you may have recently heard online that Jeff Kaplan and Sonny Chacko (former game director/producer of overwatch1) have expressed disinterest in building a narrative team for the game. honestly this doesn’t surprise me, I had noticed a certain tendency to treat the lore of overwatch like that done by world of warcraft (another game that Kaplan worked on).
but let’s clarify for those who don’t know the narrative management of WoW: the game was originally an rts that had a great success with the story warcraft 3, so much so that it then built an mmorpg (wow). this fantasy hub initially had no lore, but over the years they began to add a lot of narration but with one big flaw: those who weren’t there at the beginning of the game now understand less and less the story that is mentioned in the game dialogues. it is extremely difficult to recover old experiences or narratives, and you need to watch wikis or videos of explanations to recover the previous narrative that, those who come later, don’t know.
does this remind you of something? yeah, overwatch has done exactly that. we have numerous examples of this method of storytelling:
- many new players surely have no idea about sombra’s easter eggs that refer to her 2016 ARG;
- the story of doomfist’s gauntlet has been completely surpassed in the numbani map, and only the book dedicated to orisa is a trace of that memory, as well as a real chronology of who orisa was originally with the barrier and the supercharger;
- we have archives, which is no longer featured in the game, but is constantly cited in overwatch voicelines.
in a parallel universe, i would have sincerely preferred to see overwatch treated like starcraft 2, where narrative and pvp are divided into two separate departments. starcraft 2 in fact offers a single player story campaign with a very good AI … but above all a real package of satisfying and ordered stories from beginning to end. there is a real idea of journey and growth of the characters that end up in the adventure (ideally, the many characters that join the new overwatch) and above all it has no balancing influence on the multiplayer part, something that unfortunately overwatch still influences.
I sincerely wanted to see the invasion dlc treated like starcraft: lots of missions, a story that “closes” a narrative cycle, and waiting for more in the future. even giving up the pve formula, a single player would still have been decent with empty servers due to an unmanageable AI on high difficulties and really too few playable missions. missions that probably required more time for the level design than pve, for a replayability that will never exist for 4 difficulty queues that require 4 players. pve only works for limited-time things, but a limited-time story mode is not the most famous solution.
maybe kaplan had the idea of fandom in mind. he wasn’t wrong at first, but it’s a big damage over the years, and even wow suffers from it unlike other mmorpgs. people want complete and playable stories, otherwise you greatly preclude the generation of interest for new future players.