The rationale for why heroes are shooting each other all over the place in Overwatch 2 can nowadays be summarized by “stop thinking about it, enjoy the new seasonal shinies, and buy our cosmetics.” However that wasn’t always the case, as there were far more rich reasons and details shared about the wider world. And while new hero debuts have had some brief story vignettes, the days of the animated shorts have stopped since the pseudo-sequel released. That might be changing, or at least there’s a desire for that to change, according to an interview with game director Aaron Keller and voice actor Conor McLeod shared by content creator Jay3.

“It feels like Overwatch has dropped the ball when it comes to story and lore,” Keller admits in the interview. “To speak frankly about it, we did have a big plan to go after story in the game. That was the PvE side of it. […] That didn’t work out, so it was kind of a bit of a reset moment for us when that happened, and we would like to get back to it.” For his part, McLeod even revealed that he believed when he was auditioning for the character Hazard that Overwatch was a story mode game.

That mention of PvE “not working out” glosses over the historical facts of the matter: When Overwatch 2 was unveiled at BlizzCon 2019, PvE was the defining feature and reasoning for it being a sequel, but Blizzard axed those ambitions in 2023 and even admitted that its priorities shifted almost two years prior to launch, meaning it had been fibbing even to players about what it would be long, long after it pivoted. Blizzard then paywalled some PvE missions and finally killed its PvE score chase Gauntlet mode at the end of Season 10. It was actually kind of a massive debacle! Multiple debacles!

In terms of what plans there are for story or cinematics to make a comeback, it doesn’t sound like there are any: Keller was amenable to the idea of an Overwatch TV show and said that in order for the game to be “firing on all cylinders” that these things would need to come back, but he makes no allusion about the how more than acknowledging the why – a fact that some comments and fans on Reddit tried to call out.

Other tidbits from the interview include a “maybe” when asked about bringing back group finder (Keller calls out a “pretty low participation rate” when it was still offered), the vague promise of a “ramp up” of plans when asked about more frequent hero additions, and another discussion about how the competition of Marvel Rivals has an impact but “is not a response to Rivals” since many of its plans were in the works a year ago.