So not all characters are playable in PvE?

General Discussion
1

Please tell me that I heard this wrong.

No way are not all characters playable, right?

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2

The base (actual story/lore ) version of the missions were designed around only certain heroes being available to choose from.

Ex: Sojourn has to be picked in Toronto, but I believe the other 3 players can choose from a selection of heroes that are present in a story capacity.

Whether or not they’ll also launch with “all heroes” versions of these maps like the Archives events has not been revealed (or it has, and I’ve missed it buried in the feed somewhere)

It’d be a real shame if they didn’t which means it’s the most likely case from what I’ve come to expect of ABK lately.

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3

Whatever the plot calls for.
You won’t see Symmetra being playable in these missions because, canonically, she hasn’t met the Overwatch crew yet.

So other heroes that aren’t associated with the main cast of the respected storyline won’t be playable.
So Overwatch team will be playable in main story.
Junkers will be playable in Junker related stories (if that happens)

It just needs to make sense.

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5

It’s always been that way for OW’s PvE. Could you play every hero in either Halloween event?

They added an all-heroes mode to the old archive missions during the second or third release, probably just to add variety.

Personally, I think they’ll probably just have the main heroes related to the story available this go around, for two reasons, 1) to maintain a steady population with low queue times in the story mode, and 2.) to limit any game breaking bugs or exploits that other more buggy heroes (Dva, LW, Kiriko, Sym, Doom etc) might cause/discover.

But we’ll have to wait and see.

6

Yeah, and it will shuffle between the characters every how ever often, to give you a reason to turn around and look at it (I assume)

7

Well yeah.

It’s a story mode. The only characters available are the ones that make sense in the context of the story.

That’s kind of the point.

I will note that - originally - it was going to be hard-locked to 4 characters for each mission like Archives was. They actually increased that by quite a bit since 2019. Since this campaign is focused on reformed Overwatch, I wouldn’t expect Talon or Null Sector heroes to be playable. Probably not the Junkers either.

Every single piece of Overwatch 2 reeks of Blizzard trying to make this thing more complicated than it needed to be - trying to create a Story Mode that works around various combinations of 19 different heroes sounds like a nightmare. If they had’ve kept to the original vision of ‘4 heroes per Story Mission’ and ‘6 talents per hero’ this game probably would’ve released in 2021, no problems.

Smh.

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8

Yes, this was possible, but not in the default game mode.

I thought PvE was designed with playability in mind, but by limiting the amount of playable characters do I see the playability drastically decreasing.

9

so far confirmed one is bridgitte,tracer,reinhardt,mei,mccree,and sojourn

10

It’s a Story Mode, so it’s only logical for the characters portrayed in the Story to be the only ones playable, at least for Story Mode. Same went for Junkenstein’s Revenge and all the Archives. Wasn’t till later in that they brought out All-Hero versions where players could choose anyone, albeit Junkenstein’s Revenge I believe only allowed you to if you made them all available through a custom game lobby.

Ngl, I’m disappointed, but hopefully as they progress the story, which will hopefully not take 3 years between each release, they’ll allow more characters to be playable, or maybe do a different perspective of the same timeline, where you play a series of missions as several different characters that later in the game meet at some point.

Problem is that if they tried to do something like that, they’d have no choice but to make it an RPG like originally promised as an end result for the game, where you can select who you wish to play from the entire roster, and just follow maybe a very particular set of quests only that character can access in order to progress the game, otherwise known as Main Missions, where as the rest would be the kind anyone can join and help in; again though, if they tried, the story would be forced more or less into a single direction that has all of the roster teaming up against a common foe.

I just know that if they do only plan on sticking to 19 characters and never adding to or removing from as the story progresses, good luck keeping it replayable when there’s nothing to do but the same old Hack n Slash / Shoot n Scoot gameplay with the same 19 heroes we get to start with, versus the 30+ amount of characters available to PvP. In fact, it would leave the rest of them out as far as anyone is concerned when it comes to the lore; which means to some players, the rest are just background characters, hardly important to even acknowledge. So yea, hopefully they expand and eventually allow us to play as the entire roster, otherwise it’s gonna get boring a whole lot faster than we anticipated, post-axing of skill trees and such.

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11

I don’t know why you’re surprised. This was a thing in the Archives story missions, it was shown during the initial versions of PvE at Blizzcon too.

There’s every possibility we’ll get a “all heroes” mode like the Archives events.

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12

For story missions, yes, they are limiting the heroes that canonically appear in that chapter, but not for the coop event mission, it’s still limited but it will have rotating playable roster every week with also weekly objective and modifiers.

13

???
did you expect every character to be playable what?
:joy:
this guy :joy_cat:

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14

Yes.
I do expect in game mode that relies on replayability to have all characters available.

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15

Events before have had an “all characters” mode which is obviously non-canon, but is where a lot of the fun and replayability is.

I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that blizzard is so out of touch with the concept of “fun” that they neglect to put this in.

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16

I do find it a weird that not all characters will be playable considering that this storyline is supposed to be the SECOND Omnic crisis. Not the first, which is where Rein, Torb, Tracer, and crew were called to action for the very first time.

It seems like the current storyline should have more than enough room for most of the Overwatch cast, if not all of them. So I agree that it’s weird.

17

From what ive read, not one of the heroes i mainly play is gonna be in the Pve. So im just really excited to not get any story about the heroes i care about.

The only heroes in it i somewhat care about are Brig and D.va, but neither one i really play.

19

We lost more than just skill trees, we lost the ability to play most of the roster

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20

Why would every single character be playable in 3 missions?

There are 35+ heroes, they can’t all be relevant to the story at one given time.

The story mode was never intended to be “highly replayable”, it’s a story mode.

I can’t think of any “highly replayable” story mode

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21

wouldn’t have to be this way if we had an Enemy AI Director like in L4D2, Vermintide, and DRG.

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22

that was the mode that got cancelled

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