One of the biggest Overwatch 2 selling points was its campaign-style story content, but back in 2023 fans were crushed by the announcement this was being canned. Instead, players were treated to shorter PvE missions—and now internal reports suggest those are in danger of disappearing too.
Former Overwatch 2 developers have reportedly shared their stories on what’s happening to the sequel’s long-awaited PvE content, and it’s not great news for those hoping to get more of this style of content any time soon. Ongoing development issues and wide staff layoffs were two of the key concerns voiced by ex-developers to Kotaku in a report shared on March 18, and ultimately, the devs now believe the future of this content is up in the air.
In what will likely be a barb for Overwatch players, some former developers even told Kotaku the player-vs-environment modes being designed for the sequel could have been shipped to players a long time ago if leadership had made firm decisions. “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” the former Overwatch 2 team member suggested.
The hold-up in production can be boiled down to achieving what leadership would call “Blizzard quality,” the ex-developers claimed, with the same sources suggesting the term really means “piss about forever and ever redoing the same work.” Because decision-makers and “gatekeepers” leaned on teams to keep changing things, the devs kept running into technical difficulties and issue-heavy delays.
These reports do little to change the feeling among OW2 fans that the once-teased PvE content will never really arrive; a sentiment already quite prevalent after recent layoffs at Microsoft that saw many of the OW2 team members specifically working on this content lose their jobs.
Right now, it doesn’t sound like PvE has been completely halted at Blizzard, but these accounts from former staffers don’t paint a promising picture. According to the report, there are still PvE missions in all stages of production from concept to playable, though it remains to be seen if players will ever actually get to play them.
