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Meanwhile, developers are worried about the PvE missions.
Overwatch 2 fans were blessed by Blizzard yesterday when a new Developer Update was released with exciting changes. The most important of them is, of course, free heroes, who are now available to everyone.
One of the worst decisions Blizzard made with Overwatch 2 was locking characters behind a paywall. If you dropped it after it became "free", here's the deal: new heroes are now available for battle pass owners, which can be purchased with real money or coins that are difficult to get as they require long hours in the game trying to complete various quests (of course, hardcore players with all the time on their hands might argue.)
So if you're unwilling to pour money or time into it, new characters will be available to you only in the next season, which is about two months away. The problem is Blizzard (and other developers, to be fair) is notorious for launching OP heroes that aren't properly balanced yet, so if your team didn't pay for the battle pass but the opponent did, well... Good luck.
But Season 10 will right this wrong, as promised some time ago, and all new heroes will be immediately unlocked from their launch day. You'll still need to complete some tasks to understand how the character works, but it's easy and doesn't require you to spend much time (and no money at all, yay!)
Image credit: Blizzard
Other updates introduced in the next Season include changes to how you unlock and upgrade customizable Mythic skins through the new Mythic Shop. You can buy older skins now and decide how much you want to unlock. They are still under the paid battle pass, which will have some upgrades too – more to be announced later.
There are also easier-to-get coins, one more Push map in Season 11, improved Dorado, Circuit Royale, Havana, and Numbani maps sometime in the future, and a new Clash mode introduced at BlizzCon 2023 (in Season 10).
Speaking of old introductions and promises, the biggest mess Overwatch 2 has been in is the absence of PvE – the main marketing point of the game back when it was announced. While we got some small PvE missions eventually, they are hidden behind a paywall as well, and I have no idea if anyone actually plays them.
I guess not because their icon has recently been moved to the right, so it's now small and sad. Could we lose even this tiny piece of what we expected? Unfortunately, we might.
In January, Activision Blizzard and Xbox lost 1,900 employees, and now former developers fear the PvE future will never come. According to Kotaku's sources, initially, the idea was to release three missions around every 18 months, but then the progress was slowed as the team was chasing the so-called Blizzard Quality.
"[Blizzard Quality] is a justification to essentially piss about forever and ever redoing the same work over and over,” one developer said. "Some executive goes, ‘Hm, but is it Blizzard quality?’ It’s always leadership or game directors, deciding they need to spend the extra time. So honestly, if they could have just made any kind of decisions, the game would have shipped years ago."
Eventually, the PvE missions many artists had been working on were abandoned as "Overwatch's PvP gameplay just turned out to be very difficult to adapt for PvE." There were also issues with the higher-ups.
As for the current PvE missions, the layoffs affected a portion of people working in that field, so they are now worried about the outcome:
"If they’re gonna make more of that stuff, they just laid off all the people who were working on it," a source said. "Maybe there’s some other way they could do it, but most of the people laid off from the Overwatch team were working on that pillar."
While everyone in the team was excited about the mode, some ex-devs doubt that Activision or Microsoft "have any faith in the PvE."
What do you think will happen to it? Find the list of changes to the game here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.