Overwatch 2 shifts focus in PvE development amidst major challenges and external pressures
Blizzard’s upcoming game Overwatch 2 has been making headlines recently due to a major shift in its original plan for the Player versus Environment (PvE) side of the game. This has caused disappointment among the Overwatch 2 community. The original plan for the hero mode, which was going to have long-term progression and skill trees with customizable abilities, has been cancelled.
This news has come as a blow to those who have been eagerly waiting for this aspect of PvE since Blizzard first showed it off in November 2019. However, Blizzard’s decision to hit the reset button on PvE and move in a slightly different direction with the co-op and single-player experiences seems to be the right call. There are still a bunch of PvE experiences on the way, just in a different flavor than many of us expected until this week.
In a dev chat, Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller and executive producer Jared Neuss explained that the ambitious hero mode wasn’t coming together as the team had hoped. Neuss said, “With everything we have 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.” Keller added that the team had been running two separate games simultaneously, and it was pulling too many resources away from the live game.
Blizzard’s decision to shift its focus back to the live game makes sense, as it is essential to know when to pull the plug on something that isn’t working out. It’s not uncommon for game studios to kill major features and even entire projects that are well into development. In this case, Blizzard has nixed a mode that was announced years ago, which is likely making the move sting more than if the hero mode had never been revealed publicly. Despite this setback, Overwatch 2 is still expected to be a highly anticipated game, and fans can look forward to a new direction for the PvE experience.
The cancellation of the hero mode in Overwatch 2’s PvE side is not a surprising move, given the monumental task of building out skill trees for at least 37 different characters with dozens of talents each. The developers would have had to make all of those modified abilities work cohesively in co-op missions while living up to Blizzard’s expected level of polish. Developing a progression system for dozens of characters and making all of that function harmoniously with a litany of new enemies and mission types would have been a challenging task, and prioritizing the live game instead makes a lot of sense.
However, game development is hard enough without external pressures affecting teams. According to reports, there has been an exodus from Blizzard lately, partly due to the studio’s policy of requiring non-exempt workers to return to its offices for at least three days a week. Many of the company’s employees have spoken out against the return to office policy, and this may have impacted the WoW team significantly, with one producer saying last month that they had to create “crisis maps” detailing what they can and can’t ship due to departures.
It is unclear how hard the Overwatch team has been hit by developer attrition, but there have been several notable departures in recent months. There are certainly other major studios that have embraced remote work and are perhaps offering a better work-life balance. These broader issues affecting the development pipeline of Blizzard games may have played a factor in the Overwatch 2 PvE changes, not to mention the other ongoing concerns at the studio as a whole. Despite these challenges, fans can still look forward to the new direction for the PvE experience in Overwatch 2.
