{"id":22972,"date":"2023-05-20T06:09:52","date_gmt":"2023-05-20T06:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/5a829464-8a74-4eb1-9e49-84ed2a6cb92b12"},"modified":"2023-05-20T06:09:52","modified_gmt":"2023-05-20T06:09:52","slug":"overwatch-2-director-explains-why-hero-missions-were-canceled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/overwatch-2-director-explains-why-hero-missions-were-canceled\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Overwatch 2\u2019 director explains why hero missions were canceled"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Blizzard announced<\/span> earlier this week that it had canceled Overwatch 2<\/em><\/span> hero missions, a central part of its player vs. environment (PvE) story mode, fans were none too pleased. So director Aaron Keller published a blog post<\/span> today to ease the concerns and offer more transparency about the development team\u2019s \u201cincredibly difficult decision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hero missions, revealed<\/span> in 2019, were designed to provide a \u201cdeeply repayable\u201d branch of the game based on RPG-like talent trees. Although progression would have been separate from the main game (to avoid giving hero mission players an unfair advantage), it was still part of the hype Blizzard used during the past four years of marketing the title. But the publisher ultimately found that the hero missions were pulling too many development resources away from the live game.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhen we launched Overwatch<\/em> in 2016, we quickly started talking about what that next iteration could be,\u201d Keller wrote. \u201cLooking back at that moment, it\u2019s now obvious that we weren\u2019t 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.\u201d That years-old plan refers to the development team\u2019s influence from its work on Project Titan<\/em><\/span>, Blizzard\u2019s canceled MMORPG. The creators initially saw Overwatch<\/em> as a vessel to reintegrate some of the ideas from that scrapped project.<\/p>\n

\"Overwatch
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Blizzard Entertainment<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cWork began on the PvE portion of the game and we steadily continued shifting more and more of the team to work on those features.\u201d But, Keller says, \u201cScope grew. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keller says the team\u2019s ambition for hero missions was devouring resources at the expense of the core gameplay. \u201cWe had an exciting but gargantuan vision and we were continuously pulling resources away from the live game in an attempt to realize it,\u201d said Keller. \u201cI can\u2019t help but look back on our original ambitions for Overwatch<\/em> and feel like we used the slogan of \u2018crawl, walk, run\u2019 to continue to march forward with a strategy that just wasn\u2019t working.\u201d<\/p>\n

The decision to abandon hero missions came down to prioritizing present quality over past promises. \u201cWe had announced something audacious,\u201d Keller reflected. \u201cOur players had high expectations for it, but we no longer felt like we could deliver it. We needed to make an incredibly difficult decision, one we knew would disappoint our players, the team, and everyone looking forward to Hero Missions. The Overwatch<\/em> team understands this deeply \u2014 this represented years of work and emotional investment. They are wonderful, incredibly talented people and truly have a passion for our game and the work that they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overwatch 2<\/em>\u2019s story missions \u2014 minus the canned hero missions \u2014 are set to arrive in season six, scheduled for mid-August. PvE aspects include a single-player version with a leaderboard, in-game and out-of-game stories and \u201cnew types of co-op content we haven\u2019t yet shared.\u201d Before that content arrives, there\u2019s still season five, set to launch in June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Blizzard announced earlier this week that it had canceled Overwatch 2 hero missions, a central part of its player vs. environment (PvE) story mode, fans were none too pleased. So director Aaron Keller published a blog post today to ease the concerns and offer more transparency about the development team\u2019s \u201cincredibly difficult decision.\u201d Hero …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22973,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22972"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22972"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=22972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}