Overlook 2The highly anticipated hero missions PvE mode is no more. In a live stream from a developer, game director Aaron Keller said the team is canceling the game’s PvE-based hero missions to continue with seasonal, story-focused events.
When Blizzard first announced Overlook 2the developers teased that the game would have two PvE campaign modes in addition to the traditional competitive modes.
Announce in the presentation Overlook 2 at Blizzcon 2019, former game director Jeff Kaplan talked about hero missions and story missions that encompassed the game’s PvE elements and drove the game’s story. Story missions would be like the story-focused events in the original Overexpected already had. Players would group up and fight against AI-controlled enemies instead of teams of other players. These types of missions would cover either Overlook 2‘s general story the road Revolt, RetaliationAnd Storm coming up engrossed in events in the original Overexpected or outside being fantastic side stories Overexpected canon like the Halloween event Junkenstein’s Revenge. These story missions would also be seasonal, changing every few months.
However, hero missions were presented as this always-on, always-replayable mode with talent trees that would give heroes different buffs, giving this part of the game more RPG-like qualities.
“With everything we’ve learned about what it takes to operate this game,” says executive producer Jared Neuss. “Obviously, we can’t deliver on that original vision for PvE that was shown in 2019.”
After Overlook 2 was announced, the game entered a kind of “dead zone” where no new content was released except for skins and repeated holiday events. Although a new game was on the way, players began to break away from the original Overexpected. Ahead of the game’s 2022 release, Keller released a video promising a steady stream of releases and new content, so players never have to wait years between new heroes or events again.
In an interview with Game SpotNeuss and Keller went into detail about the reasons for the cancellation of hero modes, talking about how it would have cost to pull developers away from the live game to create hero mission PvE the way it was originally conceived and how that wouldn’t fit with the team’s dedication to keeping the game fresh and exciting.
In reality, we were watching two separate games at once with a series of heroes as the piece shared by two of them. And as we started to get further and further into it – clearly our players could realize that we were moving the focus away from the live game – but it just didn’t look like there was a final end date in sight where we would finally be able to put that stamp to set up [it], or that end date was years away and it no longer felt like we could do that to our players, or we could do that with the live game we were running. And then we took the moment to change the strategy and put everything in the live game.
Losing hero missions is a big bummer, but Overlook 2 PvE is not completely gone. Story missions are traditional events in both games, and the developers shared that Overlook 2‘s first major story event is coming up in Season 6.
Plus, the live stream wasn’t just focused on PvE. Neuss and Keller also shared the rest of the 2023 roadmap with new support and tank heroes, the return of the Summer Games event, and the equally anticipated arrival of the creator workshop.
