Convert PVE to single player?

Story Discussion
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I’m very sorry I couldn’t ask about it in the AMA so I 'll post this theory to this section. I honestly don’t think PVE has a future for too many reasons.

  • it’s boring to play it alone knowing that the bots will always be the same, predefined and too uncoordinated.
  • there are too many queues available. we are talking about 3 missions x 4 difficulties = 12 queues of players who must share the chance of playing together. and only the most difficult one has an almost infinite time range in the possibility of finding players;
  • assuming you want to explore all possible dialogues… good luck finding players willing to hear them all in the same difficulty and mission queue;
  • Even if the cinematics are good… it’s still a story stuck waiting for development because the developers don’t know how to make it playable.

IF we don’t want these missions to become a limited time event in an unspecified period of the year (stealing time and patience for the whole community to wait for a specific period of the year), at this point I think the only compromise could be… the single player. sell the lore as a single player story pack with the possibility of being able to play it ALSO with other players, if you want (increasing the difficulty when grouping players just like in cuphead) and completely changing the degrees of difficulty and narrative of the gameplay around the single player:

  • go back to the old idea that there are 4 specific characters at that moment of the mission (mei, tracer, lucio and reinhardt in Rio, sojourn and 3 other heroes in Toronto and keep the 4 Gotheborg heroes) and once chosen, perfect them to 100 % for the single player of those specific missions;
  • use a similar approach to trial of sanctuary, some skill upgrades to make the single player chaotic;
  • Add multiple secret achievements within the missions that unlock the heroes’ information sheets (such as multiple choice dialogues in the waiting sections) in order to give everyone the opportunity to enjoy all the narrative immersion of the mission. obviously designed to be unlockable by players regardless of difficulty;
  • radically change the difficulty system, setting it to just 3 types (easy, normal, difficult) but designed for the single player;

I think it’s the only valid way to sell the lore as story packs (like Starcraft 2) because I think that as an event Blizzard isn’t interested in developing it also because it really costs too much to commit to cinematics… just for a free event. and here I understand it as a company that they would not earn anything from it, but at least they have to save this overwatch narrative potential with a real playable narrative.

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There is PVE, and there is story mission. And that was kinda the point of OW2 in the begining : hero missions, and story mode :disappointed_relieved:

I never give a thought on the single player thing of OW, but 100% agreed on the story mission : stick with 4 heroes like archives.
It’s hard to have replayability on story mode, and we know it. We’re here to discover the mission, the story, maybe unlock one or two achivement in the process, and have fun playing it. Hero interactions are definitelly a thing the community LOVES, abuse it in story mode.

Right now, it’s a PAIN to discover some interactions (espacially the subway ones), and to unlock all the lore codex for Toronto, especially now that the hype of novelty is gone and you still have characters to unlock, it’s long and you’ll be paired up with bots anyway. Adding a bigger roster of heroes won’t fix the replayability problem of story mission.

I’d rather have smaller missions with different OW groups helping in different sides of Toronto, and switch between teams from different sides of the city, even if it’s like, 3 minutes long than doing the same mission aaaaaaaaaaaall over again with 17 characters to unlock all the codex :grimacing:

Imagine, having a team with Sojourn, Cassidy, Zarya and Baptiste, you end some boss, and Sojourns goes like " How it’s going on your side Winston?"
*small cut scene "
And then you are playing Winston, Pharah, Genji and Mercy in New Queen Street helping some other civilians.
Or another scene with Zarya, Mei, Brig and Echo… I’d rather have some stuff like that than replay the same mission with different heroes over and over again. Make us play them all, but in different location of the same mission.

And for the PVE non-story mode part :

I kinda liked-but-not-really the Underworld mission. I would have enjoyed it more if we had a story mode for it, with a team of 4 heroes like the archives, and then having a non-canon full PVE with modifiers and just go wild with the hero pick and stuff.

I enjoyed the PVE crossover with Diablo very much, it was really fun, having new abilities and perks and having fun discovering them was really a nice change of pace.

I hope those were experiments and that we’ll have more Diablo like PVE missions, and more story missions, but not some mash up of scraped hero mission duck tape together (like it felt playing Underworld tbh)

And not to be full off-topic : I don’t know for solo play. Because OW is a team based shooter, it’s hard to go solo. The game kinda doesn’t work for that, not the way the missions are designed to begin with (i think)

There is one thing I’ll always regret the team not making : stick to 4 player missions. Every. Single. Time.

Give me one mission with Widowmaker killing targets from afar on her own, give me a duo mission with Ana and Soldier, give me a trio mission with Kiriko, Genji and Hanzo… the RANGE guys, the RANGE!

Make it dramatic while your team is being cornered, your team call for help and all of a sudden you’re on another character and have to get to them quickly…

And now, i’m being excited on what OW2 could have been :sob: :skull:

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yes, they also did this approach with starcraft and in my opinion it would be ideal with the (in my opinion too many) heroes that they introduced thanks to new Blood at the same time. I think that Gothebourg is the most functional mode both because it is the one that offers the most functional innovations (the turrets) and because it has short narrative steps, no. exaggeratedly long like Toronto. Don’t get me wrong, Toronto is a great mission… but the length doesn’t justify the type of replayability and too much variety in the roster they applied for one mission.

I know. but I think it’s the only valid compromise for a playable lore. lore based events such as archives are objectively a cost for the development team (now free2play) and I understand that it is economically difficult to sustain over the years. among other things, archives started out as a test which already with storm rising was affected by the need to save resources by recycling AI and Havana, aiming for experimentation on cinematics.

and they certainly can’t ask the community for money for a limited access game mode like archives. and to be clear, it’s already been annoying enough for anyone that they’ve sold us a very incomplete lore starter, with no clear date for the next chapter (if there will be a next chapter at this point, they’ve been too silent about it even at blizzcon )… and which is greatly affected by the absence of players and the low performance quality of the bots. and as we highlighted before, this also affects the experience of listening to the dubbing: no matter how good a job they have done, they will be voicelines that no one will ever hear.

What are the remaining solutions?

  1. open it to the public? no, because in addition to being an economic problem for investing in narrative, it is also a solution destined to collapse with the entire community who will have played to obtain the achievements and then abandon it because it doesn’t encourage replayability, nor is it fun to end with a uncertain coming soon too soon.

  2. make it an archives event? it would be unfair to those who bought it, and the old archives find themselves in the unpleasant situation of being stuck in a limbo of “will they come back?” that no new ow2 gamer has been able to try them in over a year.

  3. create a spin off entirely dedicated to narrative (like the difference between early warcraft and world of warcraft)? absolutely not, it would really be a funeral of the ow2 game engine even worse than giving up the talent tree.

  4. adapt the gameplay to a single player? perhaps with the possibility of choosing to switch to another hero played by the game’s AI at any time and being able to invite friends to create completely optional degrees of difficulty? this seems to me to be a rather classic solution, but one that always works and could certainly create fewer problems on how to manage the problem of the quantity of players on 4 difficulty queues for each mission. This is a big sacrifice but… it’s realistically impossible for Overwatch to form a multiplayer-coordinated narrative right now, especially with the game’s unpopularity and complete distrust of the sequel to this lore.

whatever the developers’ decision, the worst will always be the one we all really fear: "sorry, we have decided to no longer deal with the Overwatch lore with missions. Enjoy it through the evolution of the live service game like Apex and Valorant do. " getting to think about this type of eventuality is perhaps the saddest aspect of how ow2 has failed in its retracted intentions.

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