Overwatch 2 PvE Canceled... Blizzard Completely Failed Us

Sorry, Tracer, the calvary never arrived.

If you haven't seen the latest headlines surrounding the once-highly-anticipated successor of the 2016 game of the year, Blizzard has decided to axe any further development of PvE content and "double down" on competitive instead. This news really comes to no surprise after the majority of the team behind the game's PvE development was laid off in January after a crash-and-burn failure of a launch, which held the first three story missions behind a paywall that did not sell.

A Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that this decision was made ultimately because of player feedback. As a former player, who put almost 1,000 hours into Overwatch and barely any into Overwatch 2, I'll speak for most of us when I say that we lost interest as soon as we had to wait in 24-hour queues to load up the second game a week after launch. We never had any interest of even trying PvE when it released months after launch, because they spawn-killed it.

Let's try to figure out how exactly Blizzard steered this ship so far off course. Here's a rough timeline of events for those who weren't aware:

• Announces OW2 at Blizzcon 2019.

• Sidelines any development of OW1 to focus on OW2 development, emphasizing their commitment to bringing a new, immersive PvE experience to their loyal player base.

• Provides practically ZERO updates to OW1 for YEARS aside from skins and the occasional deathmatch map.

• Launches the OW2 Beta (hell yeah!) with ZERO PvE elements (...okay?).

• Barely launches OW2 with unstable servers and impossible queue times just to load in.

• MONTHS LATER... finally launches PvE, but behind a paywall and with none of the things they promised like skill tree elements, unique story development, etc.

• Fires the dev team behind PvE and scraps one of the main selling points of the game all together

It's truly sad to see. The game is practically dead even though they revamped competitive with a complete reset (something they should've done at launch) in early 2024. Where do we go from here? I have no interest in playing, all of my old 6-stack teammates lost interest years ago. Even some of the biggest content creators in the ever-shrinking space have said that at this point, it's almost worth hitting the big red button, bringing Will Smith in with a neuralyzer to blank everyone's memories, and going back to the good old days.

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say this, but I wish I could go back and queue up 6v6 competitive on Hanamura one last time.

RIP Overwatch. RIP Overwatch League. RIP the promises of what they claimed PvE would be.