Overwatch director says smaller PvE story missions could return, but a full campaign would need "a whole new game"

Overwatch players who still want to play the story instead of just reading about it got a small “maybe” this weekend. Game director Aaron Keller says Blizzard is open to smaller PvE experiences in the future, but anything on the scale of the campaign fans were once promised would have to be its own game, TheGamer reports from a press roundtable.

Keller was asked whether there’s still room for playable story missions now that Overwatch has wrapped up its year-long narrative arc, The Reign of Talon. His answer was honest about how the last attempts went. He said the earlier Archives event missions and the more recent narrative event missions both drew plenty of excitement, but the campaign “didn’t really get played the way that we wanted it to.” The pattern was a big surge of players at launch followed by a fast drop-off, and PvE missions cost a lot more development time than other event types.

Why the story moved to comics and cinematics

That’s the reason, Keller said, Blizzard shifted Overwatch’s storytelling toward cinematics, comics and webtoons. Those formats let the team tell more story with the same resources, and the gameplay people who had been building PvE missions could go back to work on the competitive game.

He didn’t close the door, though. “I would never discount it,” Keller said of more playable story content, as long as it doesn’t pull attention from the main game. A truly big story experience, he suggested, would need to be “a whole new game” made by a whole new team.

How we got here

This is the same promise that’s been shrinking since the start. Overwatch 2’s PvE was a centerpiece of its 2019 reveal, with hero missions where you’d level up and customize characters. In 2023 Blizzard cut that Hero Mode. Keller told GameSpot at the time that the team couldn’t keep pulling more and more resources away from the people playing the live game, and PC Gamer reported that development had “no end in sight.” What was left were standalone co-op story missions that didn’t sound built for replay the way hero missions were.

PPR take: Keller’s answer is the most straightforward thing Blizzard has said about PvE in a while, and I respect that. The problem he describes is real: people play a story mission once, maybe twice, and then they’re back in quick play, while the mission took far longer to build than a new map or event. But it’s also a little circular. Missions that were never really built for replay got played once, and now that’s the evidence players don’t want PvE. The “whole new game” line is the part I’d watch. Blizzard has no announced project like that, so don’t read this as a tease. For now, Overwatch’s story is something you’ll watch and read, not play, and anyone still holding out for the 2019 pitch should probably let it go.