When Overwatch 2 was announced back in 2019, the folks at Blizzard revealed some pretty big features to differentiate the sequel from the original Overwatch. These included the arrival of PvE alongside Story Missions and Hero missions, but those features were missing from the game at launch with Blizzard promising they’d eventually arrive as seasonal content.
Now, those plans have changed with the outright cancellation of the PvE Hero Mode, a decision that Blizzard says was made due to its inability to deliver the mode with the “Blizzard-quality” experience that it expects.
The announcement was made during a livestream with Game Director Aaron Keller and Executive Producer Jared Neuss, who explained the decision in more detail.
“Development on the PvE experience really hasn’t made the progress that we have hoped,” explains Neuss in the video, which you cans see below. “The team has created a bunch of amazing content. There’s awesome missions that are really exciting, there’s brand new enemies that are super fun to fight and some truly great and ridiculous hero talents. But unfortunately, the effort required to pull all of that together into a Blizzard-quality experience that we can ship to you is huge, and there really is no end in sight or defined kind of end date where we can put that out into the world.
“And so we are left with another difficult choice. Do we continue to pour all that effort into PvE, hoping we can land it at some point in the future, or do we stick with the set of values that we have aligned on and focus on the live game and focus on serving all of you? With everything we’ve learned about what it takes to operate this game at the level that you deserve, it’s clear that we can’t deliver on that original vision for PvE that was shown in 2019. What that means is that we won’t be delivering that dedicated Hero Mode with talent trees, that long-term power progression. Those things just aren’t our plans anymore. And we know that this is going to be disappointing to many of you which is why we wanted to bring it up before we talk about the road map. And to be perfectly honest it’s been really difficult for many of us and a lot of folks on the team that pour their heart and soul into that stuff.”
It doesn’t spell the end of the PvE dream in Overwatch 2 entirely though, or at the very least co-op gameplay and experiences. The team explains it’s moved away from doing a big drop of a new gameplay paradigm and is instead focussing on releasing collaborative and story-based events more often and with more variety.
Keller and Neuss walked fans through the upcoming roadmap for Overwatch 2’s Season 5, 6, 7 and beyond, which will include new time limited events, cinematics, new heroes, the introduction of the promised Story Missions and collaborative events and more. You can see it in brief below:
