Following the cancellation of Overwatch 2’s Hero Mode, Blizzard Entertainment shifted towards delivering PvE missions in seasonal updates. However, after last year’s three story missions in Invasion, there’s been no sign of further additions. Sources speaking to Kotaku recently revealed that the original plan was to release three missions “every 18 months.”
While some were fully playable, others were in the concept phase. However, much of the work was reportedly held up due to concerns of “Blizzard Quality.” One source described it as a “justification to essentially p*** about forever and ever redoing the same work over and over.
“Some executive goes, ‘Hm, but is it Blizzard quality?’ It’s always leadership or game directors deciding they need to spend the extra time. So honestly, if they could have made any kind of decisions, the game would have shipped years ago.”
The pursuit of “Blizzard Quality” may have led to constant iterations, but adapting the PvP gameplay for PvE wasn’t easy. Another source revealed, “Overwatch’s PvP gameplay just turned out to be very difficult to adapt for PvE. Mostly because of how differentiated and PvP-oriented the hero kits are.”
While the sentiment on story missions was “never outright negative” internally, it grew “increasingly pessimistic.” Even as concerns piled up, leadership, including current game director Aaron Keller and executive director Jared Neuss, avoided questions from the team.
“You had designers, programmers, artists, QA, all disciplines, on the team constantly making suggestions and ideas to improve or trying to do the best we could. But it was all either shot down by a few gatekeepers or just ‘there was no point, there was no time.’”
“Almost every single team town-hall there were questions about ‘what do we do if it doesn’t succeed? I don’t feel confident that it will perform well. What are we going to do about players being disappointed?’ It was met with either ‘don’t worry about it. It’ll be fine. We have so much confidence in it. Trust us.’”
Hero Mode was reportedly cancelled as late as December 2022, six months before the official announcement. It was also posited internally that the development team would need to double to accommodate PvP and PvE.
“They used to say all the time that we would essentially need two 400-people teams, one for PvP and one for PvE to have the personnel needed. I don’t think that’s true. There were already too many cooks,” said one source.
With Invasion’s story missions allegedly not doing well financially, layoffs for those who worked on PvE and little enthusiasm from higher-ups in Activision and Microsoft, further additions look unlikely. Nevertheless, PvP continues receiving new content, with Keller discussing Season 10 in a new Developer Update today. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.
