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Overwatch 2 story missions have “battle royale” style loot

Blizzard breaks down what to expect from those story missions

Overwatch 2 puts a big-time focus on story-driven PvE content this time around, and after today’s announcement at the BlizzCon opening ceremony we got some more details on what to expect during an Overwatch-specfic panel later in the day. As the announce cinematic suggested, there’s an attack on Paris, but the action goes much further to depict an all-out assault on the entire world.

Each story mission has a cinematic intro and outro, and BlizzCon attendees are getting to play a stage set on Rio de Janeiro. Missions will come with a pre-selected array of heroes to choose from – here, it’s Lucio, Tracer, Mei, and Reinhardt. The team is still working out whether you’ll get additional hero options to choose from – these kind of decisions are why the Overwatch 2 release date is so far off – but those potential choices would likely still limit you to specific roles.

Story missions have loot, but director Jeff Kaplan says you shouldn’t expect anything like the loot in Blizzard titles such as Diablo or WoW. Instead, it’s a system more like “battle royale,” where you’ll find items on the map that’ll stick with you until the conclusion of the match.

There’s a deployable healing station, a corrosive grenade that makes enemies take 60% more damage, and a barrier fence that can soak up to 2000HP worth of damage. Each item has an associated cooldown – 90 seconds in many of these examples – but can be reused.

While these main story missions give you a pretty tight narrative, the devs plan to back them up with hero missions built for repeat play in a variety of locations against a variety of NPC enemies.

Check out our full BlizzCon 2019 news roundup for more on everything you might’ve missed from the big show today.