Overwatch Game Director Aaron Keller talked about canceled Hero Missions and the future of the game.
On May 16, Blizzard announced they're canceling Hero Missions for Overwatch 2. The ambitious mode first unveiled at BlizzCon 2019 involved upgrading Heroes through talents.
Game Director Aaron Keller now confirmed Story Missions are still on the table for Season 6, but with Hero Missions, the team faced various challenges and lost focus along the way. The result was a difficult choice that disappointed both players and developers, considering the years of work and emotional investment involved.
(Source)
Hey all. It's been an emotional week in the world of Overwatch. A few days ago, we talked about our change in approach to PvE in Overwatch 2 and released a high-level roadmap for the year. We're really excited for everything we’ll be launching soon, but much of the discussion this week has been about how we’re cancelling PvE outright, which isn’t accurate, so I want to take some time to discuss some of that with you here.
When we announced Overwatch 2 in 2019, the idea for the game was centered around the PvP game we released last October, and on the PvE side, Story Missions and Hero Missions.
Story Missions focus on fast-paced, co-op gameplay, as well as story, cinematics, and cutscenes that expand the world of Overwatch. Story Missions tell a linear narrative about the heroes of Overwatch reuniting and battling the new Null Sector threat, pushing the story of Overwatch forward for the first time since our original game released. These missions take place on huge maps with new enemies and new cinematics. We will begin to release them in Season 6. 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. We’ll be sharing more details there in the coming weeks.
Hero Missions (or Hero Mode), on the other hand, encompassed an in-development game mode that allowed players to upgrade individual heroes through talent trees, providing a deeply replayable version of PvE in Overwatch 2. It was a really exciting concept, something that not only resonated with players, but that the team was passionate about and really dedicated to. This is the mode we’re no longer moving forward with.
To give you some context for this change, I'd like to talk about the past and the origins of Team 4. The Overwatch team was founded in the wake of a cancelled game at Blizzard called Project Titan. That game had many facets, but at its heart, it was an FPS MMO. The Overwatch team, especially at its inception, considered itself an MMO development team. As we transitioned away from that original concept and started creating Overwatch, we included plans to one day return to that scope. We had a crawl, walk, runplan. Overwatch was the crawl, a dedicated version of PvE was the walk, and an MMO was the run. It was built into the DNA of the team early on, and some of us considered that final game a true realization of the original vision of Project Titan.
When we launched Overwatch in 2016, we quickly started talking about what that next iteration could be. 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 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. Scope 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.
We had an exciting but gargantuan vision and we were continuously pulling resources away from the live game in an attempt to realize it. I can't help but look back on our original ambitions for Overwatch and feel like we used the slogan of "crawl, walk, run" to continue to march forward with a strategy that just wasn't working.
We had announced something audacious. Our 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 team understands this deeply - 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.
Lastly, people have wondered why this announcement came at this time. After Overwatch 2 had launched, we started refining our plans for future seasons. As those plans grew, we tried to find ways to make all of our ambitions fit together in a plan that we believed in.
We couldn't. And we also knew that we couldn't go back to pulling people away from the live game in service of that original vision again. So, we made the difficult decision to cut Hero Missions and started planning for the future.
From there, we needed to update the vision for the game, gain confidence in our new direction and roll out the changes to the team. The decision was the start of a long process, not the final piece of it.
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.
We are focusing our efforts and our passion into making this game an ever-evolving experience. We are still committed to building many of the elements we talked about at BlizzCon 2019, including the Story Missions that delve into the next chapter of the Overwatch universe, new types of co-op content we haven’t yet shared, and new stories that we’re planning to tell both in and out of the game. We’re excited about this direction and we 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 moment of metamorphosis 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 out of it.

Overwatch 2 developers revealed in a Gamespot interview they're scrapping the Hero PvE mode introduced at BlizzCon 2019.
If you've been eagerly anticipating the arrival of the Overwatch 2 PvE mode, we've got some bad news for you. The mode has been scrapped and won't go live at all. However, some PvE elements from Hero Mode may be implemented into the game, according to Overwatch 2 developers.
Gamespot talked to Game Director Aaron Keller and Executive Producer Jared Neuss who confirmed their are "definitely not doing Hero Mode and the talents and the power progression system because it's taking away resources from the game's live version".
In 2019, they had a large portion of the team working on the PvE side of the game and players felt it in the live version of the game because they eventually stopped making content for it, reaching a point where it took two and a half years to launch a new Hero.
Keller: Yeah. I think the scope of the Hero Missions was really, really large, and what it was going to take to finish it was going to be a pretty remarkable, massive lift. You think about making a game that is supposed to be almost its own standalone co-op experience that people are going to be able to play as a main game, and not just how do you put all of the content into that to finish it? Even just a small piece of it, the talent trees: 40 to 50 talents per Hero, over 35 plus Heroes. You're looking at thousands of talents to make everything just to get the game out the door, plus all of the content and the missions you'd be playing to do that, and it is a pretty gargantuan ask for a team. And then, on top of that, you need to run that as a live game, so content has to continually come out for that side of the game.
In reality, what we were looking at was running two separate games at the same time with a set of Heroes as the piece that is shared between two of them. And as we started to get further and further into it--obviously our players could realize that we were pulling focus away from the live game--but it just didn't look like there was a definitive end date in sight where we would finally be able to put that stamp on [it], or that end date was years away and it no longer felt like we could be doing that to our players, or we could be doing that to the live game that we were running. And that's when we took the moment to shift strategy and put everything into the live game.
You can check out the full inteview on Gamespot.

The latest addition to the Overwatch 2 hero lineup, the tank Ramattra, has been announced and you can check out his origin story video below, as well as read more on his backstory. He will arrive with Season 2 starting on December 6th.
Ramattra (Source)
A better future for all omnics 
This evening, we introduced the latest hero at the Overwatch League Grand Finals! 
Check out Ramattra’s origin story, as well as an inside look at his development with art director Dion Rogers and lead hero designer Alec Dawson: 
  Ramattra’s story is complex and multifaceted, and his ultimate goal is to protect his people—but the cost of that goal is still to be determined. 
Suffer as I have 
Originally a war machine, Ramattra shed his munitions for a shield to protect his people by promoting peace and tranquility. His ideals weren’t far removed from his fellow Shambli monk, Zenyatta. However, Ramattra’s story is one of hardships, trauma, and a magnified view of humanity’s harsh realities.  


Harmony was replaced by dissonance, and Ramattra began to approach his convictions from a more pragmatic angle—justifying any means necessary to defend his fellow omnics. As the leader of Null Sector, Ramattra boasts incredible support from his people, and he is primed to impose his philosophies on our world.  
______ 
Ramattra will join the tank lineup at the beginning of Season Two starting December 6. Our team is counting the days down to when we can share more about our newest hero, so keep an out for more information in the weeks leading up to Season Two.  

The Overwatch development team has posted a blog with more details about post-launch updates on gameplay, maps, and competitive.
(Source)
Overwatch 2 developer blog: Post-launch updates on gameplay, maps, and competitive
Today, we want to look back at our first week in this brand-new chapter for Overwatch and share with you our team’s current thinking on hero balance and gameplay.  
Since the launch of Overwatch 2, we’ve welcomed millions of both new and returning heroes to the game. While most of our updates so far have been about our efforts to address game servers and stability, we also know players are eager to hear about what we are working on for gameplay and other topics. We’ve seen Sojourn, Junker Queen, and Kiriko completely rock the landscape of the game, blasting and slicing their way into many victories on the battlefield. Today, we want to look back at the first week of this brand-new chapter for Overwatch and share with you our team’s current thinking on hero balance and gameplay. 
Hero Balance
While some heroes are performing better than others, and there are differences across player skill levels, we have been happy to see that no hero’s overall power level is far out of line with our goals. Every hero on the roster has a win-rate between 45% and 55%, and we are not planning any immediate balance changes based on what we are seeing, with the exception of a targeted adjustment to Zarya in Total Mayhem which should go live with our next major patch on October 25. Instead, our team is planning to make a series of balance changes for Season Two that are in line with our design goal of ensuring the overall game feels balanced and fair while giving each season a more distinct identity. While we’ll continue looking at hero performance and listening to player feedback prior to finalizing any specific changes to balance for Season Two, we want to share more about what we are seeing so far.
Tanks fighting on the front lines
Since shifting to a 5v5 format, we see many players focusing more on the tank role given the heightened importance of a single tank in role queue modes. One of the most talked about heroes on the roster right now is D.Va. With buffs after the last Beta to her Defense Matrix and Micro Missiles, she can put up a fight longer than she could before the launch of Overwatch 2. Despite many players saying she’s one of the best tanks in the game, Reinhardt, Sigma, and Zarya actually currently lead up the competition with an average 53% unmirrored win rate. Zarya’s new ability to choose where to place each of her two Particle Barriers often allows her to build up to high energy quickly, which is something we’re currently keeping a close eye on for potential changes next season.
Junker Queen was a dominant force during the last beta playtest. Because of that, we applied changes to her Commanding Shout to reduced how dominant the brawly, “death ball” team compositions were at the highest skill levels, including the Overwatch League Summer Showdown. We’ll keep an eye on her performance in the upcoming weeks to ensure she’s an effective tank and fun to play. 
The team is also monitoring Doomfist’s performance and play rate compared to other tanks. As we look to Season Two, we think it makes sense to evaluate his overall tanking ability and potentially make improvements to Power Block and Meteor Strike.
Slicing through the competition
The damage role has seen many hero combinations across all ranks, but we’ve noticed some popular picks among our players. Genji and Sojourn started as the most popular heroes when Overwatch 2 launched, but they’ve since leveled out to the rest of the damage roster. Genji started off with a dominating win-rate, and although it’s lowered slightly since launch (currently at 52%), we want to make sure he’s not dominating the playing field. We’ll watch Genji carefully throughout the season to ensure he doesn’t slice up the competition too much and may make adjustments in Season Two. One way we are considering doing this is through an adjustment to the damage role passive, which has particularly benefited heroes like Genji.
Sombra is also hacking her way through the back lines in many games. We adjusted her damage potential to be optimal on targets that she hacks. However, we want to ensure her targets have a reasonable time to fight back, so we’ll continue to look to balance her hack ability-lockout duration when we approach Season Two. We’ve also heard feedback that tanks feel oppressed when a Sombra is focusing them with hacks, which will also be something we will look to control next season.
Symmetra and Torbjorn are two other damage heroes that we are keeping a close eye on now. Over the course of the first week, their win rates have been gradually increasing, and they are showing the highest win rates now at some ranks. Both heroes can be effective counters to Genji and may be enjoying their success due to his popularity. When we look at potentially making changes to them we need to keep in mind the landscape of the rest of the hero roster. For example if Genji is tweaked and possibly played less these heroes might see less success and not need adjustments themselves.
Sly as a fox
Kiriko has been well-received by the community, with an initial play rate of over 75% in most matches when we first launched, making her an instant favorite among many players. This play rate has since balanced out compared to other support heroes, however, her win rate increased from 48% to 52% as players learned her kit and playstyle over this past week. Her healing averages in the middle when you compare it to the rest of the support roster, and her damage output right now is about even with Ana which is relatively low compared to heroes like Lucio, Moira, and Brigitte. Kiriko gets a lot of value in her evasiveness with Wall Climb and Swift Step to get out of harm’s way, allowing her to stay alive longer in team fights and making her the most survivable support hero on the roster currently. We’re keeping an eye on how she performs in the weeks ahead of the Overwatch League Playoffs next month.
Missions around the world
With new and returning maps based on locations worldwide, we want each season in Overwatch 2 to feel refreshing and exciting for new and returning players. To support that goal and also to allow our team, when we think it’s appropriate, to make adjustments to our maps, we have begun to run a map pool featuring all-new locations and many original maps. For season 1, we’re playing on the following maps for both Quick and Competitive Play:
Control Ilios - Evening Lighting Lijiang Tower - Dawn Lighting Oasis - Night Lighting Nepal - Morning Lighting Busan - Night Lighting Escort Circuit royal – Night Lighting Dorado - Evening Lighting Route 66 - Night Lighting Gibraltar - Morning Lighting Junkertown - Morning Lighting Hybrid Midtown - Morning Lighting King’s Row - Evening Lighting Eichenwalde - Evening Lighting Hollywood - Morning Lighting Paraíso - Morning Lighting Push New Queen Street - Morning Lighting Colosseo - Evening Lighting Esperança - Morning Lighting Each subsequent season, we will rotate some maps out of the map pool and bring back others that had been previously out of rotation. As we continue to rotate maps in and out, we’ll be looking at improving and tweaking them, so for example, when Rialto returns in Season Two, players will notice a few spots where we have added additional cover which should help the map play better in the 5v5 environment with reduced shields. For players who want to play maps not currently in the map rotation, hop into a custom game or the occasional arcade mode.
Climbing the ranks
Our team would like to apologize for ranking many players too low during the first week of Overwatch 2. We discovered a bug that was impacting player skill ratings, which is what contributed to many players being placed in Bronze 5 when they should have been placed higher. Our most recent patch included a fix that will help you get back to your true rank quickly, and that will be reflected the next time you receive a competitive ranking update. You will receive a boost as you continue playing to help you get up to the correct ranks. Players who haven’t yet placed in competitive won’t experience this issue after the fix goes live.
We’re also watching your feedback about how we present your skill tier and division and how you celebrate that in-game. While we don’t have any details we can share yet, expect us to make more improvements to Competitive, and we will continue to watch for your feedback.
Thank you for week one, and here’s to many more
Finally, we want to ensure games play out fairly for all players in all matches. In a future patch, we’ll fix an issue that could cause some rubber banding in-game. We also want to be certain that hit registration for shots fired is working pixel-perfectly. We have investigated reports from players about hit registration, and many reports are actually related to how our replay tool works, which does not perfectly capture the alignment of each player’s aim. 
There are also misconceptions about how our controller settings on PC work, which does not affect mouse input. As an example, aim smoothing under gamepad does not impact mouse input latency or precision. However, in one report, we discovered a bug that affected the hitbox alignment of our rendered objects for Junker Queen in some specific situations, and we’re working diligently to fix this issue. 
We also understand that some PC players have concerns with input responsiveness and recommend trying out these changes to improve how quickly the game responds to player input:
Make sure the in-game resolution setting matches your actual monitor’s set resolution. Set the capped frame rate to a value that matches your monitor’s maximum frame rate. If you have an NVidia graphics card, turn on NVidia Reflex + Boost. Otherwise, turn on Reduced Buffering for other GPUs. Finally, in your gameplay options, turn on Enable High Precision Mouse Input to speed up how frequently your mouse captures position in the game. Thank you to all the players who were a part of the first week of Overwatch 2. While this time has been incredibly exciting for the community and our team, it’s also come with many challenges that we're looking to address quickly. We will continue to listen to player feedback as we strive to make Overwatch 2 the best game it can be, and we are looking forward to sharing more in the coming weeks leading up to Season Two. In the meantime, we hope everyone is having a blast in the game, and we will talk again soon! 

Blizzard have published the latest Overwatch animated short, featuring the new hero, Kiriko! Coming in at almost 10 minutes it's not quite "short", but it's another quality hero intro, so let's take a look.