Aaron Keller, the director of Overwatch 2, has spoken out on the game’s official blog about the cancellation of these Hero missions, the game’s PvE mode that was promised for years.
Overwatch 2 was going to be the sequel to Overwatch on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox and Nintendo Switch that was being redeemed with PVE, but they eventually got cancelled. Now its director has commented on the reasons for being in charge of the team.
The recent announcement that the studio and the team behind it were canceling Hero Missions didn’t sit well, but director Aaron Keller has posted a new blog discussing it.
It’s clear that the cancellation of Overwatch 2’s PvE mode after it was announced in 2019 is a jug of cold water for a game that was supposed to improve this aspect of what was already an online hero shooter.
Keller talks about the origins of the Overwatch team and how the game was essentially created from the ashes of the once-canceled MMO Project Titan and how the team behind the game considered itself an MMO team.
Keller has described the studio’s plan as “crawl, walk, run”, where Overwatch’s core PvP crawling, dedicated PvE version running, and an eventual MMO release are underway.
Keller said, “It was built into the DNA of the team from the very beginning, and some of us considered that final game to be the true fulfillment of the original vision of Project Titan.”
Neither Genji nor Sombra or the other female OW2 characters saw this coming.
However, Keller has since spoken about how the team faced difficulties in creating the Hero missions because of their wide scope. Even though they created some aspects – like talents and enemy units – they couldn’t bring everything together.
“We had an exciting and monumental vision, and we were steadily pulling resources from the live game in an effort to make it a reality,” Keller continued.
“I can’t help but look at our original ambitions for Overwatch and feel that the tagline we used […] To move forward with a strategy that just wasn’t working.
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Keller explains how the decision had to be made because the game mode didn’t materialize, but he also explains how they announced it. It seemed like the team was still trying to get Overwatch 2’s PvE working while planning seasonal content.
“We couldn’t,” he said. “And we also knew we couldn’t turn people away from that original vision of Games as a service again. So we made the difficult decision to pull it out and start planning for the future.”
With this, the director of Overwatch 2 has explained why they canceled PvE at Blizzard and how the team in charge tried everything to make it a reality alongside PvP.
