, Blizzard made a big deal of the brand new PvE component, which would have been comprised of Story Missions and Hero Missions.
The former would have been a full-fledged campaign, whereas the latter mode was meant to be highly replayable thanks to a leveling system and a talent system that allowed players to customize the characters’ abilities while playing in PvE.
At first, Blizzard said it would launch Overwatch 2 with just PvP so that it could refine the PvE mode. Eventually, though, the studio came clean to clarify that the full scope of the original vision was not feasible. The first PvE missions were introduced with the release of Invasion in Season 6, a separate $15 DLC for just three missions. However, Blizzard quickly added that players shouldn’t expect any more PvE content before 2024. Now, though, a new Kotaku report suggests it may not come – ever.
According to the anonymous sources within the studio, the plan was to release three missions every year and a half. The remaining campaign levels currently range from fully playable to the concept stage. One of the issues stems from the pursuit of the mythical Blizzard quality (or polish):
[Blizzard Quality] is a justification to essentially piss about forever and ever redoing the same work over and over. Some executive goes, ‘Hm, but is it Blizzard quality?’ It’s always leadership or game directors deciding they need to spend the extra time. So honestly, if they could have just made any kind of decisions, the game would have shipped years ago.
But there were other problems. Another source said there were issues adapting the PvP-focused playable roster to a persistent PvE mode with full progression.
Still, most of the team reportedly was keen to make the PvE vision a reality, but executives didn’t feel the same way. Now, after the middling reception of the Invasion bundle, the prospects are bleaker than ever, particularly because the recent Activision Blizzard layoffs reportedly hit the Overwatch 2 PvE/narrative team hard.
