Michael Gwilliam
Blizzard Entertainment
Overwatch 2 Director Aaron Keller has shutdown requests for the Archives event to return as the game continues to adapt following the cancelation of PvE.
A plethora of upcoming Overwatch features were announced during the recent Spotlight event, including the return of Lootboxes, new heroes, and Perks. But players are still reeling from the cancelation of planned PvE content.
Back in Season 6, Overwatch 2 launched its first batch in a series of planned PvE missions in the form of ‘Invasion’ but the rest of the upcoming missions were canned due to poor sales.
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The PvE missions were largely panned by the community and compared to the free Archives event from OW1, something that won’t come back according to Aaron Keller.
Overwatch still figuring out lore after PvE “setback”
During a stream with content creator Emongg, he inquired about the return of Archives, an OW1 PvE event that included several missions that released over the course of Overwatch’s run.
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“The honest answer is I’m not sure if or when that would come back,” Keller said. “There’s no satisfying answer. As we were working on the PvE side of the game, you end up building all these new tools, you have this whole new code based to where everything gets refactored and those all broke.”
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According to Keller, if the team wanted to bring back the old PvE missions, they’d have to remake them from scratch.
“We’re at a point where – is it worth putting the development time into that?” he added. “We’ve never gone on record saying that, so this is probably why they don’t put me on stream very often.”
The Game Director also confirmed that the team was rethinking how it handles lore following PvE’s cancelation and OW2 in a state of limbo narrative-wise.
Related:
Overwatch 2 confirms “groundbreaking” gameplay changes for 2025
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“Internally we have this intention to get back to the narrative and get back to the story. It’s no secret that we have had a big setback in the way we wanted to tell stories,” he admitted. “We’ve had to refocus and regroup on how we’re gonna do that.”
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It’s worth mentioning, however, that Keller is “hopeful” they can get back to moving the world state forward, including the possibility of a long-rumored OW anime.
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“It would be awesome to get something like that. It would be a ton of work. I think the whole team would love it.”
For now, though, it doesn’t look like any big lore developments or story moments are in the cards for the foreseeable future. The devs have doubled down hard on the PVP experience instead, introducing new ways to play once Season 15 kicks off.
