Overwatch 2 Director Outlines Plan To...

While Blizzard’s Overwatch franchise was once considered the gold standard when it comes to hero shooters, the game has fallen from grace over the years.

Not only is it facing stiff competition, but even its player base has qualms about how Blizzard has treated the game.

That should be changing in the near future, as the developer has acknowledged some of its shortcomings, especially when it comes to building the game’s story and lore.

Overwatch 2 Story Content To Come Back, As Blizzard Admits PvE Didn’t Work Out

Speaking with content creator Jay3, Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller acknowledges that the hero shooter will need to bring story content to help build its story and lore.

Keller notes (via IGN), “One of the things that we hear our players talk about a lot, you see online… it feels like Overwatch has dropped the ball when it comes to story and lore. “You kinda see that. We used to put a few more of the big animated shorts out than we do nowadays”

In case your memory needs a reminder, Blizzard used to released animated shorts when introducing new characters and this somehow tied the new character into the game’s over-arching story. Fans used to receive this regularly from 2016 to 2023, although the release cadence noticeably slowed when Overwatch 2 was released in 2022.

Keller admitted that the studio had a big plan about the game’s story, and it was tied to PvE. In case you didn’t know, PvE (Player vs. Environment), was the main reason cited by Blizzard for why they had to move on from Overwatch to OW2. This was a move that many community members disapproved of, as they felt it was unnecessary and was being done to overhaul the game’s microtransactions system further.

As Overwatch 2 players know, the PvE portion didn’t pan out with Blizzard officially killing it off in 2023.

Keller said, “To speak frankly about it, we did have a big plan to go after story in the game. That was the PvE side of it with the campaign and everything like that. That didn’t work out. So, it was kind of a bit of a reset moment for us when that happened, and we would like to get back to it. I think one of the best parts of Overwatch is the universe and the characters that are there. That’s definitely a goal of ours to get back to it. There’s been a bit of a step backwards that we had to take in order for us to be able to start moving forward on it again.”

While Keller thinks that for Overwatch 2 to be “firing on all cylinders,” they ned to have some of the story content back, the director can’t specify whether we’ll see it return or in what form.

With the game’s resurgence after the introduction of the new Stadium mode, let’s hope Blizzard uses this momentum to shore up the game’s lore given it’s one of the specific things the player base has been clamoring for in quite some time.

In other Overwatch 2 news, the developers at Activision-Blizzard have formed a union, and here’s what that means.