Overwatch 2 is abandoning one of its reasons for existing
Blizzard recently hosted a live stream for Overwatch 2, showing off the roadmap for the game, including insights into Seasons 5, 6 and 7, but there was one massive piece of news delivered from it, the planned PvE Hero mode is being dropped.
The news came from the games producer and director, here is what executive producer Jared Neuss had to say on the subject.
Development on the PvE experience really hasn’t made the progress that we would have hoped, the team has created a bunch of amazing content, so 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 when we can put that out into the world.
And so, we’re left with another difficult choice. Do we continue to pour all of that effort into PvE, hoping that we can land it at some point in the future, or do we stick with this set of values we’ve 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 the original vision for PvE that was shown in 2019.
What that means is we won’t be delivering that dedicated hero mode with talent trees, that long-term power progression. Those things just aren’t in our plans anymore.
We know that this is going to be disappointing to many of you which why we wanted to bring it up before we talk about the roadmap, and to be perfectly honest it’s been really difficult for many off us and a lot of folks on the team who poured their heart and soul into that stuff.
The games director Aaron Keller added more on to that.
Going forward though, rather than doing a big PvE releasing, and rather than pouring all of our effort sinto these singular releases, we’re planning to make co-op gameplay and co-op experiences just part of out live roadmap, so we want you to be able to experience it more often and with more variety than we had originally announced.
Now the game will still offer story missions, which according to the roadmap will come in Season 6, which is expected to launch in August, but many players of the original Overwatch were excited for the Hero missions, which would have given the characters more time to shine.
What makes this especially insulting to many players, is that they went for quite a while without new content in the original game, with the promise that Overwatch 2 would give them more. The pivot to free-to-play didn’t work for many, then there were the base game changes and now the removal of a core promise, it isn’t a great run for the team.
Of course, Overwatch 2 is not complete yet, as the game is still technically in its beta release, so features can be added or removed fairly easily. Given their instance on seasons for a game that is not complete, I suspect the beta tag is just there as a means to avoid having to do lot checks for each update, but I am not a developer.
Either way, the roadmap is below, should you wish to see it.
If you want to watch the entire 40ish minute long presentation, you can do that below.
