For as successful as Diablo 4’s launch seems to be, the opposite is true for the other half of Blizzard, currently helping Overwatch limp along after it’s deeply weird pivot to being “Overwatch 2,” essentially a multiplayer overhaul and move to free-to-play.
This led to the announcement that Overwatch’s PvE content that was promised to accompany Overwatch 2 eventually would not actually be produced. What PvE content there was would instead be spliced into seasons, but the main concept that was originally pitched about leveled-up heroes and talent trees was dead.
Now, after a few of these missions showed up in the last season, Blizzard has said PvE mission will skip the next two seasons and not arrive until some time in 2024.
Jared Neuss explained this recently:
“Don’t expect the next round in the next season and the season after that, or anything like that,” Neuss said. “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.”
Players have noted that work on Overwatch PvE content has supposedly been going on for four years already, and yet now the game has produced a couple missions and needs to take half a year off again to figure out how to do some more.
At this point, it feels like it makes close to no sense to continue down this path with PvE content at all. I was actually eager to see Overwatch produce a PvE side of the game, but that’s not what this is, these are sparse missions attached to multiplayer-based seasons, in a game that has refused to move its plot along in any significant way, practically since launch, content instead to make its “story” content backstory after backstory for its characters.
It always made me sad that Project Titan, the MMO precursor to Overwatch, was cancelled, because when Overwatch launched it seemed like these characters and this world would be something that would be really fun to explore in a PvE game. But a very, very slow attempt to get back to that has clearly failed on multiple fronts, and for all the problems Overwatch has, I’m not sure attempting to wring PvE blood from a stone is the best use of anyone’s time these days.
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