Overwatch 2 PvE Hero Mode Canceled: ‘Difficult Pick’

Blizzard has officially canceled Overwatch 2’s long-awaited PvE Hero mode, but the game’s creative leaders assure fans that PvE remains a focus of the game moving forward.

on twitch stream Executive Producer Jared News detailed Overwatch 2’s content roadmap, the decision to cut PvE content.

“The development of the PvE experience has not made the progress we had hoped,” said Noyce. The team has created a bunch of amazing content so there are really cool and exciting missions. There are all-new enemies that are super fun to fight and some really cool and funny hero talents. But unfortunately the effort required to bring it all together into a Blizzard-quality experience that we can ship to you is huge, And there’s really no end in sight or a specific kind of end date where we can put that in the world.

And so we are left with another difficult choice. Do we continue to put all this effort into PvE, hoping that we can achieve it at some point in the future or do we stick to this set of values ​​that we have set and focus on the live game and focus on serving you all? On what it takes to run this game at the level it deserves, we obviously can’t achieve that original vision for PvE that was laid out in 2019. What that means is that we’re not going to introduce this custom hero mode using talent trees, this long-term evolution of talent power. “Those things are not in our plans anymore. And we know this is going to be disappointing to a lot of you and that’s why we wanted to bring it up before we talk about the road map. And to be completely honest, it’s been really tough for a lot of us and a lot of people on the team who are giving their heart and soul in these things.”

Another big change in Overwatch 2

Overwatch 2’s PvE mode was supposed to be a huge differentiator between the original game and its sequel. In 2019 we got our hands on PvE, which was to feature new hero abilities, co-op attacks, and a level progression system. But when Overwatch 2 launched, the long-awaited PvE mode wasn’t even a part of it. Instead, Blizzard has promised that Overwatch 2’s PvE will be coming sometime in 2023 as seasonal content.

Although the original vision for the PvE mode has been cut, there is still plenty of content in Overwatch 2’s pipeline. TwitterOverwatch account shared an image detailing plans for Overwatch 2 Season 5, Season 6, Season 7 and beyond. Story missions have been confirmed to be coming to Overwatch 2 in Season 6, along with a new support hero. So while an ambitious PvE mode isn’t part of Overwatch’s future, perhaps story missions will help fill that void for players.

# monitoring 2: look ahead ✨

Join us as we share more details on everything we have planned for 2023, including new events, PvE, new heroes, new maps, and more.

👀 https://t.co/FEyTC2p7eL pic.twitter.com/lGd1uABbfN

– Overwatch (PlayOverwatch) May 16, 2023

In an interview with GameSpotOverwatch 2 director Aaron Keller explained some of the PvE additions coming to Overwatch 2 in lieu of the ambitious Hero mode.

“We’ve got a lot of releases this year, and even if you look at Season 6, it’s the biggest season we’ve launched in Overwatch history,” Keller said. We’re running a PvE event that season. We’ve got a whole new kind of PvE content that we’re unlocking with single-player hero mastery missions… so I hope players see that we’re still sticking to PvE and working with the story more than we’ve done before. We’re doing it differently than we originally talked about.”

Neuss expanded on that, saying that Blizzard isn’t completely moving away from Overwatch 2 PvE.

“We know if we get into the seasonal cadence, we can trigger things through the seasons in a way that we can plan effectively and that we think will be really exciting for the players,” Noyce said. That, by and large, gives us time to adapt the next thing for players before we release it, and I think moving away from this idea of ​​this big single PvE release moment to, ‘No, we’re going to be doing PvE stuff all the time. Different flavors of that, and we’ve got a bunch of other releases coming up and seasons after that.”

We called Overwatch 2 great in our review, saying that the sequel, “brings new life to what was once the mightiest multiplayer shooter, before its edges were badly frayed by Blizzard’s attention shifting too far.”

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over seven years of experience in the gaming industry with minor lines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.