Overwatch 2 PvE is Coming in Season 6… But Not in the Way You Think

Today, we saw the reveal of a new Roadmap for content features coming to Overwatch 2. As part of the roadmap was the revelation that Season 6 would bring the fabled PvE mode that would introduce new story beats, and is pretty much the reason why people turned their eyes toward the game announcement back when Blizzcon 2019 was making the rounds.

Well, it was later revealed by the developers at Blizzard that while the PvE is still coming as part of Season 6 of Overwatch 2, it was not going to retain that vision that was once seen in the 2019 trailer. In fact, it’s going to be a much more scaled-back version of that product.

Additionally, if you were looking forward to the features that were seen in the game such as the Skill Tree, Replayable Missions, and Long-term progression, we have some bad news for you as it’s been confirmed that Overwatch 2’s upcoming Story Missions are not going to feature any of those. But hey, players will still have access to a new IP collaboration later in the year. That will make things okay, right?

In an interview with GameSpot, Game Director Aaron Keller elaborated more on the decision with some insight on the process behind it:

The development of any game is a process. In the years following our announcement at BlizzCon 2019, we had a really large portion of our team working on the PvE side of that game, and I think players of our live running game could feel that because we eventually stopped making content for it.

It’s been maybe two and a half years since the last hero that we launched, and we don’t want to be back at the point where it’s another three and a half years since launching a PvP map. So we really looked hard at what we were doing with the live game in service of this much bigger thing that we were working on and hoping to release later.

Because of this, we will have a new way of distributing the now-called Hero Missions in Overwatch 2. The PvE component will now be part of a story arc that will be launched in Season 6, with co-op missions being released as part of their seasonal releases rather than one big-boxed release. The game’s executive producer Jared Neuss has also stated that the new content will radically differ from what was seen in Archives and other co-op events.

Whether or not that promise will be held by the time of the mode’s release is yet to be seen but for now, it’s worth noting that the PvE experience will not be the same as seen in the 2019 trailer.