Blizzard has made another unwelcome clarification in regards to the PvE content in Overwatch 2.
As reported by PSU, Blizzrd executive producer Jared Neuss made this statement:
“Don’t expect the next round [of story missions] in the next season and the season after that, or anything like that.
It is very much like trying to find that balance between getting [story missions] in front of players quickly because we love story stuff, and giving ourselves enough time to make changes or add features.”
It’s unfortunate that Blizzard can’t commit to full development of PvE content even at this juncture. But given that Blizzard essentially cancelled the full story mode that they had promised to fans, this announcement can’t have been unexpected.
However, Jared went on to say this:
“To be fair, there’s a bunch of stuff that we want to do next year, or that are already in development for next year, that will fill the gaps that people will have in between.
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.”
For those fans expecting to see some form of story mode in truncated form from Blizzard, you should probably give up on that hope.
This statement seems to be an indication that the company will address the bare minimum of story and canon concerns necessary to keep the game going. That may be extended for a period of a few years, and the way Blizzard will deliver this content to fans will likely not be to anyone’s satisfaction.
Truthfully, Blizzard can definitely spin off a portion of their studios to make that single player campaign, even if it means it isn’t being worked on by the main Overwatch dev team. They don’t even need to work with Blizzard’s main writer – that person can simply do consulting for any other writer that Blizzard wants to hire and set to the task.
Blizzard can call in favors across the aisle to other ABK owned studios to help them make this too. Raven Software or Sledgehammer Games may welcome to slight change of pace to be working on this game’s single player content instead.
But no, the demands of Overwatch 2 being a live service game make it so that the same team making it now can’t make a story campaign for it. Besides, the core Overwatch team is too protective of their ownership of the IP. So they aren’t likely to let other studios take charge of such a campaign.
Perhaps something will change in the future (Microsoft intervening after their purchase?) but until then, fans will just have to live with those set expectations for story content.