Overwatch 2's story missions might not continue until next year, according to the game's producer

rockpapershotgun.com:

Despite scrapping the game’s major Hero Mode, Blizzard still want to tell us a few stories through Overwatch 2, starting with the first batch of story missions on August 10th. Unfortunately, we won’t be getting any more PvE missions for the next few seasons, according to the game’s producer, cutting short any potential momentum from the upcoming season’s tale.

Overwatch 2’s producer Jared Neuss recently joined a livestream on Twitch (good spot, Gamesradar) to talk about the game’s future PvE missions. “Don’t expect the next round [of PvE missions] in the next season and the season after that, or anything like that,” Neuss says. That’s probably to keep fan expectations in check, so the community doesn’t expect new story stuff every single season. Since seasons are around three months long, though, that probably means we won’t see any other developments until next year at the earliest.

Neuss explains that the extended break is the team “trying to find that balance between getting [PvE] in front of players quickly because we love story stuff, and giving ourselves enough time to make changes.” Neuss also says the team wants to fill the gaps between story missions with other narrative things: “We’re trying to make it so that it doesn’t feel like… there’s nothing for a long period of time.” The team wants a feeling of “there’s this cool thing, and there’s this other narrative thing,” and so on. That could explain the animated Overwatch mini-series so we'll probably see more off-shoot stories outside of the main game.

Overwatch 2’s upcoming story missions will launch with Season Five on August 10th. They’ll be confusingly paywalled separately from the Battle Pass and premium editions of the game, however.