Overwatch 2 PvE Hasn’t Been Cancelled, But A Major Pivot Is The Right Call

There was a lot of disappointment among the Overwatch 2 community this week with the news that Blizzard has pulled back on its original vision for the PvE side of the game. Hero mode, which was going to have long-term progression and skill trees with customizable abilities, is no longer happening.

That’s a gut punch for those who have been looking forward to that aspect of PvE since Blizzard first showed it off in November 2019. It seems like the decision was a blow for many of the developers on Team 4 too.

Still, hitting the reset button on PvE and moving into a slightly different direction with the co-op and single-player experiences looks like the right call. There are still a bunch of PvE experiences on the way — just in a bit of a different flavor than many of us expected until this week.

In a dev chat, Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller and executive producer Jared Neuss said the ambitious hero mode wasn’t coming together as the team had hoped.

“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,” Neuss said. “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.” There were also concerns that focusing on hero missions was pulling too many resources away from the live game.

Keller expanded on that in an interview with Gamespot:

In reality, what we were looking at was running two separate games at the same time with a set of Heroes as the piece that is shared between two of them. And as we started to get further and further into it — obviously our players could realize that we were pulling focus away from the live game — but it just didn't look like there was a definitive end date in sight where we would finally be able to put that stamp on [it], or that end date was years away and it no longer felt like we could be doing that to our players, or we could be doing that to the live game that we were running. And that's when we took the moment to shift strategy and put everything into the live game.

This makes a lot of sense. As difficult as it may be, you have to know when to pull the plug on something that just isn’t working out. It’s not rare at all for game studios to kill major features and even entire projects that are well into development. Heck, Overwatch itself evolved from the bones of a canceled MMO.

In this case, though, Blizzard has nixed a mode that was announced years ago. That’s likely making the move sting more than if hero mode had never been revealed publicly.

It’s not difficult to understand that building out skill trees for at least 37 different characters, giving them dozens of talents each and making all of those modified abilities work cohesively in co-op missions was going to be a monumental task. All the while, the devs would have had to live up to Blizzard’s expected level of polish.

It apparently takes Team 4 a year to develop each new map and hero. I can’t imagine what it must be like to assemble a progression system for dozens of characters and make all of that function harmoniously with a litany of new enemies and mission types.

Prioritizing the live game instead makes a lot of sense — Overwatch 2 simply cannot find itself in the same place as the original game and have long content droughts. Thankfully, we’re on a regular cadence for content drops these days. Shifting away from hero missions in favor of other PvE experiences and perhaps accelerating development on those looks like the correct call.

External Pressures

Game development is hard enough without external pressures affecting teams. According to reports, there’s been a bit of an exodus from Blizzard lately, partly due to the studio soon requiring non-exempt workers to return to its offices for at least three days a week.

Many of the company’s employees have spoken out against the return to office policy. After all, over the last year, Blizzard shipped Overwatch 2 and World of Warcraft’s Dragonflight expansion, both of which were developed by folks who were working remotely for the most part. The same goes for Diablo IV.

The WoW team seems to have been impacted hard by developer attrition. One producer said last month that they had to create “crisis maps” detailing what they can and can’t ship due to departures.

I don’t know how hard the Overwatch team has been hit by devs leaving. There are several notable names who have moved on in recent months, though as far as I can tell, those departures haven’t been explicitly attributed to the RTO policy. In any case, there are certainly other major studios that have embraced remote work and are perhaps offering a better work-life balance.

I’ve asked Blizzard for comment on this. (If you’re a current or former Blizzard employee and want to chat about the impact of the RTO policy, please contact me by email or securely through Proton Mail.)

All of this is to say that there are broader issues affecting the development pipeline of Blizzard games. I would not be surprised to learn that developer attrition played a factor in the Overwatch 2 PvE changes, not to mention the other ongoing concerns at the studio as a whole.

Reasons For Optimism

On a brighter note for Overwatch 2, there’s going to be a much bigger focus on story and lore in the coming months, which we’ll see play out in cinematics and story missions, as well as in other parts of the game. That’s very exciting. The canonical Overwatch story has needed a major jolt for a long time, and it looks like that’s finally happening.

There’s one other reason I’m not too upset by hero mode being killed off: there are already way too many games with RPG-style progression. I don’t really need that in Overwatch 2 as well.

I played through Horizon Forbidden West without paying much attention to the skill trees. The same goes for Cyberpunk 2077 (save for a few melee perks I wanted). Skill trees are just not a thing I care much about.

It’s okay that hero missions and talent trees aren’t happening. Really. We can still see fun, ridiculous spins on hero loadouts in the Workshop and modes like Battle for Olympus.

Look, it’s fair to say that Blizzard has fumbled the transition into Overwatch 2. Muddy messaging, a rocky launch and now the cancellation of hero mode have been particularly low points for the series in many fans’ eyes.

The PvE misstep is rooted in the distant past, long before the game’s current leadership team was in place. Not to place blame on anyone in particular, but there was a different Overwatch game director and Blizzard president four years ago, when Overwatch 2 and its PvE modes were announced. (It’s worth mentioning that the person at the tippy top of Activision Blizzard who makes the big business decisions and apparently slows down development on certain games is still in power).

In recent months, Overwatch 2 fans have been getting frequent, fairly transparent updates from the developers, which is a great step forward. There’s been an obvious improvement in communication on many fronts.

Now, Keller and Neuss have been pretty frank about the understandable reasons why hero mode has been nixed (it’s definitely worth reading the Gamespot interview in full). It seems to me that the current Overwatch 2 leaders are doing a good job of steering the ship overall.

I’m excited about the Overwatch 2 roadmap and the PvE modes that are coming. Story missions, one of the major PvE additions Blizzard announced all the way back in 2019, are still on the way soon. I can’t wait to try the single-player hero mastery missions. There’s a lot of stuff to look forward to.

I just hope that Team 4 is making the right calls for not only the wellbeing of its devs, but for the long-term future of the game.

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