Blizzard Entertainment has announced that it will be removing Overwatch 2‘s Hero Mastery Gauntlet PvE mode due to lack of player engagement.
The decision was shared in a recent forum post where the developer explained that it will be discontinuing the mode beginning Season 11 after finding that it “hasn’t resonated with players”.
“As we prepare for Season 11, we’ve taken the time to evaluate a variety of game modes based on how much they are being played,” the post reads. “Hero Mastery Gauntlet was intended to bring the high score-chasing excitement of Hero Mastery missions into a multiplayer format.
“Unfortunately, it hasn’t resonated with players in the ways that we hoped. With this in mind, we have decided to discontinue Hero Mastery Gauntlet as a permanent mode, and it will not be available to play starting in Season 11.”
Blizzard adds that players have until the end of Season 10 to complete the Lifetime Challenges for Hero Mastery Gauntlet and compete on the mode’s Top 500 leaderboards before it’s gone for good.
However, Individual Hero Mastery Solo Courses will continue to be available in single-player. Blizzard has also promised that more Hero Mastery Solo Courses will arrive in upcoming seasons, but didn’t offer any further details.
Hero Mastery Gauntlet launched in March 2024 and isn’t the first PvE mode to be removed from the first-person shooter (FPS). Earlier this year, the developer announced it had canceled the game’s long-awaited Hero mode – which was originally intended to be a single-player Overwatch experience.
Game director Aaron Keller later apologized, saying that the project grew too big. “We were trying to do too many things at once and we lost focus,” Keller said at the time. “We had an exciting but gargantuan vision and we were continuously pulling resources away from the live game in an attempt to realize it.”
