Overwatch 2 devs explain why new story missions are never releasing

Blizzard has seemingly canceled new Overwatch 2 story missions, the main reason the FPS game sequel was created in the first place. With only one set of narrative missions currently available to play, and no follow-ups announced, developers that have worked on the game are sure that story content is over.

Overwatch 2 players are already miserable at recent balance changes, and the lack of new content has only made that misery deeper. However, according to past developers, a long history of pipeline issues has let to a drought of new additions, and that’s resulted in content being scrapped.

In a report by Kotaku, multiple Overwatch 2 devs revealed the original plans for the game’s story content. Developers explain that the plan was to release “three missions every 18 months” with every mission currently sitting in multiple forms of production.

At the time of writing, some unreleased story missions are fully playable whereas others are still in a concept phase. The missions that have been finished have been kept in multiple rounds of revision to achieve “Blizzard Quality”, an internal term that has made developers remake content in games like Diablo 4 over and over again.

“[Blizzard Quality] is a justification to essentially piss about forever and ever redoing the same work over and over. Some executive goes, ‘Hm, but is it Blizzard quality?’ It’s always leadership or game directors, deciding they need to spend the extra time. So honestly, if they could have just made any kind of decisions, the game would have shipped years ago,” a Blizzard developer told the outlet.

Another source told the outlet that the team has a “pessimistic” view on the existence of story missions. While developers would throw up ideas for how to actually improve the narrative missions, higher-ups would gatekeep the content over fears that the PvP gameplay doesn’t suit a PvE format.

“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?’” a source explained.

While the team was excited to bring PvE missions to Overwatch 2 at the start of the game’s development, the team behind the game has since claimed it would need to double in size to properly support both story content and the standard multiplayer experience, despite already having a massive team.

“They used to say all the time that we would essentially need two 400-people teams, one for PvP and one for PvE to have the personnel needed,” a source told Kotaku. “I don’t think that’s true. there were already too many cooks.”

Overwatch 2 was originally pitched in the existence of the new story missions. Forcing players to move from the first game to its sequel, PvE was the golden promise for long-time fans. Instead, the sequel has completely failed to deliver on this promise.

With the recent Xbox layoffs hitting Blizzard with large staff cuts, Overwatch 2’s story missions most likely won't release at all.

“If they’re gonna make more of that stuff, they just laid off all the people who were working on it,” an ex-Blizzard employee said.”

With the first release of story content not doing well from an engagement perspective, both Activision and Microsoft reportedly have no faith in the future of PvE content. With Blizzard’s development of the content taking so long, it’s unsurprising that management doesn’t wish to continue funneling money into that aspect of the game.

Overwatch 2 is currently available to play for free on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch and PC.