According to Kotaku reports, "Overwatch 2" has failed to achieve its original promise of providing a complete single-player campaign story/PvE mode. Its campaign missions as a compromise will be gradually withdrawn as a real-time service or will not be able to continue due to the recent layoffs at Microsoft Activision.
The media and several former Blizzard employees discussed the "Overwatch 2" campaign missions, and according to one of the former developers, the campaign project had been mired in development process problems more than five years ago. Originally, the team planned to release three tasks every 18 months. All missions for the campaign mode were said to have been in the "playable concept" stage, but were shelved due to what the developers described as a "vague concept" of so-called "Blizzard quality."
These developers have begun to question so-called "Blizzard quality," saying it has become a term used to avoid decisions about continuing to develop the single-player campaign. Said the developer: "[Blizzard quality] is essentially a rationalization of bullshit about doing the same thing over and over again. Some executives will say, 'But is this Blizzard quality?' and it's always leadership or the game director who decides they need to spend more time. So honestly, if they had any decision to make, this game would have been out years ago."
On the other hand, the pursuit of "Blizzard quality" has also led to constant changes to the original concept of the game. The problem faced by the development team is not only that, the original PvP gameplay of the game is "difficult to adapt to PvE", and the views surrounding the campaign are not always pessimistic, but increasingly negative. This is all because the leaders of all teams constantly reject any suggestions and ideas for improving the game, constantly hearing the excuses of "no point" or "no time", and the reactions of department leaders are divided into the pressure of "what if we let players down" and the overconfidence of "don't worry, we are confident about this".
It was not until the final stages of development that the campaign mode was announced to be cancelled.
After the campaign PvE mode was cancelled, Blizzard launched PvE gameplay in mission mode. Originally they were hoping to see "significant numbers," but another source said the mission was "not performing well" in terms of revenue and player sentiment. In January, major layoffs in Microsoft's gaming division resulted in many people on the game's PvE development team leaving the company, with many expressing no hope of seeing new single-player content in the future.
"If they really had the idea to develop this content, they just fired everyone involved. Maybe they could have done it in other ways, but most of the people fired from the Overwatch team were working around that core (PvE content)," the source said.
Most of the former developers interviewed agreed that despite the development issues, everyone on the game development team wanted both PvE and PvP to be successful, but senior management didn't think so. "Even from a business perspective, Activision or Microsoft really don't have any confidence in PvE," one interviewee said.