I’m struggling to understand the goal of what they want to make OW2. The dev blogs don’t really help; they just speak in platitudes about seasonal nonsense, but there is never really any discussion whatsoever of gameplay and the aim of their development process. Anybody have any insights? I’m worried that the devs just don’t really have a plan at the moment.
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You ever put your forehead on a baseball bat, spin in circles, then try to run toward a goal?
It’s kind of like that, just with less laughing.
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death as that is where this game is heading
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The goal is to survive the onslaught of Mahvel until people get bored of it and return.
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If the plan is to just wait it out, it won’t work. Video games are a saturated industry. Once people go, most don’t come back. When they’re tired of MR, they’ll move on, not back.
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Nah, people will definitely come back and I’ll be happy to see them go. As long as there’s a healthy amount of people playing Rivals, we’re good. The OW2 fans that can’t figure out Rivals or don’t care for it are welcome to stop feeding in my game and come back to OW2 to do it. 
I feel like ow2 is the husk of a game which was loved by millions. It feels like they took the overwatch name and used it as a marketing scheme to sell battle passes, skins and shove porche and transformers collabs down our throats. So I dont think there is any vision for this game, they are just using the incredible work and worldbuilding that attracted so many people when the first game launched and using it to milk as much profit as possible. And you can see that by just comparing the cinematics over the years. Frankly it’s a very depressing situation and there is not one thing we can do about it. It’s the most late stage capitalism greed I have ever seen
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What would you expect their plan to be? Like, how about, make a suggestion. What should they be “working towards?”
I think their plan is just to keep the game a fun game that people play. (seems to have worked for 8 years so far)
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Make shot load of money with least effort.
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i dotn think anyone is coming back in reality this season alrayd has had the lowest turnout ever
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6v6 OW2 has been the most fun I have had in OW in years. probably since 2017. this is better than the years of abandoned OW in 2018-2021. hopefully 6v6 comes back permanently thats all i want
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The plans of the Devs has gone mysterious on us. Obviously they are going to make more skins and collabs and eventually more heroes, but will there be other things? Hopefully more trials of 6v6. Thats the direction I want to see.
Earlier this year half of their team was fired. From artists, developers, writers, you name it. Only this moronic leadership somehow survived. And leadership is a strong word because truthfully its a lack of leadership thats killing this game.
The people at the top do not care. Everyone still playing is still dropping $60 on collaboration IP damaging skins and Mercy and Kiriko mains remain the most selfish groups within the OW community. They have no obligation to care about gameplay or do anything outside of minor seasonal changes because people keep giving them money and time for no acceptably good reason because anyone claiming to have fun is just lying.
Until everyone is fired or Micro$oft pulls the plug entirely, OW has no goals or vision of how they want their game to be. By this point we should have gotten the promise of PvE again but actually executing it, I mean they are stealing at least 400 million a year, how has none of that gone back to the game? No one has a real answer other than the execs and bosses are obviously taking 99% of that money.
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Oh sweet summer child. The “vision” for this game is literally just to sell Widow, Mercy, and Kiriko skins.
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their vision is to sell cosmetics. before it was to sell story missions and cosmetics, but the price for the stories were too high with the gameplay being lame (what happened to ability trees??). they couldn’t care about the experience moment-to-moment, if people are purchasing skins that’s all that matters to them. of course this is where longterm they’ve killed the game. Marvel Rivals is the antithesis of their philosophy.
Money 
The entire goal of OW2 was to replace the monetization. They have canceled the pve way before OW2 released but launched the “game” anyway.
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Long-term, the vision was to build the sci-fi MMORPG that Team 4 was intended to build all-along. That means the plan for Overwatch 2 would have been to build and maintain it for a few years before eventually abandoning it in favour of ‘Overwatch 3’ (the MMORPG).
We don’t know the exact timeline of when things were cancelled, but it certainly looks like Team 4’s MMORPG plans died when Jeff Kaplan left - that was when they refocused on the Overwatch game that they already had.
As for what Overwatch 2 was originally going to look like? It had 3 parts:
- Essentially the PVP game that we have today (Overwatch 2.0, basically) - a free-to-play game combining the OW2 engine, the original gameplay elements from Overwatch 1 + new maps, heroes, events and monetization. The plan was always to move all Overwatch 1 players over to this version as a base. Like I said, it’s basically what we have.
- Story Mode PVE. A co-op campaign mode that wasn’t really intended to be replayable. Just a one-off mode that continues the Overwatch story. Maybe they would’ve released additional Story packages eventually, or maybe they would’ve saved future story progression for the MMORPG.
- ‘Hero Mode’ PVE. Randomly-generated co-op missions using elements from the Story Mode (enemy units, objectives) and maps from both the Story and PVP modes. Think a way more sophisticated version of MVM mode from TF2. The hero talent system that everyone was looking forward to was present in this mode. The hero talent system was again clearly intended to lay the groundwork for the future MMORPG.
Parts #2 and #3 would have been paid releases, probably bundled together. Part #1 would have been free for everyone.
We essentially only got Part #1, with a small portion of Part #2 - basically the first 3 completed missions released as an episode-style pack (Invasion). There were (are?) apparently more that were very close to completion as of the start of 2024. Maybe we’ll see them one day, maybe not - the plan in 2023 was to release a new ‘episode’ every 12-18 months. However, the Invasion pack was very poory-received (see: the Steam review score), so plans changed. We have seen portions of the work completed for Part #3 in various event modes.
But the important thing to note was that the long-term vision for Team 4 under Kaplan was to eventually move beyond Overwatch 2 (similar to how they eventually dropped support for Overwatch 1) and move on to an MMORPG. That was the original vision.
One other thing that’s worth thinking about is that the original plan for the Overwatch 2 means that the Story would likely not have had a satisfying ending. Team 4’s intention was still to lead-up to an MMORPG, not to tell a story where all loose-ends were tied-up. There likely would have been no resolution for Talon, Null Sector, Anubis, the Iris, the Junkers, Vishkar or any number of other things that people kind-of expected to be resolved or explained in the Overwatch 2 story.
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I still stand by this, but this game whole vision should have been PvE with PvP. This game would have been sky rocket if the devs actually follow through with the plan years ago.
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Really? Do the Overwatch 2 PVE demos look even remotely competitive with something like Helldivers 2? They were aiming to make something that played like Left4Dead but the world had already moved on.
It was cancelled because it was taking years to develop and it was bad lol.
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Overwatch 2 was essentially Team 4’s attempt to recreate Project Titan (the cancelled MMO that became Overwatch) through Overwatch. They wanted to create a massive PvE campaign, along with an extremely ambitious, infinitely replayable PvE mode where you could gear your favourite hero for that mode, and pick talents that modified their abilities in significant ways.
Unfortunately due to meddling from Bobby Kotick the team lost key staff and faced substantial delays. The extremely ambitious PvE mode needed to be cancelled because implementing it the way they wanted it would have further delayed the game several years (We wouldn’t have seen it until late 2025/early 2026 had they kept it in). This stung quite a bit as Overwatch players had already been in a content drought for 2 years as all the resources, new heroes, and maps that were planned for Overwatch had been shifted over to Overwatch 2.
Then on top of that it was revealed that the PvE campaign would not be releasing with the launch of Overwatch 2 (as Aaron Keller believed it was better to get the multiplayer out first and prioritize that, which was the correct move) and that the PvE would also be split into multiple mission ‘DLC’ style chunks, rather than one large, cohesive experience.
When the PvE campaign launched it was met with anger from the players as they were expected to pay for the privilege of playing it. The missions were decent enough, but sales were understandably poor and in the layoffs that happened earlier this year most of the PvE team was axed. While there’s been no official announcement on the status of the PvE campaign, many players, myself included at this point, believe it to be cancelled.
So basically Overwatch 2 now exists as a format change to the existing multiplayer with new heroes, maps and modes to make up for everything. And as someone who enjoys 5v5, it’s decent enough. There’s always room for improvement and expansion and the team has shown dedication to that. So we’ll see where we end up.
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