Recently, “Overwatch 2” (Overwatch 2) official developer live broadcast announced the cancellation of the development of the PvE hero mode promised by Blizzard Carnival in 2019. After that, it caused a great uproar among players at home and abroad. In view of the dissatisfaction of players, Director Aaron Keller released a long article on the official website Explained again and apologized to the players, and also mentioned the original team’s vision, the “Project Titan” MMO.
existOfficial AnnouncementIn, Keller first emphasized that the PvE content is not completely cancelled, saying that “Overwatch 2” will release a new story mission in the sixth season to continue telling the story of the defenders heroes against the new threat. It will be similar to the PvE activity mode launched by “Overwatch” in the past.
Next, Keller began to review the original intention of “Overwatch”, that is, Blizzard had canceled the development of the “Titan Project” MMO project. At that time, the core gameplay of the game was an MMORPG game that focused on the first-person shooting experience. When Team 4 was formed, most of its members considered themselves an MMO development team.
In the end, Team 4 did not launch “Project Titan”, but created “Special Attack”, but Keller emphasized that the development team actually formulated a long-term plan for returning to “Project Titan”, which they called “crawling”. , walk, run”.
For the development team, “Overwatch” is the “crawling” stage, while the game focused on the PvE version is “walking”, and the final realization of MMO is “running”. This concept has been integrated into the team’s genes in the past.
However, things backfired. Although “Overwatch” was successful after its launch in 2016, the PvE development work was not smooth. They could not integrate and unify a complete game experience. At the same time, maintaining PvP while developing PvE consumed too much effort of team members.
When we launched Overwatch in 2016, we quickly started discussing the possibility of the next version. Looking back, it’s obvious that we weren’t fully committed to the blockbuster game, and instead, we’d been focused on a project we had laid out many years ago. We started the PvE development of the game and continued to transfer more and more team members to the development of these features.
And game development often doesn’t go as smoothly as planned. We initially had trouble with the Hero Quest experience. The vision keeps expanding and we try to do so many things at once that we lose focus. The team created some really cool stuff, including hero talents, new enemies, and early version quests, but we were never able to bring all the necessary elements together to deliver a complete, unified experience.
We have an exciting but massive vision, and we’re constantly mobilizing resources from existing games in order to realize it. I can’t help but think back to our original ambitions for Overwatch, and it feels like we’ve been using the “crawl, walk, run” mantra to push a strategy that didn’t work.
In the second half, Keller admitted frankly that after the launch of “Overwatch 2”, with the expansion of the quarterly update plan, they were in a state of resources that could not maintain the current update pace and continue to develop the PvE hero mode, so they could only cancel the hero Difficult decisions in mission development and starting over with new plans for the future.
The new plan will be a new type of cooperative task content, which will be released around the sixth season of “Overwatch 2”.
From there, we need to update our vision for the game, gain confidence in our new direction, and roll out those changes to the team. This decision is only the beginning of a long process, not the end.
It’s been tough for us, but as director of this project, I have to try to make decisions that prioritize the game and the community, even if some of the decisions are disappointing. In this case, I was having trouble pulling away from a vision that wasn’t working. For this, I would like to apologize to our players and team. sorry.
We will focus all our efforts and enthusiasm 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, content for new types of co-op missions that we haven’t yet shared, and our plans to Draw new stories to tell in and out of the game. We’re excited about this direction and can’t wait for you to finally experience everything we’ve built.
