I was at BlizzCon 2019 when the ambitious vision for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Overwatch 2 was first announced. This reveal was sudden, and focused around a promised co-op campaign and PvE elements that seemed like a huge departure from the tight multiplayer action the hero shooter traded on for all of its lifespan. Lead developers Aaron Keller and Jeff Kaplan excitedly shared their hopes for the upcoming sequel, and how it would remain loyal to what Overwatch was while lifting it to ambitious new heights. The reality was far more sour, and four y🅷ears later it has all begun to fall apart.
This week saw 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blizzard Entertainment confirm that the origin😼al intentions for Overwatch 2𒈔 have been scaled back, with some ꧒ideas 🧸cancelled entirely. Missions that intended to focus on larger environments and specific heroes with skill trees and bespoke abilities could have been incredible. We had seen screenshots and footage of one early example, and I even recall playing it back during the event, although whatever form that took was nowhere near representative of a final product, and nothing like it came to pass in Overwatch 2 at launch. But it was sold to us with such a promise, long before the game went free-to-play or pivoted to an aggressive monetisation model. For years, it was the reason for Overwatch 2 existing to begin with.
Development continued on this new portion for years, and was continually referenced and promised before and following the release of Overwatch 2. Fans thought its absence strange upon release, with the sequel more or less a glorified version of the original game that made it harder to earn cosmetics and in some cases even took things away from us, but we convinced ourselves that something better was on the horizon. That Blizzard was taking its time to create a c🌃omponent of the game that would finally bring it to life. Now it isn’t coming.
Story missions are still set to arrive, albeit in a truncated form delivered through seasonal updates instead of the fully-fledged campaig♕n some were hoping for. At some point it became clear that giving us the freedom to upgrade and customise characters outside of multiplayer would have clashed with the live-service design philosophy, either by making characters feel too different to play, or awkwardly failing to blend with where Blizzard wants us to be spending our time and money. It’s harder to monetise, and makes more sense from a business perspective to roll this content in with battle passes and other seasonal offerings than to take the spotlight away from anything else. This sucks, but it’s not unexpected.
Overwatch has a rich and enduring universe filled with beloved characters, and Blizzard is well aware that there is more than enough mechanical and narrative weight to support the creation of a single-player focused mode, or even an entire game, but this has been cast aside in favour of focusing on a multiplayer experience that has already started to present diminishing returns. Maybe if a solo campaign hadn’t been promised to players for years as the big selling point, it wouldn♔’t seem so bad.
But for 🤪the majority of players, it was the single thing that justified making a sequel at all instead of pursuing a seasonal release model. The truth is that Overwatch was no longer the golden child it used to be. It was a premium product in a world defined by free-to-play live-service juggernauts fueled by battle passes and optional currency. Loot boxes didn’t cut it anymore, and the cynical part of me believes Blizzard wanted to deepen its pockets, and making a sequel that pivoted to free-to-play and put once accessible bits of cosmetic progression behind myriad paywalls was the easiest move, and dangling a solo campaign over our noses like an alluring carrot kept us from reading between the lines. The plan worked, at least until it became clear the creative vision was impossible༺.
Overwatch was once the only multiplayer shooter I cared about. A social lubricant during my time at university which me and my ꦯfriends would jump into most nights merely to talk about our days, celebrating when a legendary skin happened to drop or a big seasonal patch gave us a reason to shake things up. It was wholesome despite the loot boxes, until it began to make all the money and Blizzard needed more, even i✨f it meant announcing a sequel two years earlier than needed and promising content it was never going to deliver. I could see a crack or two beginning to show even back then, but now it’s crumbling to pieces and there’s almost nothing that can pull me back into the fold.
