Overwatch 2 director shares he wanted the shooter to return to its MMO origins
Blizzard recently announced that Overwatch 2 would no longer be receiving its defining Hero Mode.
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Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller has discussed how the shooter series was "born from the ashes" of Project Titan following the cancellation of its Hero Mode.
Earlier this week, Blizzard made the surprising announcement that Overwatch 2 would no longer be receiving its PvE Hero Mode, arguably the main thing that even justified having a sequel at all. PvE content is still planned for the game in the form of Story Missions, it's just Hero Mode that has been cut. Following this news, Keller has now shared his latest "Director's Take," a regular series of blog posts he shares covering the state of the game, where he talked about how the Overwatch team together following an MMO called Project Titan being cancelled, with the ultimate goal of developing a shooter MMO.
According to Keller, the "Overwatch team, especially at its inception, considered itself an MMO development team," as it was "founded in the wake of a cancelled game at Blizzard called Project Titan… 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, run plan. 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 realisation of the original vision of Project Titan."
Keller explained that as time went on, "scope grew," when it came to the Hero Mode, with the team "trying to do too many things at once." As the team began to plan for future seasons, it became clear that they couldn't fit Hero Mode into the game's future, and ultimately made the decision to cut it, with Keller writing, "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."
It sounds like ultimately the team wanted to make something like Destiny, itself a bit of an oddity in the MMO scene, and one that has found more success in its sequel than in its first game.
While Hero Mode has been cut, Overwatch Season 6 will introduce story missions, though the launch date for this season hasn't been announced yet.