Overwatch 2’s PvE content may never come out, based on some new interviews with former Blizzard employees.
Kotaku shared the results of research with several sources who they refer to as former Blizzard employees. These developers were also kept completely anonymous.
We won’t rundown the history of the PvE content here, but these sources claim that the decision to cut Hero Mode, which was the big narrative campaign that the developers promised, was made as early as December 2022.
Studio heads did not want to cancel the PvE completely, in the same way that rank and file staff wanted to keep working on the content. The main issue seems to have been the dreaded mistake of many a game developer: scope creep.
Blizzard’s management apparently told employees the studio had to double in size to meet the demands of making both this narrative campaign, and to maintain the online multiplayer live service title the franchise is best known for. It seems like Blizzard should have made the choice to cancel the project outright, to grow their studio as appropriate, or to work with another studio to make this campaign.
Instead, these sources state that Blizzard allowed their narrative campaign plans to choke up the studio’s development pipeline. The original plans were to make three missions to come out every 18 months. As of right now, Blizzard’s developers have worked on multiple missions, most of them incomplete, and all in various states of completion.
Obviously, these missions should have been worked on one at a time, but the issues with development go deeper. The staff was told to polish their work over and over, to meet something management called “Blizzard Quality.”
To quote a source:
“[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.”
As for right now, under Microsoft Gaming, Activision made the call to fire several staff at the Overwatch team, among other teams in their company. Kotaku hypothesizes that this is a sign of low confidence from Microsoft for Overwatch 2 PvE. However, we have to remember that Microsoft revealed that Activision decided on these layoffs months ago. Their non-intervention may be part of the arrangement for approving the deal; allowing Activision some degree of independence on decision making.
No matter what degree Activision or Microsoft is responsible for the layoffs, the result is the same. Blizzard doesn’t have enough staff to make the promised Overwatch 2 content now, and may not be enough to keep the game good as it is.
It’s a very baffling situation as Blizzard is managing their other big franchises, such as Diablo 4, much better at this moment in time. If Phil Spencer can intervene more directly to get this title on the right track, he definitely should be making those hard calls Blizzard management seems reticent to make right now.
