Overwatch 2 will in fact not include the promised PvE Hero Mode showcased when the game was first announced in 2019, as Blizzard has decided to stop development on the Hero Mode, and will not be releasing it.
When speaking to the Hero mode, executive producer Jared Neuss said the mode, dedicated talent trees for characters, “just aren’t in our plans anymore.”
In a video update from the PlayOverwatch YouTube channel, Neuss and game director Aaron Keller spoke about this update, citing that the decision to not release the previously announced hero mode came after the team saw “no end in sight” to when its development would finish.
Instead, the team will be focusing its efforts entirely on keeping the live game up and running, with new content at the quality level players expect.
What will happen instead, is that Blizzard will release smaller co-op PvE experiences as story missions, along with its regular updates to the live game.
According to Keller in an interview with GameSpot, the decision to move away from the Hero mode PvE as was originally intended came “a year and a half ago,”
Keller and Neuss both spoke to the decision coming not just because the team wanted to focus more on the live aspect of Overwatch 2, but how as development continued, it became more and more clear that delivering the Hero mode as originally intended was a far greater challenge than anticipated.
“So I guess, my take is just as the team learned more about what it took to make this, as it learned more about the time, the iteration and the technology required, it just became clear that the schedule wasn’t going to work.” said Neuss.
Keller for his part added “Yeah I think the scope of the Hero missions was really, really large, and what it was going to take to finish it was going to be a pretty remarkable, massive lift…Even just a small piece of it, the talent trees: 40 to 50 talents per Hero, over the 35 plus Heroes.
You’re looking at thousands of talents to make everything just to get the game out the door, plus all of the content and the missions you’d be playing to do that, and it is a pretty gargantuan ask for the team. And then on top of that, you need to run that as a live game, so content has to continually come out for that side of the game.”
Overwatch players who’ve been long awaiting the coming PvE Hero mode will be disappointed to see the team go in this direction, and now only time and the execution of the coming updates listed in an announced roadmap today will tell if it was the right decision for the game, its longevity and its community.
“Really, the decision that we’ve made was not to walk away from PvE,” said Neuss, “or to totally sort of abandon this side of the game. It’s to move into a model that we know we can deliver on.”