It might be possible to play Overwatch 2's story missions offline with AI teammates instead of with others. Until this past week, there had been no news about the Overwatch sequel since its announcement at Blizzcon 2019. The development team said that it would be going dark and that it would be a while until the team was ready to share more information. That silence was finally broken at Blizzcon 2021, where a ton of Overwatch 2 news was announced during a behind-the-scenes deep dive with developers on the Overwatch team. That presentation, which ran for almost 40 minutes, offered details about new enemy AI, two new maps (Los Angeles and Rome), updated character designs, and the development software that the Overwatch team is using.
The first Overwatch game hasn’t seen many updates since the sequel was announced because Blizzard shifted almost all of its developers on the Overwatch team to the sequel. The biggest update Overwatch has seen since Blizzcon 2019 was the addition of Echo; the 32nd and final hero to be added before Overwatch 2's release. Other updates have been smaller including Kanezaka, a new free-for-all map, workshop tweaks, and the changes to the role queue with a flex option that reward players with priority passes to jump to the front of the role with the longest wait time.
In an interview with IGN, the director of the Overwatch team, Jeff Kaplan, said that the team has been working on friendly AI companions so that story missions can be played in single-player offline. The feature is still being tested, so its inclusion in Overwatch 2 is still in question. The team’s biggest priority surrounding friendly AI is to have bots take over the role of players who leaves the match. Kaplan said that the story is meant to be an online cooperative experience first and foremost, but the team wants to give people the option to play alone if possible.
"Perhaps we just let you play [with AI], but that's not officially decided yet, and there are a lot of technical hurdles for us to get over. So we're working on the friendly AI, I don't know if it will get to a point where it's good enough that we think you would have a great experience playing just by yourself but we're definitely open to it, and that's something we're going to push on throughout the development of the game." – Jeff Kaplan, director of the Overwatch team.
From the beginning, Overwatch has been an online multiplayer game focused on teamwork. The original game was criticized at launch for its lack of single-player modes and for the fact that a story mode wasn’t included. The lack of a story mode in Overwatch seemed odd for a game that relies so much on the distinct personalities and designs of its hero characters. Most of the story content in Overwatch has been relayed in Pixar-quality short films, comics, short stories, and in-game conversations between heroes.
Overwatch 2’s story mode is one of the most anticipated parts of the game. It is also the primary distinction that will separate it from its predecessor as both games will be connected online multiplayer modes and new heroes and maps will be coming to both games. The inclusion of an offline single-player experience could bring in a wider audience who were interested in the characters and the world of Overwatch but prefer single-player games. This isn’t a feature to count on for the final game, though; Kaplan emphasized how hard AI allies would be to implement on this scale. But it would be a welcome inclusion and a good way to distinguish Overwatch 2 as a sequel instead of just an expansion.
Source: IGN
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