By the end of Season 14, it will have been a year and a half since the Invasion missions dropped and as far as official communications are concerned, we’ve had nothing. A quick Google search yields many unofficial but seemingly likely statements about the future of Story Missions. Many people, myself included, have a lot of emotional investment in the world of Overwatch. A full campaign of Story Missions where we get to experience that world first-hand was a dream. There is nothing to be lost by being transparent and communicating with the community what the state of things are, it beats out unofficial speculation by a longshot. If the speculation is true and they have been scrapped as a result of a reduction in team size, I cannot imagine how impossibly challenging it must be to communicate that they’re not coming after so much passion was poured into them - I am truly sorry to the developers in this position. I wish we lived in a world where great artistry crafting other universes could be undertaken and shared with no monetary constraints. I greatly enjoyed the Invasion missions and the world of Overwatch is one of my favorite series, and my hope is that they will come out eventually. However, officially hearing that they’re fully cancelled, or indefinitely postponed, is a much more satisfying conclusion to the 5-year long dream of an Overwatch campaign than silence.
I thought they did announce that PvE was canceled? Is that not why everyone was disappointed and review bombed the game?
I maybe would’ve pitied them if the came out the gates telling us it was done for good. They didn’t do that, they get no pity.
Also, we do not need a full campaign. They can very easily flesh out the story via PvE events that happen periodically like they did before. Not only can they satisfy the players’ need for lore, but they can also build upon existing components/mechanics with each event.
All they’ve done since OW2 has released is sit on their thumbs and worry about what they should do instead of actually doing anything.
They announced the full campaign was an unreasonable ask to produce, but either directly confirmed or alluded to the fact that they would be releasing pieces of the campaign that were already finished.
Basically implying that we could get PvE content through single releases rather than a big independent game.
I mean they did that with underworld, but it was apparently the worst thing ever. And people did nothing but complain about the next PVE modes that came out after, outside like the diablo one.
So you can probably point a finger at the community for why were not getting more of that.
some general clarity on the status of PVE:
- there was never really any official mention of PVE project development being abandoned, what you remember as a “sad announcement” was about something that was said months before Invasion was announced: they canceled Hero modes, which are almost completely different sections from story mode. They were basically hero progression modes where you could choose who you wanted, play random missions against the AI (like the underworld event) and “upgrade” characters with a skill tree. the most obvious traces of this idea can be seen in the Blizzconline video. but this does NOT concern the narrative part, the one that “carries the story forward” so to speak.
- invasion was released… in the typical “activision style”: small chapters, big earnings, basically little real content in terms of narrative. this would have worked… IF people weren’t terribly angry about the too many years of waiting for a lore. the lack of replayability for so little narrative to get passionate about (it’s like reading the wizard of oz and stopping at the part of the tin man) didn’t help at all, and at that point the situation was rudimentary for many: either you give us a complete story or you can avoid selling us an extremely incomplete first chapter with the umpteenth uncertain coming soon (published only to avoid being accused of false advertising, at that point.)
- invasion was “”“officially”“” defined as a commercial failure only when there were reports with activision blizzard shareholders. at blizzcon 2023, in that embarrassing introduction to “we have no plans for pve to tell you about yet, sorry” they had introduced gauntlet mode precisely to see how they could manage the replayability of a vs AI mode. result: zero effort, then let’s close it. we are talking exclusively about a commercial failure mentioned to shareholders (before moving to microsoft), but no real announcement telling everyone that pve has been canceled. and everyone finds themselves with a “demo” of a story interrupted today.
- last step, the layoffs, the quotes from former developers and the book by jason shreier that spoke of a project wasted from every point of view: mr korick’s fault, ybarra’s incompetence’s fault, the fault of an overwaych league so high priority as excessively expensive to give it a priority at all costs over everything. but here is not a real announcement of “no forever story, people”;
the real failure of pve in my opinion is that we are literally back to square one: a game with BIG narrative potential, but no good idea in its management, so in the meantime let’s think about repairing the damage suffered in pvp. and for the latter they are succeeding, but… that 2 on the title will always remind us that we are back to having a live service game like in 2016 but absolutely nothing about its narrative potential. with the addition of developers who pretend that there is nothing to say about projects of this type (including archives).
hopes?
generally the lore has always had new glimpses, between the books and the new heroes. honestly positive glimpses, whose only flaw (as usual) is finding a space with which to live such adventures through gameplay rather than a narrative for niche readers who seek narrative.
my personal aspiration is to see the narrative of overwatch rethought in a similar way to starcraft 2: give people a real story campaign (huge and real chapters), and make playability with other players optional, making it in fact… a single player mode with a lot, a lot of story. really, all it takes is a less insipid AI and base the cost of the product on the narrative rather than on replayability where evidently blizzard does not know how to look for or manage. at least in the end there would be a story to comment or to know, and above all no regrets if you play it when and how you want today or in 10 years. which is also one of the things that make you appreciate starcraft in its lore despite it being mainly valid as a multiplayer game.
it’s obviously just my fantasy, but it’s perhaps the only type of marketing that I think works best.
there was shreier who in his book mentioned “good news coming for overwatch” but I don’t know if he meant 6v6 or a new pve / story mode plan. it’s still worth noting that after so much effort as pvp (and it would be really unfair not to recognize that the experimentation started at the beginning of 2024 is one of the most active periods of the game update since the golden age of ow1) the only thing left for overwatch is to invest in the lore. for many reasons, right or wrong:
- to take back ideas and narratives that are already ready and that only lack a setting to be proposed;
- to give a sense to the “2”, because honestly overwatch is behaving like the live service game that it always had to be: constantly updating and re-adapting;
- because it is literally the only thing that gives it a definitive identity compared to other franchises (the most recent marvel rivals);
i don’t want to be optimistic, they don’t deserve this benefit anymore. but i can still see that the potential is still there, somewhere and waiting for better ideas to set it up. the only positive thing is not having life support signals like starcraft 2.
I’ll make this a lot easier to read;
The team involved with PvE, story, art, etc was fired at least a year ago.
Now we just have the people who make trailers, or the actual game (probably lots of overlap)
No official announcements, no.
There’s been no blog posts or blue posts from any of the Overwatch development team about the future of the Story Mode missions, just safe assumptions that the mode is dead because almost all the PvE developers on the Overwatch 2 team were let go at the beginning of the year during the layoffs that savaged the industry at large.
Could the story missions still be developed? Yes, it’s possible. The major cinematics are done by a completely different team (Story & Franchise Development) and most of the people laid off could easily have their workloads given to other staff on the Overwatch team.
But by this point, unless they’re planning a huge campaign drop that is completely different to how they released Invasion, it’s unlikely that we’ll see it.
Dead and long buried.
The PVE team was deleted by Microsoft, only leaving enough to make low-effort Halloween modes.
Blaming the community is silly.
Archives and the Diablo event were popular, as was Junkenstein when it first released.
The rest were simply not good, and Underworld had very little lore expansion and was just a tower defence mode put together from the scraps of the Hero Missions. It was missing the ENTIRE point of the Hero Missions being a seperate thing, and that was the talent trees.
underworld was the archives event, and that got a lot of negative feedback.
And we also got the Junk’s bride that people really didn’t like, moria left 4 dead style alien event that people kind just dropped, the tower defense whole PVE game mode that got shut down do to disinterest. (ya that was meant to be permanent)
Then we had Junk’s lab get loads of love. showing that people really wanted talents then the actual game modes they were made for.
People liked Archives.
People disliked Underworld.
Underworld was nothing more than a bland tower defence mode that had been gutted.
Underworld would have worked if they had bothered to reuse the talent trees they did finish.
This is so sad honestly. They have a massive story with great characters right there and they are doing nothing with it. The story is stuck on limbo and for the life of me I can’t figure out why? It makes little sense.
If you want a story just stick to fan fiction. I know I have
???
Goes to show how little you payed attention to it.
That was mission one of three. Were you also had to explore the map to collect batteries for the bot, forcing your team to split up while waves attacked. Using all the new PVE omnic enemies that showed up in the Paid modes.
Two was keep the bot alive while you moved it pushed style but shot back at things. With things like the tf2’s MVM bombs with legs running at it.
Three was a boss battle against the an Enemy team of the season pass robot skins, were you got to plat with your gun loaded push bot depending how well you did in part two.
Story wise was also the pay-off tot he tracer commics.
And their you go, my point exaclty. It wasn’t what people wanted. Even tho it was a fully functional and content filled archives styled mission.
it wasn’t the thing people wanted, so it got a lot of hate.
extremely disagree with this statement: there was no real story and the heroes involved were not canonical (they didn’t speak).
the community gave decisive feedback simply on a sad reality: there is no replayability after several months and it is not worth playing repeatedly the equivalent of a first interrupted narrative chapter (would you always read the book of the wizard of oz only exclusively until you get to the tin man or would you prefer to get to a clear point in the story?)
people hated the poor replayability but above all an incomplete story. Let’s stop pretending that Invasion was a complete narrative experience, when it is effectively a too-fast and unworthy coming soon after years of waiting.
Ah so it was the pay-off to the five part tracer commics, were you were playing through the second london omnic crisis.
The new character in Iggy was voiced. And their were loads of character interaction and specific callouts just for this mode. And is officially part of the story overall.
So the paid missions as in the story campaign was never the replayable part. That was the hero mission mode that go canceled that would been filled with little mini-achrive style events like having a Zerg rush of the little slicer bots that we had teased in the OW2 reveal. Where you get a random selection to play out at any given time.
No, it isn’t.
Let’s be clear, the market is what determines if a company will invest their money on something or whether they’ll cut their losses. Who determines the strength of the market? We do.
If we spend money on a given thing, we shape how the market responds. Why do you think microtransactions are so prevalent now days? Because they were trailed initially by developers in various games, we responded by creating a profitable market for those things and now they’re everywhere.
But when we don’t spend money on a given thing, that thing has its development spun down or ceased completely. We saw that happen with Heroes of the Storm. While it has a dedicated community that still plays it to this day, when it was getting content delivered for it, it wasn’t making money compared to how much was being spent on it. That’s what led to development being spun down and then major updates ceasing entirely. Users weren’t spending, and so Activision-Blizzard shifted money to where they were spending.
Looking at Overwatch 2 and the Invasion PvE missions, they apparently didn’t sell well and there were a lot of people complaining about the price of the missions. Why didn’t they sell well? It wasn’t because the missions themselves were boring, because they weren’t. They were quite fun, especially on harder difficulties. It was because we (as in the market) decided it wasn’t worth the price being asked, so we didn’t buy it. And the response to that? Well understandably the response to that was to wind down development on the PvE side. If it’s not making money, then the people deciding where the money goes aren’t going to spend it there.
We decided it wasn’t going to make money. So the fault lies, at least partially, with us.
last official statements:
1 hero missions and talent trees cancelled. said on a stupid steam where they talked one hout about the next arcade mode they put a lot of effort yet everyone hated and nobody cared or remember right now, starwatch? remember that? the arcade mode with lore and a story
2 pve will focus on small projects. said by the executive director on an interview with a youtuber
3 blizzcon 2023, there is a lot of pve in the works but is a surprise
and literally thats everything they ever talked about the pve since ow2 launch, they knew pve was never going to be done and keep promoting it, there was never an official cancelation or anything, coward director dont talk about the story at all, the junkenstein mode made with pve assets they acted like was something new and unique
you again lying, everyone already told you nobody liked a pve mission with no story or interactions, thats why was not liked, we want the story mode, not pve just for the sake of it
they cancelled two of three parts of the pve missions and still sell them for an epensive prive with no rewards or more hope for more missions in the future and you act like is our fault pve failed
Ya just stick your head in the sand.
I sent you links to the commics which lead up to the events in underworld.
As TLDR for the commics are guess what? Omnics in london planning another uprising, and Iggy who is knees deep in human culture getting outcasted. While tracer proves she is willing to fight and protect her and other omnics like her by eating a bullet for her.
After failing to save a certain other omnic from the same fate.
They didn’t sell well because Blizzard decided to give us overpriced scraps of what we were promised.
Unlike Archives, there was ZERO replayability because there was no all heroes mode. Once you were done, no point in ever coming back to this $20-$60 purchase.