Overwatch 2 director apologizes for game’s big cancellation, explains what happened

polygon.com:

Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller and executive producer Jared Neuss announced Tuesday in a Twitch stream that a cornerstone of the game’s promised story mode, Hero Missions, had been canceled. The game’s fanbase hasn’t taken too kindly to the news, which is why on Friday, Keller took to the Overwatch Blog to offer a more in-depth explanation behind the decision.

In 2019, the Overwatch 2 team announced upcoming PvE content in the form of Story Missions and Hero Missions (or “Hero Mode”). Keller reiterated Friday that while development on the latter mode has stopped, the former is still set to come to Overwatch 2 later this year. “The work done here is amazing, leaps and bounds above what we’ve built for PvE previously in our game, and I can’t wait for our players to get their hands on them,” Keller said. “We’ll be sharing more details there in the coming weeks.”

Concerning the cancellation of Overwatch 2’s Hero Missions, which would have allowed players to upgrade individual heroes through talent trees in what was supposed to be a deeply replayable PvE version of the game, Keller goes into the history of Overwatch as a game born out of the cancellation of an MMO Blizzard was developing, codenamed Project Titan. The plan, Keller says, was to keep building on Overwatch to make it something bigger — not quite Titan-sized, but fully featured.

“When we launched Overwatch in 2016, we quickly started talking about what that next iteration could be,” Keller said. “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