Potential is one hell of a drug. When you can see the potential in something you care about, whether it’s a game, a promising young player in your favorite sport, or even a budding relationship, you want to see that potential achieved.. The problem with potential, though, is that it leaves a lot of room for disappointment. In the case of Overwatch 2, I can’t think of a single game that has let me down as often or as consistently since launch.
When Overwatch originally launched in 2016, it was the talk of the town. A bright, colorful world with charming characters from all walks of life that appealed to casual and competitive players alike. Without a doubt, Overwatch PvP is still one of my favorite gaming experiences to this day. I still play at least a couple of ranked matches almost every single day. One big aspect that keeps me continually coming back, though, is the lore. The gameplay is important, but I love the Overwatch world. During the OW1 days, this was largely through great Pixar-esque animated shorts, comic books, and short novels. All aspects of the Overwatch world that are very rare these days.
The often-maligned story of Overwatch 2

When Overwatch 2 was announced in 2019, fans had a good understanding that support for the live game at the time was going to take a bit of a backseat as the focus shifted to the sequel. Between Hero Missions and the Talents tree additions, this was going to take a lot of development resources, but reports were that Blizzard was finally bringing more people on board and investing in Overwatch to be more than it was before. We were going to get a dedicated PvE mode that not only finally moved the story forward, but was going to provide a completely new experience in addition to the continual PvP updates. The future Blizzard painted for me was bright. Personally, I was ready to sacrifice a couple of years of stagnant updates in OW1 so the team could craft the sequel I was anxiously waiting for. If I wasn’t going to get the animated series I had dreamed of, a constant PvE inclusion was exactly what I wanted. However, there was a lot happening in the background that I didn’t know about.
When Overwatch 2 finally released, I could easily see that the new content didn’t amount to more than a decent update. Even with that said, I was willing to go along with it because this was just a piece of the puzzle — essentially a beta. When the story and Hero Missions modes came out, that was when the community would understand why this deserved to have that “2” in the name. As I waited, Overwatch’s live service nature finally had life again, which was great. The swap to 5v5, going free-to-play, plus adding new heroes, maps, and modes has its critics, but did succeed in breathing new life into the game. However, that PvE was still the big carrot being hung out in front of me.
The justification that never was

Fast forward seven months after the Overwatch 2 launch, and we got our first round of bad news regarding PvE. The Talents tree that caught my eyes from the game announcement, plus the continually replayable Hero Missions, were being scrapped. The new form of PvE that was coming would be severely cut back from what was initially promised, and instead of giving a completed story in one package, the remaining story missions were to be doled out in small packs over time. Very disappointing news after hearing nothing on the mode for nearly four years. But I could at least still look forward to getting story missions.
Finally, the first pack of story missions came out last year, called Invasion. Not the worst way to spend your money in a game, but the experience was definitely a lot more shallow than was initially promised. The story it delivered was great, and gave me hope for the future. From a business perspective, however, this content raised some red flags. The community wasn’t getting behind the new content. It was too tall of an ask to look past years of sacrificing poor live service management to let everyone buy back in. The Invasion story pack sold very poorly, likely leading to a big portion of the PvE team being laid off after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard earlier this year according to this Kotaku report.
That brings us to today. Bloomberg’s recent report of Overwatch developers receiving no bonuses due to the game’s poor financial performance while other teams did is just a little more fuel for how Activision Blizzard doesn’t have its employees’ best interests in mind. With so much of the team gone, they reportedly have axed a product that people put years of their lives into. According to former Overwatch 2 devs in the above Kotaku report, the PvE would have shipped years ago if executives weren’t constantly forcing people to rework sections to find “Blizzard quality.” A ton of time wasted for little to no payoff.
We can all point to one big problem

A big driver in why we have lost so many aspects of the Overwatch world’s storytelling has to do with mismanagement from the higher-ups of Activision Blizzard. After Bobby Kotick stepped down as CEO, we all were hoping we’d never have to think of him again. The man is good at making money, but every other aspect of him described by the people who have worked with or around him has painted a picture of everything wrong in the gaming industry. Even months after his departure, Overwatch is feeling the effects of his poor influence.
For a game that has had so many dedicated people working on it, all we ever hear are horror stories regarding Overwatch 2 development. The constant sexual harassment lawsuits from a few years ago, threatening to have an assistant killed, ignoring the calls for help before the Steam release, and who knows how many projects were started that didn’t deserve to be so focused on. There have been so many issues in the background, a lot of them being directly attributed to Kotick, but he always deflected the falling stock prices onto the employees. It makes me wonder what could be if Blizzard wasn’t such a mess all the time. Even with Microsoft now at the helm, I’m not entirely sure things are going to get any better any time soon.
All of this isn’t to say that the development team is without fault. Even Game Director Aaron Keller has admitted that the scope of the PvE project got out of hand and the team lost focus. No one is exactly “innocent” in the mishandling of Overwatch over the last five years, but the s##tstream always starts from the top.
What happens next for Overwatch?

The plan for the future of Overwatch 2 is pretty basic on the surface. The game is going back to just being a PvP game, which it pretty much has always been. That being said, there’s no real hope for the game’s future. A large portion of the people who were making new characters and injecting them with life and exciting lore that made me invested in the franchise from the start were let go after Microsoft laid a small town’s worth of people off. PvE content that was finished will likely never see the light of day. We hardly ever get those animated shorts that everyone universally loves, and an animated series that makes so much sense for them to pursue has never presented itself.
Throughout the nearly eight years that Overwatch has been in my life, I have generally looked on the brighter side. Even in the game’s more down periods, I felt that I always had something to look forward to. Maybe with time, I’ll get over my heartbreak over the PvE situation, but for a game filled with so many heroes, the development team is in dire need of some real-life ones to pull this game back from the brink.