Overwatch 2 Director Apologizes for Canceling PvE Hero Mode, Makes Big Promises for Story Missions

ign.com:

In what he described as an "emotional week", director Aaron Keller opened up about the decision to cancel Overwatch 2's planned PvE Hero mode, saying that the team "struggled to find its footing" amid what he called high expectations for the mode.

"Things rarely go as planned in game development. We struggled to find our footing with the Hero Mission experience early on. Scope grew," Keller wrote in a new blog post. "We were trying to do too many things at once and we lost focus. The team built some really great things, including hero talents, new enemy units and early versions of missions, but we were never able to bring together all of the elements needed to ship a polished, cohesive experience."

According to Keller, the PvE Hero mode was an "exciting but gargantuan vision" that kept pulling resources away from the live game. Finally, Keller says, the development team realized it had to walk away.

"This has been hard for us, but as the director on this project, I have to do my best to make decisions that put the game and the community first, even when those decisions are disappointing. In this case, I had trouble pivoting away from a vision that just wasn’t working. And for that I would like to apologize to our players and to our team. I'm sorry," Keller wrote.

The decision to cancel Overwatch 2's Hero mode shocked its community when it was announced earlier this week, leaving some to wonder why Blizzard had opted to make a sequel in the first place. Overwatch 2 has gone through many iterations since its original announcement, finally settling on a refined version of the first game featuring expanded co-op and narrative missions.

Reflecting on Overwatch 2's journey to this point, Keller called Hero mode an attempt to make