With all sorts of new drama rocking Blizzard Entertainment, Overwatch Producer Tracy Kennedy revealed a tidal wave of new information about the state of the game including former Director Jeff Kaplan’s vision of Overwatch 2.
Jeff Kaplan was one of the biggest voices in the gaming community before he left Blizzard in April of 2021. Since then, Aaron Keller has stepped in as Overwatch’s Game Director.
However, shortly after leaving Blizzard, multiple scandals rocked the company with sexual harassment allegations and lawsuits galore.
Now, with Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick under fire and urged to step down by employees and some shareholders, an Overwatch producer revealed what Jeff Kapan’s original vision for the game was.
Jeff Kaplan’s vision for Overwatch 2 revealed
In a series of since privatized tweets, Tracy Kennedy explained that Kaplan had protected employees from “corporate BS” and that’s why the dev team was as good as they were.
In a follow-up tweet, she touched on a comment that Overwatch was meant to be more of a PvE game from the very start with missions such as those found in the Archives event.
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“Kaplan had a vision of an OW game with PvE in it from before the original game launched,” she explained. “He wanted OW2 to be a sequel to get non-PvP players to consider trying the game out for the PvE. He felt very strongly about that.”
It would seem as if Jeff’s original goal was for Overwatch 2 to just be strictly PvE story content, but Activision-Blizzard wanted a full sequel with more of a focus on PvP that went against his concept.
Of course, Overwatch 2 is planned to launch with a full PvE campaign, but constant delays have the game now looking like it will only be released by 2023 thanks to ongoing balance changes needing to be made.
It will be interesting to see how much of Kaplan’s PvE vision is retained with the sequel or if it will end up lacking in those areas.
