After announcing the release date for Overwatch 2: Invasion over the weekend, Blizzard has no confirmed you'll have to pay for the new PvE content.
At this point it seems that Blizzard can't decide what it wants to do with Overwatch. It seems kind of baffling how they've handled what is basically a live service cash cow.
OW2 came with some genuinely good gameplay changes (depending on who you ask. The topic of 5v5 is contentious at best.) that made the game feel legitimately fresh. Could it have been a "2.0" patch/expansion instead of being presented as a sequel? Probably. But skins are optional as always because the real meat of the game was the gameplay since the start.
Feels worth noting that the PvE was always planned on being a paid module, but now they're making us pay per mission instead of just buying a full campaign which is absolutely ridiculous.
I think Blizz is still doing PvE in a similar vein as OW1's PvE events but utilizing some of what they worked on, but there won't be a full-fledged story mode for PvE anymore.
PvE wasn't canceled, what was cancelled was unique talent trees for each hero and whatever "hero missions" was. What we're getting is (what appears to be) episodic story content with scripted events and cinematics.
The only reason I would go back and play overwatch 1 every once in a while was for the free pve events. I'd then get sucked into pvp again for a bit, spend some money without thinking, and then leave again. If they start charging for pve events I won't be tempted back into that loop.
The idea of charging for PvE missions sounds bad on the surface (especially given the attitude surrounding Overwatch 2 at the moment) but honestly I think this sounds totally fine. I mean it's basically like a paid expansion, which is a rare thing nowadays in the age of live service games. Personally I like the idea of paying a finite amount of money for a finite amount of content. The only question is whether these three missions are actually fun and replayable enough to be worth $15.
Sure, charging a reasonable price for additional content is fine. This has been happening for decades as expansions.
This feels particularly odd because Overwatch previously had events (Summer, Halloween, etc) where they released PvE content for free and the community loved it. I played a fair bit of Junkenstein and Lucio ball, it was exciting when it happened for a limited time.
I hope the missions have enough content to warrant the $15 USD price. OW2 disappointed me and it feels like every news article continues that trend.