This topic seems to have a lot of confusion around the community. It’s time we cleared some things up… First of all we need to go back to Blizzcon 2019:
[20:10]
now a lot of you have questions like why a sequel or what does that mean to me as a player of the original game I put so much time into this game I cared about it so much well we thought about it and for us as gamers you know sequels make us nervous more than anything else so what we’re hoping to do with overwatch 2 is really redefine what a sequel means and I think some explanation is in order right now so for all original players of overwatch players of the current overwatch game you will get to play on all of the same maps as overwatch 2 players including all of the brand-new maps that are coming to overwatch 2 and you will get to play with all of the same heroes as overwatch 2 players it will be a shared multiplayer environment where no one gets left behind.
The other thing that I think a lot of us are thinking about is all those cool accomplishments and cosmetics that we’ve been unlocking over the years you know how hard did you work for your witch mercy skin for example we want to make sure that all overwatch cosmetics come forward with you into overwatch 2 so all of your progress matters nothing’s getting left behind no one’s getting left behind we worked so hard to build this community of over 50 million players at this point the last thing we would ever do is do anything to split what an amazing community you guys are and and how much you mean to us so overwatch 2 is going to be amazing
Then we have this interview with IGN:
I think in a lot of ways we didn’t communicate it at BlizzCon 2019 accurately. We tried to. We tried to tell people this is a true sequel. This isn’t DLC, this isn’t just something that should be a patch. But obviously we didn’t do that correctly because people just sort of created their own dialogue around what the game was. This was always the vision of the game. This has always been what we’ve had our eyes set on.
I’m somebody, if you look back on my career personally, I’ve made expansions, I’ve made patch updates. I have a very clear picture in my mind of what the difference between an expansion and a patch is versus a sequel. And our goal was always to make a sequel.
Also probably worth noting all of this likely came before the decision to launch pvp and pve separate. I don’t know how closely they intended to couple those two, but it seemed like they had pretty lofty goals which eventually couldn’t be shipped on time. So what they’re talking about is likely the vision of a product we haven’t been sold yet. Their vision is still mostly unknown.
They’re also calling what they have given “early access”, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say “it’s not a sequel, but it might be worth calling it one when it’s complete.” It’s hilarious to me that, of all the franchises to release a game in “early access”, Overwatch is one of them.
At the moment, all we have is the “shared multiplayer environment” piece which happens to include all the Overwatch 1 stuff, as originally stated.
Since 2019 two key things changed:
The switch to 5v5 for PVP
The decision to elease the PVP environment early and release the PVE content when its done.
Imagine if they had taken this approach all along. In early 2020, we get the 2.0 engine update alongside the release of Echo - nothing else changes except for updated graphics. Over time, new time-of-day modes are added for all existing maps. Push is released. New maps and heroes are released one by one. Eventually they flip the switch and move to a Season Pass model as they begin releasing PVE content on the now-ready engine.
The alternate timeline where Activision executives weren’t holding out for the big “sequel” bonus.
This didn’t age too well for them. I guess redefining a sequel means keeping 95% of the old game, add 5% new and use them as false advertisement, then when enough people are on-board, scrap 4% of the content that you never intended to release anyway.
