Blizzard today announced that it has nixed its original plans to make a story-based PvE campaign mode for the Overwatch universe during a developer chat on the game’s official Twitch channel.
Overwatch 2 was originally announced during Blizzcon in 2019, with PvE being a huge part of the presentation. Three years later when it was time for the game to come out, the campaign was still not available, and since then speculation has swirled regarding when, if ever, players would see this PvE system. Now, it seems that a fully separate PvE campaign in Overwatch 2 is dead, although Blizzard still plans on developing and bringing smaller PvE story missions to the game periodically.
“As work slowly continued on Overwatch 2, we began to pull more and more of our focus and energy away from the live game,” game director Aaron Keller said. “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.”
This is how Blizzard was able to release the PvP only portion of Overwatch 2 in October last year. However, with the new PvP content live, the team didn’t want to go back to neglecting the live game, and due to available resources, it seems as though Keller and executive producer Jared Neuss had a tough decision to make.
“We shifted our values for how we want to develop the game,” Keller said. “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 prioritize the live game and all of the people playing it.”
Though this has resulted in a cancellation of Blizzard’s original plans for a PvE experience in Overwatch 2, the developers noted that moving forward they planned to continue to add events and co-operative modes that help to advance and expand the Overwatch lore, but it won’t be quite what they originally promised.
