A popular Overwatch content creator known as Your Overwatch has accused Blizzard of gaslighting players into believing PvE is still coming.
The Overwatch 2 player base was crushed when developers announced that the PvE mode that was promised was no longer happening, with the team wanting to focus on the live game instead. The Hero Missions that were promised back in 2019 at BlizzCon would include unique storylines and skill trees for each hero, but this was apparently too big of a promise for devs to keep.
As backlash poured in, director Aaron Keller sent out an official apology and explanation. At the end of the letter, Keller announced that PvE wasn’t completely out of the question and that there were still some single-player modes in the works. But now, Your Overwatch is accusing Keller of lying to fans.
Is Overwatch 2 still getting a PvE mode?
In a video titled “More Lies From Blizzard,” Your Overwatch condemned Keller’s apology, claiming that it’s an attempt to gaslight and lie to Overwatch 2 fans.
PvE is a term that’s often used in the context of “replayable RPG games,” not to refer to campaigns and co-op modes. To Your Overwatch, it felt like Blizzard was attempting to “redefine” what PvE means in an attempt to downplay the huge pivot from the original plan.
He explained: “Aaron Keller admitted that they knew they were not going to be doing the full-fledged replayable RPG Missions before they launched Overwatch 2 — they knew that. It’s a lie by omission, and they are trying to gaslight us into believing PvE is the same when they canceled the replayable part.”
Your Overwatch said that the upcoming missions and other single-player opportunities coming to Overwatch 2 will probably be fun and reassured viewers that the game is not dying. But he did feel that Blizzard had lied to everyone, with Keller admitting previously that the team already knew they were not able to do the “full-fledged, replayable Hero Missions” that were promised before Overwatch 2 was launched.
“It’s a lie I will never forgive them for,” Your Overwatch said.
The lack of open communication is what bothered Your Overwatch more than the PvE mode being canceled. The fact that the team knew that PvE would never happen — even before Overwatch 2 was launched — but didn’t say anything to fans until now left him frustrated.
But Your Overwatch did admit that former Overwatch game designer Jeff Kaplan just had wild visions that couldn’t be implemented, being much too grandiose for the team to create. For this reason, Overwatch 2 has continued to evolve and explore different game genres, forced to leave some concepts behind.
A lot of viewers agreed with Your Overwatch, however, stating that they felt duped. The entire reason that people accepted a lack of content for the release was the promise of a campaign mode in Overwatch 2. People were under the impression that the team was working on the Hero Missions and such, but it now has been revealed that the team knew it probably wasn’t possible years ago — but remained silent.
