Blizzard is canceling its original plans for Overwatch 2 PvE, first shown at 2019’s BlizzCon, though parts of that vision are still alive. Aaron Keller, the multiplayer game’s director, explained the reasons why Overwatch 2 PvE to GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain in a recent interview and said that the team needs to focus on the live-service components instead.
While scrapped projects usually result in lost jobs, executive producer Jared Neuss said this time, the PvE team was just integrated into the PvP team.
“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. “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.”
Keller said the team started shifting resources to Overwatch 2’s PvP experience about a year before its October 2022 launch and created a new “value” for developing Overwatch: to always be “putting out fresh, exciting, fun, new experiences” – hence the regular introduction of new maps and heroes.
Keller and Neuss said that, while PvE was originally the main reason Overwatch 2 existed, they hope fans will gradually get used to the idea of Overwatch 2 as a robust, regularly updated multiplayer game instead. Both pointed to plans for the near future, including another new support hero, a new map, modes, and PvE events, along with story missions.
These story missionsare carryovers from the original PvE vision that will reportedly dive into the game’s lore, but they won’t feature the expanded hero talents and other promises from the scrapped game.
Keller and Neuss said that the expansiveness of the vision was part of its downfall. The team was working on something completely new to them, and it changed and grew to the point where it became unmanageable. Why it changed so often, and whether it stemmed from the same management problems Diablo 4 devs said plagued their game and eventually contributed to their union vote, Keller and Neuss naturally didn’t say.
The work on PvE isn’t entirely for naught, though. Keller and Neuss said it maps, mission structures, and other elements can and will be repurposed for PvP events. We apparently got a taste of that with 2022’s Junkerstein event, with more on the way.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
