It’s no secret that Overwatch 2 fumbled the bag when it comes to OW2 PVE, as each mission is just a typical PVE event we saw in OW1 but this time with cinematics. The cinematics and animation are amazing, by the way. Absolutely loved that.
OW2 teased things like skill trees, which was one of the things that got people super excited. We all know that this turned out to be too much for them, but they could have spinned this another way:
Picture this. It’s a bright Summer morning. You open up your window to hear the birds chirping. You sit down with your coffee and load up Overwatch 2 Story Mode for the first time. You are greeted by Athena to design YOUR OWN HERO. Once you create your own hero, Winston walks you around Watchpoint Gibraltar and your journey as a new member of Overwatch begins.
In my opinion, if Overwatch 2 PVE was a single-player mode (maybe have up to 5 players in a different mode), and in third-person, it would be such a refreshing experience.
Let’s call it Story Mode. You could design your own member of Overwatch and give them abilities which you could level up. They already designed progression amongst abilities, let’s go with that. But rather than designing new abilities for all 38 heroes, design new ones for 1 – for you. And then once you pick your class (Tank, DPS, Support), and all the abilities that go with it, the story begins. Let the brilliant minds at Blizzard come up with a narrative befitting of the Overwatch universe and allow us to experience that journey.
A Story Mode is what I would have always wanted from Overwatch. Allow us to become the heroes that you said we are. While the PVE missions are fun for a few days, it’s not what we all were hoping for.
“Never accept the world as it appears to be, dare to see it for what it could be.”
I think they are adding more missions occasionally so they are building to more of that PVE standard but not doing the upgrades (such as 360⁰ Rein Shatter)
That was OW1. The entire reason for the 2 in Overwatch 2 was that PVE was going to be the focus, not PVP.
It’s basic math. Let’s say each hero needed 20 customizations in what they were originally planning on doing. That’s 760 unique abilities and modifications that they needed to make, which they failed to deliver on. However, they did show a handful of skills they already developed. A single hero that they would allow us to design would maybe require what… 50? Not even?
760 abilities vs 50. Makes a whole lot of sense to me.
The PvE portion of OW2 was never marketed as a single player activity.
Yes it’s basic math, if you’re going to create your own hero based on at least 720 different abilities, then you have to dedicate time to restructure the ability trees to be separated from each other, limited by ability choices, have unique animations coincide with custom character attributes and cosmetics, and balance it all in a package that wasn’t designed for these abilities to interact in the way they’re now able to interact within.
It’s more work than simply incorporating the hero mode in as portrayed, much much more work.