If you are an OG Overwatch player, then you know why Overwatch 2 came into being. Originally planned to be the PvE missions which expands on the lore behind the hero shooter, Overwatch 2 then shifted its priorities into their PvP aspect. Since Overwatch 2’s release, players have only received 1 set of 3 story missions which released in August 2023.

Several ex-Blizzard employees have come forward under anonymity to talk more about the past, present, and future of Overwatch 2’s story missions. Apparently the first 3 missions released “did not do well at all,” either in player satisfaction or financial success. It was also confirmed that the layoffs that hit Microsoft in January impacted many of the developers working on PvE content and narrative elements of the game.

“If they’re gonna make more of that stuff, they just laid off all the people who were working on it. Maybe there’s some other way they could do it, but most of the people laid off from the Overwatch team were working on that pillar.” – A developer said.

Blizzard aimed to unveil Overwatch 2’s campaign through “multiple content releases spread over several years,” but the project encountered delays throughout the years. There have been a lot of issues since the release with developers trying to integrate the PvP and PvE elements together.

“Overwatch’s PvP gameplay just turned out to be very difficult to adapt for PvE. Mostly because of how differentiated and PvP-oriented the hero kits are.”

There has also been a lot of negative sentiments surrounding the story elements in the internal team. Sources spoke up about their concern on whether leadership took it seriously. Leadership (including director Aaron Keller and executive director Jared Neuss), would reassure the team, and sometimes even avoid their concerns.

“Everybody still cared a lot about PvE, though, and that includes team leadership, [but] it really doesn’t seem like, even from a business perspective, that Activision or Microsoft have any faith in the PvE.”

“You had designers, programmers, artists, QA, all disciplines, on the team constantly making suggestions and ideas to improve, or trying to do the best we could. But it was all either shot down by a few gatekeepers or just ‘there was no point, there was no time. Almost every single team town-hall there were questions about ‘what do we do if it doesn’t succeed? I don’t feel confident that it will perform well. What are we going to do about players being disappointed?’ It was met with either ‘don’t worry about it. It’ll be fine. We have so much confidence in it. Trust us.’”

This testimony, of course does not mean that story missions are cancelled, so we hope that Blizzard do intend of delivering on their promises to fans on working on the PvE modes. Blizard has not announced anything publicly just yet. We only have a statement from Executive Producer Jared Neuss, about what’s to come for PvE in 2024 from the end of 2023.

“We’re going to keep experimenting, move lore into those experiences to give people who love the story more reason to be excited, but we also want to try these other things that are smaller, replayable things that give a very different experience,” Neuss said of PvE.

Overwatch 2 is available on Steam and Battle.net for PC!