Overwatch 2's PvE story missions have been canned, despite being featured so prominently in the game's reveal back in 2019. Now, it turns out that they were in development even longer than many of us had thought, with Overwatch director Aaron Keller revealing that the team had been working on PvE since 2016.
Amazingly, this wasn't the only scrapped Overwatch project that was keeping Blizzard busy. In a blog post explaining the recent cancellations, Keller also shared that there were plans for an Overwatch MMO, also on the cards since the first game's launch in 2016. Keller says that these plans were scrapped because the project "just wasn't working", significantly reducing the scope of Overwatch 2.
In the blog post, Keller alludes to Project Titan, the cancelled game that Overwatch was born from. Featuring many of the same characters, Titan was an FPS MMO, before Overwatch was rejigged to be PvP.
"We had a crawl, walk, run plan," says Keller. "Overwatch was the crawl, a dedicated version of PvE was the walk, and an MMO was the run. It was built into the DNA of the team early on."
"When we launched Overwatch in 2016, we quickly started talking about what that next iteration could be," he continues. "Looking back at that moment, it's now obvious that we weren’t as focused as we should have been on a game that was a runaway hit. Instead, we stayed focused on a plan that was years old. Work began on the PvE portion of the game and we steadily continued shifting more and more of the team to work on those features."
As outlined in the Overwatch 2 reveal trailer, PvE would be split into two modes: hero missions and story missions. Story missions are here to stay, and will feature co-op gameplay and new cinematics. Hero missions, however, were the big pull, allowing players to customise heroes and earn new abilities. Keller doesn't go into too much detail on why this needed to be cut, other than saying that the team wasn't able to make the new mode a "polished, cohesive experience."
"We had announced something audacious," Keller says. "Our players had high expectations for it, but we no longer felt like we could deliver it."
This blog post doesn't give us the clear explanation that many of us were hoping for, and if anything, the news that PvE had actually been in development since 2016 only gives us more questions than answers.
One comment, however, does shed a little light on the situation. In the post, Keller says that he couldn't "[pull] people away from the live game" to get PvE to work, adding some validity to claims that Blizzard is having to downsize due to a staffing shortage. Just last month, Blizzard devs claimed that they had put together a "crisis map" of projects that they can release with their current workforce. From alleged poor leadership to the end of working from home, it's possible that Blizzard to struggling to retain the staff it needs to make projects like Overwatch hero missions a reality.