Something is not right at Blizzard. If we didn’t know it before, with examples like accusations of useless corporate culture, how they managed their game series in recent years and so on – we definitely know it now. One of the original reasons why Overwatch was forced to upgrade to Overwatch 2, according to Blizzard themselves, has been scrapped.
It is about the ambitious, previously announced PvE mode in co-op, with missions that were designed to be played over and over again, new skills, skill trees and character development that would be saved from game round to game round. All of this is now scrapped, and instead we will only get story missions starting with season six – which will be released sometime this summer. These missions should also be playable in co-op, but are more reminiscent of traditional Overwatch 2 without the mentioned finesse and the large scope of the discontinued game mode.
The reasons for the decision are stated to be that the developers would rather invest in pumping out content for “the live game” and that the PvE mode simply did not get anywhere in the development. Read executive producer Jared Neuss’ statement from the Twitch stream below, or check out the video.
Development on the PvE experience really hasn’t made the progress that we would have hoped. 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. But unfortunately, the effort required to pull all of that together to 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. And so, we’re left with another difficult choice: Do we continue to pour all that effort into PvE, hoping that we can land it at some point in the future or do we stick with this set of values that we’ve aligned on and focus on the live game and focus on serving all of you? With everything we’ve 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. What that means is that we won’t be delivering that dedicated Hero Mode with talent trees, that long-term power progression. Those things just aren’t in our plans anymore.
Has Overwatch 2 lived up to your expectations?
