The Overwatch 2 PvE Hero Mode has been canceled by Blizzard.
The announcement came during a dev chat Twitch stream on Tuesday afternoon. It came towards the end of the stream when executive producer Jared Neuss joined to talk about the decision and plans moving forward.
“Development on the PvE experience hasn’t made the progress that we have hoped,” he said. “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 where we can put that out into the world.”
He continued: “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 this set of values that we have aligned on and focus on the live game and focus on serving all of you? With everything we have 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 talent power progression. Those things are just not in 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.”
The PvE Hero Mode was one of the most touted additions to Overwatch 2 when it was first announced. In fact, it was the feature to many that would justify the move from Overwatch to Overwatch 2. Since then, however, there has been silence about when it would come and what it would feature. Now, fans know why.
In an interview with GameSpot that dropped around the same time as the announcement, it was mentioned that PvE elements will be a part of the game still.
“We are running a PvE event that season,” Neuss said when talking about the upcoming Season 6. “We have a whole new type of PvE content that we’re releasing with our single-player Hero mastery missions… So I hope that players can see that we are still committed to PvE and we are doing more with the story than we’ve ever done before. We’re just doing it in a different way than what we originally talked about.”
What do you make of the Overwatch 2 PvE Hero Mode being canceled by Blizzard?
For more Insider Gaming, check out what Ubisoft is planning to do to boost the development on Assassin’s Creed.
H/T to Logan Plant at IGN for the Twitch stream transcription.
When OW1 players were forced to ‘upgrade’ to OW2, the upgrade we bought included access to the PvE content when it arrived. NOw we’re told that not only is it not going to arrive in the way we were promised, but that it will only be available to Battle Pass purchasers. That sounds like a class-action lawsuit if I ever heard one.