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.