A couple of days after making the highly scrutinized decision to scale back the PvE projects coming to Overwatch 2, game director Aaron Keller has written a blog post discussing the decision. While he does not offer much of a look into what will be coming in Season 6 specifically, he does give some insight as to what development issues caused this to happen.
Keller starts by talking about the misconception that Overwatch 2 will not have any PvE at all. This is a common point that the community is jumping to that we talked about recently. After some shoddy communication, he is working to tell people that story missions are still coming. This will push the narrative and lore of Overwatch forward and comes included with cinematics and cooperative gameplay as you fight AI opponents. The part that is being taken away is Hero Missions and the Talents tree.
The Hero Missions mode was a secondary game mode that had you taking on enemies in a PvE format on PvP maps while the story mode looks to be on unique environments. Story and Hero Missions were supposed to work together as a complete PvE experience. Moving forward, now there will only be the Story experience. Instead of having the RPG Talent tree system to keep you coming back, you can look at PvE as a Left 4 Dead experience where you keep pushing forward and working with your team to defeat enemies.
When talking about what led to Hero Missions’ cancellation, Keller says that the project’s scope was too large for the team to realize. While there may be some truth to that, we also want to point out that Blizzard is struggling to keep their teams fully staffed. If we had to look between the lines here, we would guess that is mostly where this decision comes from. It’s speculation by us, but we think it doesn’t have the manpower to complete a project like that right now. Of course, this all comes back to the shady and outright wrong management decisions of those at the top of Activision and Blizzard, people like Bobby Kotick and Mike Ybarra.
If you decide to still be upset about Overwatch 2’s PvE announcement this week, we get it. We are right there with you. Overwatch 2 has been mismanaged at many points over the last few years, and it is unfair to the community and the team that builds the game. We just want to stress that this is not a developer issue. It goes way higher than the people that put so much effort into the game, making it as good of an experience as possible.