Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard has canceled Overwatch 2’s PvE component, Hero Mode
Blizzard has some rough news for fans of Overwatch 2 who were waiting for the cooperative story mode promised during the reveal of the game.
Overwatch 2 is losing its previously upcoming Hero Mode. Goodbye to PvE, see you never, arrivederci, sayonara. This was announced by Blizzard Entertainment during a Twitch stream in which they shared the content roadmap for the title, in which they admit that the development wasn’t progressing as expected. Faced with this situation, the studio preferred to change its plans and cancel this expected feature of the game, which was revealed with the announcement of the game as the focal point of the sequel.
“Development on the PvE experience has not really hasn’t made the progress that we have hoped,” said producer Jared Neuss. “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,” he continued. “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.”
Why was Overwatch 2′s Hero Mode canceled?
The producer continued with the bad news: “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?”
According to Neuss, with what they have learned to date, it is clear to them that they are not capable of offering the PvE mode that they announced back in 2019. That means they won’t release the “dedicated hero mode with talent trees, that long-term talent power progression” as it is no longer in their plans. “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.”
Director Aaron Keller added that from now on they will integrate cooperative experiences as part of the roadmap so that players can enjoy them in a more consistent way than they had originally anticipated. Story missions will arrive during Season 6, which is expected in August.
Overwatch 2 is free-to-play on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Nintendo Switch and PC.