Blizzard recently announced via a developer update livestream that Overwatch 2’s originally planned co-op PVE hero mode, announced at BlizzCon 2019, has been scrapped, and the team won’t be delivering the dedicated hero mode with talent trees. According to Blizzard, this is because, “the effort required to pull all of that together into a Blizzard-quality experience that we can ship to you is huge and there really is no end in sight.” However, the team also announced that they will instead incorporate co-op gameplay and co-op experiences as story missions into the game as part of the roadmap. These missions will be released in Season 6 of Overwatch 2, which will begin sometime in August.
During the livestream, Overwatch 2 executive producer Jared Neuss said:
“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 into 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 when we can put that out into the world.
And so, we’re left with another difficult choice. Do we continue to pour all of 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 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 the original vision for PvE that was shown in 2019.
What that means is 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.
We know that this is going to be disappointing to many of you which why we wanted to bring it up before we talk about the roadmap, and to be perfectly honest it’s been really difficult for many off us and a lot of folks on the team who poured their heart and soul into that stuff.”
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