WILL OVERWATCH 2 BE PATCH

It's something I hope in some ways influences people to think about how they want to be treated as a community. See you later, Overwatch 1 people, hope you buy Overwatch 2!' The weirdest part is everybody would just go, 'Oh, they're making a sequel.'īut the second you go, 'Let's try to be a little bit cooler about what we do with the community,' we actually get destroyed by that very community. We're going to change how a bunch of PvP works. It's going to have all of this amazing PvE content, story missions, hero missions, all-new PvP maps. It's so odd to me because if we were to rewind to BlizzCon 2019 and I were to just say, 'Hey, we're making Overwatch 2, it's a sequel. Jeff Kaplan: We feel like it's super important to keep the community together. It wasn't mentioned too much in this panel, but I assume that connection is still the plan for PvP – Overwatch and Overwatch 2 will still be connected? IGN: I guess that perception comes down partly to the fact that there is a connection with the original Overwatch here. And our goal was always to make a sequel.

WILL OVERWATCH 2 BE PATCH

I have a very clear picture in my mind of what the difference between an expansion and a patch is versus a sequel. I'm somebody, if you look back on my career personally, I've made expansions, I've made patch updates. This has always been what we've had our eyes set on. But obviously we didn't do that correctly because people just sort of created their own dialogue around what the game was. This isn't DLC, this isn't just something that should be a patch. We tried to tell people this is a true sequel. I think in a lot of ways we didn't communicate it at BlizzCon 2019 accurately. Jeff Kaplan: No, I think it's kind of the opposite. You cover so many different areas – is this turning into more of a sequel than you expected it to be going in?

IGN: One thing I would love to talk about is just the sheer scale of this presentation. And it's still not been determined if we are actually doing an open beta or not – I have a hard time imagining in the era that we live in, there not being some sort of open beta happening at some point, but nothing's committed to yet. That'll probably be more under wraps, there won't be a lot publicly being talked about.Īnd then it's very likely we will move into a closed beta that will be more in the public eye at that point. Then we'll probably move into some sort of alpha internally for a while. We've already been having internal milestones, those have been extended play tests that have involved people outside of just our team playing the game. I think this is the exact opposite strategy, for whatever it's worth – announce it super-early. Jeff Kaplan: No, I think at this point, we're not going to be able to pull an Apex Legends on the world and just announce its release. IGN: I'm sure this comes without a timescale as well, but is there a plan – as with the original Overwatch – to have an open or closed beta phase before we get to the eventual Overwatch 2? Or is this more of an 'it's going to be ready when it's ready' situation? So that's what we're really focused on: delivering on the expectations of what a sequel are. Making sure the game is right is the most important thing to us at this time. And one of those values is, 'Commit to Quality'. But we used to have a statue with the Orc and the company values around it. Jeff Kaplan: Well, I haven't been there in a year, I don't even know if it's still there. Have you been out to the Blizzard campus? And the number one thing that we care about is the quality of the game. Not always – there have been cases where we've announced a date and then had to push it – but generally we don't want people getting too excited about a date unless we feel really confident. I think in general, that's how we usually operate at Blizzard. Obviously we didn't get a release date in the presentation – is the idea with Overwatch 2 at the moment that it's a 'ready when it's done' situation? You talk a lot about unfinished experiments – because of those, is there just no point in putting a timescale on it? IGN: I'm going to start with the very obvious question that I feel we should just get out of the way. Not even deliberate, just stuff we overlooked and, well, we probably revealed something by mistake because there's a lot of content in there. We're really hoping the players just see a lot of stuff – and I think there's a lot of Easter egg stuff in there too.

IGN: I really enjoyed the presentation – there's a lot more new detail about the game in there than I went in expecting.

Will overwatch 2 be