During Blizzard’s Overwatch Spotlight presentation, the company announced some of the biggest updates in the hero shooter’s decade-long life. However, one of the most notable changes revealed wasn’t an addition; it was a subtraction. Overwatch 2 is dropping the “2” from its title, and will just be called Overwatch moving forward.
This move is loaded in a few ways, particularly in that it can be seen as an acknowledgement that the Overwatch 2 Blizzard first announced in 2019 never truly materialized, instead feeling more like a significant update to the previous game than a truly new entry. While competitive Overwatch is in one of the best states it’s ever been in, a dark cloud of unmet promises, such as the canceled story mode, has loomed over the sequel for nearly four years. As a result detractors will likely look at this change with ridicule, claiming this is Blizzard acknowledging its failure to deliver what it had promised. But what does this change actually mean to Blizzard? Well, it sounds like the developer regrets slapping the 2 on the game to begin with.
Kotaku was present for a series of group interviews with Blizzard staff on the company’s Irvine campus to discuss the future of Overwatch, and the decision to revert Overwatch 2 to simply Overwatch came up during multiple sessions. The message the team wanted to get across was that this would essentially be future-proofing Overwatch to be the “forever” game the company wants it to be, rather than something fans might expect to be replaced with a third game like the original shooter was when Overwatch 2 launched in 2022.
“What we hope that this conveys to people is our path forward, which are these really big annual moments that almost feel like expansions,” game director Aaron Keller said. “So dropping the 2 is our way of conveying to players that Overwatch isn’t something that you’re supposed to move on from. We want to gain players’ confidence. We want them to have trust in the game, in the team behind it, in the company that’s supporting it so that they can look forward to playing this game that’s always improving for years to come.”
That’s where Overwatch is now, but when asked if Blizzard viewed the jump from Overwatch to the sequel as a successful endeavor, Blizzard SVP of Live Games Walter Kong said that while putting a 2 on the game might have been a mistake in hindsight, everything that the team did and learned in that time is how it got to the game we have today.
“What would I change if we could go back? Probably not call it Overwatch 2,” Kong said. “But when I look back at that period, I do think that it was a positive period for us because we made an important transition. We made a transition to an ongoing live game, and that wasn’t easy. It was really, really hard. I think I credit the leaders on the team for shepherding the organization through that, and I could see with time on the team that [it] became something that felt more natural to deliver seasonal content, it felt more natural to be able to respond to our players. So I think it was a necessary period of challenge that we had to get through to get to where we are today. I don’t think we could jump straight here. Just thinking back of all we experienced makes me feel a bit exhausted during those years, but I think it has allowed us to take much into the future.”
Keller added that, to him, this “isn’t an admission of a mistake,” but rather a commitment to Overwatch’s future as a PvP game that can integrate its narrative in the form of annual events through animated shorts, comics, audio dramas, and other media, rather than the originally planned PvE story missions that were meant to be a pillar of the sequel.
Overwatch 2 was originally announced as a PvE-driven sequel that would finally move the series’ story forward with a cooperative campaign. The first three missions launched in 2023, but that was all we got as Blizzard faced both internal development pipeline struggles and layoffs to the team that resulted in the campaign’s quiet cancellation. Overwatch is now restructuring its seasonal rollout to tell stories, but rather than via a playable campaign, the narrative will be advanced through external media, with in-game events and updates that reflect the changing world.
