According to Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, future Overwatch 2 PvE missions have reportedly been scrapped as the game sees troubling financial issues. Members still on the Overwatch 2 development team received 0% of the usual Activision Blizzard bonuses after the game failed to meet profit goals. Other Blizzard teams that worked on World of Warcraft and Diablo did receive bonuses thanks to their games succeeding financially during the same timeframes. This second run of poor financial gatherings paints a cloudy picture for Overwatch 2 that will now solely focus on competitive PvP.
Why was Overwatch 2 PvE canceled?
When Overwatch 2 was announced at BlizzCon 2019, there were a lot of promises made. PvE was meant to be a huge addition to the game that let players level up their favorite heroes and customize them with new abilities through skill trees. There was also an additional mode with the story called Hero Missions that would let players play horde-like matches together. However, last year, it was announced that the skill trees and Hero Missions were canceled as developing all of that for the dozens of heroes in the game proved to be too much after countless delays.
Finally, we got our first look at Overwatch 2 PvE missions last year, and while we enjoyed our time with the new story content, the broken promises overshadowed a good addition to the game. It was great to see the story move forward finally, but we couldn’t help but see where the corners had been cut to get that first set of missions out. Seven months later, we have heard nothing about the second round of missions, which include an India level teased in the 2019 game announcement.
The general consensus has been that the PvE missions sold poorly. Not many were happy with the $15 price tag for three 45-minute missions. The community reception was lukewarm at best following the talents cancellation, and content creators began crying out that PvE all together should be scrapped to focus on the PvP. It appears they got their wish with this report.
What’s next for Overwatch?
The future for Overwatch 2 looks murky to say the least. The PvE cancelation joins the Overwatch League shutdown as unquestionably bad news. More and more is being cut from the game, including the massive erasure of talent from the development team earlier this year. If things don’t turn around,
As a massive fan of the Overwatch story, lore, characters, and world, this is a very sad announcement. This was unquestionably the thing that excited me most about the Overwatch 2 announcement. I still love the PvP, but to hear the expansion of the world has been thrown away after years of waiting is disappointing to say the least. Hopefully, we will see these missions released in the future as an event like how the old Archives missions were handled at least, but who knows what the plan is now. It would be very disappointing if the entire lore side of the game was abandoned all together to focus on PvP alone. Maybe we will hear more from a future developer update. Regardless, we won’t be able to look past the “what could have been” story that is Overwatch 2 PvE.
