Overwatch is Over party

 Let the cancel bells ring

I don't like to just throw the coffin lid atop a game that does anything I don't like and declare it 'dead to me', because that's a very narrow-minded way to look at any artistic endeavour. I like to examine what it puts out, compare it to competitors, assess it's unique charms and use my experience of gaming built up until that moment to decided exactly how I feel about them and how it appeals to my tastes. It's with all these factors taken completely into account that I can finally give up on my long-term plan to eventually get around to Overwatch 2 once it finally gets to it's more interesting ideas, because as we recently learned in perhaps one of the most shocking developer town halls of the past few years: there is nothing new coming to Overwatch 2. That's right, the big selling point of the game around which a hundred thousand ships were sailed in hopes of the future has fallen apart completely and Overwatch has totally scrapped the PVE dedicated mode... I can't even fathom how heart-breaking that is.

Overwatch came around as a loud and proud competitive shooter with an easy barrier to entry and a huge skill ceiling for the dedicated to chase- and also an apparent rich and bountiful fountain of context and lore that absolutely never made it's way onto the screen. The world of Overwatch, brought to life with the iconic character designs who pop all the way down from their colour choices to their silhouettes, was only ever paid lip service in the intro video that played everytime you booted the game- in play Overwatch was just a fully competitive hero shooter with nothing narrative focused within it whatsoever aside from limited time tiny PVE co-op missions that would pop up once every 3 months or so and told mostly forgettable stories anyway- such as the first time Tracer went on a mission for the Overwatch police force. (Who cares?) 

Such effort went into creating the characters of Overwatch that it always felt like a distinct disservice that nothing significant was ever made out of those bones! We never got to learn about the characters enough to really care about them, to discover what the Overwatch agency stood for and what it's weaknesses and strengths were, to discover any character nuances- there was never an opportunity for this story to flesh itself out! Oh sure, we got the odd animation every few years, maybe a comic if we were really lucky- and maybe you could spend the time in between analysing the ambient voice lines between characters among the throngs of sweaty redditors who are forever stuck arguing about whether or not Mercy is dating Genji. It was a pathetic and sad waste of potential, but one which nobody seemed to care about other than me because nailing the core Overwatch experience was so important. Or at least that was the case until Overwatch 2 was announced.

Following the very next day after the intro video to Overwatch 1; (showing how little any actual story had been established or progressed in the many years since the original Overwatch launched) Overwatch 2 threatened to actually present what Overwatch was, who it stood for and let us play that journey of discovery. There would be actual dedicated PVE mission content which put us in the shoes of legendary heroes with RPG development trees and narrative missions, all developed to the high quality standard of your typical Blizzard product. And that would come atop the inherited legendary multiplayer of Overwatch 1 that was going to be brought to the new game with a host of improvements like... the teams being knocked down from 6 players to 5... There's more changes and tweaks, but that's literally the only significant difference... So yeah, the PVE was really what was going to set out Overwatch 2 as a totally different game to it's predecessor! 

And you can see where I'm going with this, can't you? Overwatch 2 dropped all of that promised PVE content with practically no warning and an 'IOU' letter attached to the forum community post with a hands up shrugging emoji. The very point of Overwatch 2, reason why there needed to be a new game to begin with when the old one worked just fine, has just been scrapped with nothing more than a 'whoops, our bad'. Overwatch 2 had been struggling, for ages, to justify it's existence against a severly critical public who just didn't want to deal with any of Blizzard's crap, and their patience has been rewarded with a steel-toe boot to the thorax and a spit in the face. Now all that Overwatch 2 is can be summed up with increased monetisation. That's it. Everything else could have been handled in the base launcher. Blizzard have made fools of it's community once again.

What gall it takes to dedicate actual years of development to making something new for your sequel to then just give up and assume people will be happy with the copy cat product hardly worthy of being called a successor- and how very unbefitting a company once renowned for it's unwavering dedication to how the players felt. It's clear that the Overwatch 2 development train was lagging behind, new maps and characters weren't showing up quite as often as we expected them to; but that was a necessary sacrifice for an interesting reward done the line. Every bit of development not sinking into Overwatch 2's multiplayer content was instead making something brand new that would recontexaulise the franchise and open it up to more people revitalising the Overwatch brand. And now that time is wasted. Overwatch 2's early development years and slow release support is just disappointing now, with no payoff whatsoever. That a cold pill to swallow.

It's not as though I don't sympathise with feature reshuffling. I know how plans change and deadlines shift all the time, that's just the flow of development and there's nothing we can do about it. But we're not talking about some piddling mingame or a questline or even a support feature- this was the spine of Overwatch 2. Without this mode, what of significance has the development team of this game got to present for their years but maintenance? Just look at the roadmap that the team have proudly touted as Overwatch's 'biggest year yet'. Some maps, a new hero... nothing that couldn't have been expected from any old roadmap. Nothing to get excited over. Because all the excitement died off with the unjust conclusion of the Hero mode development. 

So what should be done? Quite honestly; the mode shouldn't have been cancelled. In the order of priority for what Overwatch 2 needed to be a complete game, this should have been under the 'must haves'. It was a flagship selling point and if it's taking a while to create, if multiplayer updates needed to be toned down whilst they work on it, then that should have been the cost paid so as to not make liars out of themselves. (Blizzard and 'community trust' is a thorny enough union...) I only hope this decision came from higher-ups than the entire development team, that corporate themselves struck this down with almighty prejudice because otherwise, if the team themselves consider this an acceptable sacrifice, then there's no hope for the Overwatch franchise ever reclaiming it's withered lustre. Consider me extremely disappointed.