In a move that shocked many Blizzard fans, Overwatch game director Aaron Keller and executive producer Jared Neuss stated in an interview with Gamespot that Hero Mode, the much anticipated “single player” content for Overwatch 2 (and what many gamers saw as the justification for the sequel) has been canceled. Instead, the team will focus on more PVE mini-events as we saw during the lifetime of Overwatch 1.
Hero Mode aimed to transform the successful short-run PVE events from the original Overwatch into a comprehensive cooperative campaign. By upgrading heroes through gameplay and introducing talent trees, players could enhance or alter their skills to create potent builds for PVE. This generated significant excitement, aligning with Blizzard’s objective. Building upon beloved PVE events provided an entry point for players who were less interested in the competitive and demanding PVP aspect, thus appealing to a wider audience. But alas, they seemed to not be happy with leaving the current player base out in the cold.
“In the years following our announcement at BlizzCon 2019, we had a really large portion of our team working on the PvE side of that game, and I think players of our live running game could feel that because we eventually stopped making content for it,” Keller said in the Gamespot interviews. “It’s been maybe two and a half years since the last hero that we launched, and we don’t want to be back at the point where it’s another three and a half years since launching a PvP map. So we really looked hard at what we were doing with the live game in service of this much bigger thing that we were working on and hoping to release later.”
You can see the revised roadmap below…
I would love to know your thoughts on Overwatch 2. Are you happy with the pivot to improve the game? Or were you holding out for something much larger to justify the move to Overwatch 2?
