Overwatch 2 devs: we were "blind" to what players wanted in sequel

gamedeveloper.com:

The saga of Overwatch 2 has been one of the stranger ones in Blizzard's history. If you run the game all the way back to its origins, you'll remember that it rose from the ashes of a cancelled MMORPG codenamed "Titan," became the 2016 hero shooter Overwatch that wetted Activision's appetite for an esports franchise, and morphed into a free-to-play live service game that was initially pitched as a standalone sequel.

But that journey to becoming a live service shooter has been a bumpy one. And judging by new comments from Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller, Blizzard doomed itself to production peril when it first planned the sequel. One major contributing factor? The company didn't have a clear idea of what its players wanted from the series.

Keller explained this problem during a recent Overwatch 2 "summit" dedicated to the upcoming launch of the game's cooperative PvE story missions. He'd been discussing the recently-shared news that during the bulk of Overwatch and Overwatch 2's production, the team behind it operated under the mindset that the game could evolve into the MMORPG it had been salvaged from. "I think one of the things that [design approach] did was that—it was a little blind to who our players were and who our fans were at the time," he said. "The players of Overwatch at the time and the players of Overwatch right now are people who like playing a hero-based, team-based competitive shooter."

What Keller was describing was not a mere philosophical exercise—since Overwatch 2's launch, Blizzard's shifting priorities led to the cancellation of a single-player "Hero Mode" that was a core feature announced for the sequel when the game was unveiled at BlizzCon 2019. Blizzard had already undone many of the key