Are we ever going to see Rtribution and othr Archives missions ever again? Me and my friends loved playing those and unfortunately we couldn’t complete them on all difficulties last time.
I’ve been wondring this cause other events have made it back to circulation, except archives missions. Would love to play those again.
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I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Archives It should return for several reasons:
- they are key events narrated everywhere in Overwatch lore;
- they are very balanced modes in terms of AI, even if designed as limited-time events;
- they have great popularity in the veteran community, as much as the assault maps;
the problem is purely management: OW2, although it is doing its job quite well in PVP (in terms of how a constantly updated live service game should behave)… is still very clumsy in managing accessory features. with the exception of the annual themed events (Halloween, winter, summer games etc.) it has many special events that do not have any type of temporal collocation: Starwatch? Battle of the Beasts? The mission of Underworld (season 6)? And that’s not all: it very easily ignores the actual annuality of some “holidays” that are part of the game’s identity: archives no longer returns annually to April, but neither does the anniversary (now moved to October ignoring the “true” OW’s birthday), the Loverwatch website was not reactivated for Valentine’s Day, and not even the Pachi-Marci (event dedicated to pachimari in March) was reactivated, and indeed totally ignored as an internal holiday in the game.
it should be noted that archives has some very significant problems to solve in order to be re-proposed:
- the comparison with the PVE, a project that they want to leave silent for an indefinite time. but that the interviews with the ex-developers do not leave too many doubts about the abandonment of the project. Reviewing Archives would easily address the controversy over the playable narrative, even if they are two different management systems (archives is for a limited time, but has an unlimited time to be abandoned);
- The PVE codex and some small details of the “Declassified book” have slightly rewritten some small dates of the events: consequently they have to rewrite some things that have been said in the past such as the classification of the dates or some internal dialogues (such as the many voicelines “jesse mccree” in retribution;
- the biggest fear is if they completely demolished the AI of the original Bastion and OR-14, which if you remember correctly were the 1.0 versions of our Bastion and Orisa: it would be extremely inconsistent to see them updated like the heroes of OW2. Furthermore, Havana will also soon be reworked in PVP: how will the archives version be managed?;
- I will never forget it: Storm Rising is the WEAKEST lore of the event archives: map completely recycled from the PVP version, talon units recycled from retribution, exaggerated simplification of the hero skins (they were in fact the standard OW1 skins) and a very narrative incomplete. It certainly had to be part of the hype surrounding the announcement of ow2 / sojourn reveal in that same year (2019), but in reality storm rising was a narrative that has aged badly and its only merit was that of the initial and final cinematics in the game;
Personally I don’t blame the developers for underestimating the replayability of PVE, but I confirm that the postponement and silence of Archives is very embarrassing. this season of mirrorwatch, for example, would have worked better with the presence of archives to make known the true lore of an Overwatch as a task force, something that many new OW2 players still don’t know. the result is that this mirrorwatch risks seeming like a G.I.Joe theme if you don’t know the lore that is in the game.
I don’t rule out that archives will return… but it’s part of the uncertainty of many, too many game modes that have no real certainty about their return. 
2 Likes
I would love to see archives return, but right before ow2 launched, the devs stated that the “re mix” weeks were the last chance to play the archives modes.
It would be a shame if they never come back. At least uprising and retribution are big parts of the over arching story of ow, and would put things into persoective for people who are brand new to overwatch.