Aaron Keller hears you all and agrees: Overwatch 2 may positively use extra story content material proper about now, stating that for it to be “firing on all cylinders” it must as soon as once more make story content material a pillar of the sport.
Keller, who serves as Overwatch 2’s director, was just lately interviewed by content creator Jay3 about many facets of the stay recreation, together with the standing of a map editor/creator, a looking-for-group operate, and the method of making simply one of many recreation’s many heroes. The latter query ultimately led to dialogue in regards to the state of narrative content material in Overwatch 2 and Keller was refreshingly frank in regards to the matter.
When probed a couple of potential TV collection, Keller responded by saying that the crew “would love to try this” earlier than springboarding off of the query to handle narrative-starved followers. Keller continued, saying that the crew sees numerous sentiment on-line that “Overwatch has dropped the ball on the subject of story and lore.”
Even supposing the Overwatch video games have at all times been multiplayer-first, Blizzard has at all times employed a narrative crew that fleshed out the sport’s consistently increasing solid. These storytelling efforts embody many facets of the sport, like sprays, emotes, voice strains, interactions with sure different characters, in-game bios, occasions, and skins. Outdoors of the sport, it has manifested as comics, novels, and vibrant animated shorts and cinematics, the latter of which Jay3 factors out that he misses at one level within the interview.
Keller appears to as effectively, claiming, “For me personally, for us to say Overwatch 2 is firing on all cylinders, we have to have a few of that come again,” all of the whereas expressing that he and the crew know that they used to to place out extra animated shorts up to now and need to once more. Accordingly, he claims that the crew had massive ambitions of pursuing story content material in Overwatch 2, however then, as is usually the case in recreation improvement, issues went sideways.
Keller admitted, “To converse frankly about it, we did have an enormous plan to go after story within the recreation. That was the PvE aspect of it, with the marketing campaign and every part like that. And it did not work out.” When Overwatch 2 was first introduced, a serious new function of the then-upcoming sequel was the implementation of a PvE mode full with a narrative that may weave collectively a cohesive marketing campaign that includes a variety of the Overwatch solid.
Nonetheless, the closely anticipated PvE mode was indifferent from Overwatch 2 previous to its launch in 2023, and was ultimately scrapped, which prompted “a type of reset second” for the sport’s crew. Features of it had been later salvaged for later updates, like a content material pack of PvE missions that was offered to gamers post-launch. Considered one of Overwatch 2’s latest additions, the Stadium mode, additionally adapts the canned PvE mode’s skill-progression system right into a PvP format that has confirmed to be successful with followers of the sport.
However for followers of Overwatch’s bigger narrative and solid, these additions, in addition to fixed stability modifications and mechanical pivots, have come at the price of little-to-no in-game story content material, not to mention cinematics. Keller and the Overwatch crew appear to get that although, and need to get again to it, sharing, “It is simply there’s been a little bit of type of like a step backwards that we needed to take to ensure that us to have the ability to begin shifting ahead on it once more.”
With the sport seemingly in a more healthy place nowadays, Keller’s feedback might be a optimistic signal that Overwatch’s narrative will likely be a bigger a part of the sport once more within the close to future.