Overwatch 2 developers published a blog in which the director of the game, Aaron Keller, spoke more about the origins of Overwatch and the reasons why the developers had to abandon the original version of PVE.
You can familiarize yourself with the translation of this appeal below:
Hi all. This week was quite emotional for the world Overwatch. A few days ago we reported that we changed our approach to PVE in Overwatch 2 and published a detailed plan for the content of content for 2023. We are looking forward to the content that we will soon release in the game, however, the main discussions this week were about how we “canceled PVE”, although this expression is inaccurate. This is what I want to discuss today.
When we announced Overwatch 2 in 2019, we conceived a sequel to PVP (we released it in October last year) and with a PVE-component, plot missions and heroic missions.
In plot missions, the main focus was on a fast cooperative gameplay, as well as on history, symptoms and cat-scenes expanding the Overwatch universe. In the plot missions linear narration. They talk about how the Heroes of Overwatch are united to fight with the new threat of null sector. In them, the plot first moves forward from the moment the original game is released. The action of these missions unfolds on huge maps with new enemies and new cinematics. We will begin to release plot missions from the 6th season. We did a grandiose work, these missions are significantly superior to everything that we released in PVE in our game, and we are very waiting for players to try them. We will talk more about plot missions in the coming weeks.
On the other hand, heroic missions (or heroes regime) were a regime that was still under development, and allowed players to improve heroes with the help of talent branches, and was a PVE that could be played again and again. The concept of this idea was very interesting and liked not only the players, but also the development team. We decided to stop working on this mode.
To explain to you the context of this solution, I will tell you about the past Team 4 (Overwatch development teams) and how it appeared. The Overwatch team was formed after the abolition of the game, which was developed in Blizzard called the project “Titan”. This game had many aspects, but in essence it was FPS mmo. The Overwatch team, especially at the very beginning, considered itself a MMO development team. When we moved away from this concept and began to work on Overwatch, we decided that one day we would return the project by the former. Our plan sounds like this: “First halfzi, then go, then run”. Overwatch was a phase of “crawling”, a full -fledged PVE phase of “walking”, and MMO was planned at the “running” phase. This genre was literally in the DNA of our team at the beginning of work, so many of us believed that in the final version of the game we will be able to implement the original vision of the Titan project.
In 2016, after we released Overwatch, we soon began to discuss what the next stage in the development of the game would be. Now, when I remember this time, I understand that we should better focus on the game that has become our hit. Instead, we continued to concentrate our thoughts on plans, which were already many years old. We began to work on a PVE-component and gradually began to transfer more and more employees to it.
In the field of Gamdev, rarely everything goes according to plan. From the very beginning, we could not decide what heroic missions should be. The scale of the project grew. We tried to do too many things at the same time and lost focus. The team made many cool things, for example, the talents of heroes, new opponents and early versions of the missions, but we could not collect all these elements together so that the players received high -quality and full game experience.
We had an interesting, but too bloated vision of the project, and in attempts to implement it, we delayed more and more resources from the current game. Now I remember our old ambitions about Overwatch and I understand that the strategy “Polzi – Shagay – run” did not work.
We announced something unimaginable. The players had huge expectations, but we felt that we could not justify them. We had to make an incredibly difficult decision – which, as we knew, will disappoint the players, a team of developers and everyone who was waiting for heroic missions. The Overwatch team really understands your feelings-after all, it was a project that went on years of work and in which many emotions were invested. Our developers are wonderful and talented people who love the game very much and their work.
Many are perplexed why we reported their decision only now. After Overwatch 2, we began to plan content for the next seasons. Plans grew and grew, and we tried to squeeze all our ambitious ideas into them.
And we did not succeed. And we understood that we could no longer again pull the employees from the development of the current game, in order to again engage in our original vision of the project. So, we made a difficult decision to cancel the heroic missions, and began to make plans for the future.
We had to update our vision of the game, believe in the chosen direction and report all changes to the team. This decision was only the beginning of a long process, and not its completion.
It was not easy for us, but I, as the director of the project, had to do everything so that the game and its community were in the first place, even if such solutions could disappoint. For a long time I did not dare to abandon the old vision of the project, although it was already ineffective. And for this I want to apologize to the players and our team. Excuse me.
Now we have focused on making our game a constantly developing project. We still plan to release a lot of what was shown on BlizzCon 2019, including plot missions that open the new chapter of the Overwatch universe, new types of cooperative content (which we have not yet presented) and new stories that we will release, as in the game , and beyond. We are happy to have a new direction of development of the game and look forward to when you can finally see what we created.
Overwatch was born from the ashes of the Titan project. His appearance was the moment of transformation for our team and projects … Then something beautiful was born. Now we are experiencing new changes. And from them the future of Overwatch will be born.
The main insider of the gaming industry, Jason Schreyer, promises to prepare materials on the development of Overwatch 2 with some additional details in the future.