Hello all. It’s been an emotional week in the Overwatch universe. A few days ago, we talked about our change to PvE style in Overwatch 2 and released our high tier roadmap for this year. We’re really excited about everything we’re going to be releasing soon, but a lot of the discussion this week has been about how to completely cancel PvE, which isn’t exact, so I want to take the time to discuss some of that with you here.
When we announced Overwatch 2 in 2019, the idea of the game was centered around the PvP game we launched last October, and on the PvE side, Story Missions and Hero Missions.
Story missions Focus on fast-paced cooperative gameplay, as well as story, cinematics, and stories that expand the world of Overwatch. Story missions tell a linear story of the heroes of Overwatch as they come together and battle a new threat from the Null Sector, moving the story of Overwatch forward for the first time since the release of our original game. These missions take place on huge maps with new enemies and new cinematics. We’ll start releasing it in Season 6. The work that’s been 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. We’ll be sharing more details there in the coming weeks.
Hero Quests (or Hero Mode), on the other hand, included an in-development game mode that allowed players to upgrade individual heroes through talent trees, providing a deeply replayable version of Overwatch 2’s PvE. It was a really interesting concept, and one that not only resonated with players, but that The team was really passionate about him and dedicated to him. This is a situation in which we are no longer advancing.
To give you some context for this change, I’d like to talk about the past and the origins of Team 4. Team Overwatch was founded in the wake of a canceled game at Blizzard called Project Titan. This game had many facets, but at its core, it was an FPS MMO. Especially at its inception, the Overwatch team saw itself as an MMO development team. When we moved away from this original concept and started creating Overwatch, we included plans to one day return to this scope. we had crawlingAnd He walksAnd Being Plan. Overwatch was it crawlinga customized version of PvE was He walks, MMO was it Being. It was built into the team’s DNA early on, and some of us viewed that final game as a true realization of the original vision for Project Titan.
When we launched Overwatch in 2016, we quickly started talking about what this next iteration could be. Looking back on that moment, it’s now clear that we weren’t as focused as we should have been on a game that was a massive hit. Instead, we’ve remained focused on a years-old plan. Work has begun on the PvE portion of the game and we’ve steadily continued to shift more and more of the team to work on those features.
Things rarely go as planned in game development. We struggled to find our footing with the Hero Mission experience early on. The range has grown. We were trying to do too many things at once and lost focus. The team has built some really cool stuff, including hero talents, new enemy units, and early versions of missions, but we’ve never been able to combine all the elements needed to ship a cohesive, polished experience.
We had an exciting yet gigantic vision and were constantly pulling resources away from the live game in an effort to make it happen. I can’t help but look back at our original ambitions for Overwatch and feel like we used the “crawl, walk, run” mantra to keep moving forward with a strategy that didn’t work.
We announced something bold. Our players had high expectations about it, but we no longer felt like we could deliver. We needed to make a very tough decision, one that we know will disappoint our players, the team, and everyone else looking forward to Hero Missions. The Overwatch team understands this deeply – and that represents years of work and emotional investment. They are amazing people, incredibly talented, and have a real passion for our game and the work that they do.
Finally, people wondered why this announcement was made at this time. After launching Overwatch 2, we started refining our plans for future seasons. As these plans grew, we tried to find ways to make all of our ambitions fit together into a plan we believed in.
we could not. And we also knew we couldn’t go back to taking people away from the live game in service of that original vision again. So, we made the difficult decision to cut back on hero quests and started planning ahead.
From there, we needed to refresh the vision for the game, gain confidence in our new direction and bring changes to the team. The decision was the beginning of a long process, not the last part of it.
This has been difficult for us, but as a 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 walking away from a vision that wasn’t working. And for this I would like to apologize to our players and our team. I’m sorry.
We focus our efforts and passion on making this game an ever-evolving experience. We remain committed to building on many of the elements we talked about at BlizzCon 2019, including Story Missions that delve into the next chapter of the Overwatch universe, new types of co-op content that we haven’t shared yet, and new stories that we plan to tell both in and out of the game. We’re excited about this trend and can’t wait for you to finally get to experience what we’ve been building.
Overwatch was born from the ashes of Project Titan. It was a transformative moment for the team and the project… and something beautiful came out of it. This is another moment of change. And the future of Overwatch will be born from it.
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