With news that Blizzard has scrapped their original plans for an Overwatch 2 PVE mode, let’s take a look at what the future holds for the game.
Yesterday saw the news that Blizzard’s plans for a co-op PvE mode first announced in 2019 has been scrapped. Despite obvious disappointment from its fanbase, the team has still assured that there is a “lot of great PvE content coming this year”.
Overwatch 2’s Original Plans Scrapped
The bombshell was dropped during a livestream on the official PlayOverwatch Youtube channel. This saw Matt ‘Mr X’ Morello talking to game director Aaron Keller and executive producer Jared Neuss.
It was during this that we found out the PvE mode including a narrative-driven player experience will not be going ahead. This includes the original promise of a Hero Mode and a power progression system which was first shown during Overwatch 2 development.
Neuss says, “development on the PvE experience really hasn’t made the progress that we would have hoped”. However, this was not an easy decision for the team.
“With everything we’ve learned about what it takes to operate this game at the level that you deserve, it’s clear that we can’t deliver on the original vision for PvE that was shown in 2019,” he added.
So What Now?
With attention no longer on the proposed PvE mode, Blizzard has turned their sights to a brand new Overwatch 2 Road Map. This will feature co-op gameplay and co-op experiences with the first update arriving with the launch of season six.
“We’re going to be releasing our first major story-based event featuring a new set of missions and it will kick off a brand new story arc for Overwatch,” says Keller.
This is backed up by Neuss on Twitter who says, “we have a lot of great PvE content coming this year. Big story missions, new cinematics, co-op events and single player Hero Mastery missions are all on the way.”
Despite some PvE modes coming up, fans were disappointed by the news. With a big selling point of Overwatch 2 being this cancelled mode, people are wondering why we even needed a sequel to begin with. Not only that, but it seemingly took the team four years to make this decision.
Regardless, Blizzard isn’t short of plans for the future of Overwatch 2. With a Road Map promising new story missions, a support hero and limited time events, it remains to be seen if they can redeem themselves.
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