I’m excited by the Story Missions in Overwatch 2 and encouraged by what I played at BlizzCon 2019. Finally Blizzard can push the Overwatch story forward and not just flesh out backstory – and it can do it in the actual game. What’s more, there will finally be a meaningful, non-temporary, non-competitive side to the game. We’ve had a sniff of what Blizzard can with the Archives PvE events, but Overwatch 2 takes PvE to the next level.
There are two aspects to it: Story Missions and Hero Missions. Hero Missions were not playable at BlizzCon but were described as being endlessly replayable like Adventure Mode in Diablo 3. In Hero Missions, you can choose from the full character roster and level your heroes up, and when you reach levels 1, 10 and 20, you can choose a talent.
Tracer’s talents, for example, are:
Level one: Adaptive Reload – Pulse Pistols reload when using any ability, orLevel one: Chain reaction – Pulse Bomb causes secondary explosions on enemies that are damagedLevel 10: Flash – Blinking through enemies damages them, orLevel 10: Hindsight – Recall causes damage to all recently damaged enemiesLevel 20: Vortex – enemies are pulled towards the point of Recall and snared, orLevel 20: Speed kills – killing blows speed up your cooldowns
Other character’s talents include Reihardt’s Epicenter, which makes Earthshatter travel in all directions; Sojiro’s Guidance, which makes Hanzo like Yondu in Guardians of the Galaxy, and fire an arrow which hits anyone detected by Sonic Arrow; and Snowball Effect, which makes Mei a boulder of ice after using Cryo-freeze, able to tumble into enemies and knock them down.