Blizzard hires devs for unannounced PvE game months after laying off Overwatch 2 PvE team

Blizzard has begun hiring a development team for an unannounced PvE game a few months after the company sacked large parts of the Overwatch 2 team working on a similar mode.

According to Wowhead, Blizzard is actively recruiting for several roles, including narrative director and principal animator. The advertisement contains very little information on the game itself, which remains unannounced.

The news comes less than two months after a report confirmed that Blizzard would no longer actively work on PvE content for Overwatch 2. The modes that were released were far more limited than the promotional materials for the game had promised and received decidedly mixed reviews from the community.

Blizzard

This, combined with poor overall sales and disappointing initial earnings, put the final nail in the coffin for PvE. Fans had already blasted the developer for wiping the years of progress in the original, and they chose to focus on correcting the PvP experience over everything else.

Outside of Overwatch, Blizzard also cancelled an unannounced survival game in January of 2024, after the company announced sweeping layoffs. More than 1900 people were let go overall, including many who were working on the game, though others were shifted to different projects within the developer’s portfolio.

Even more memorable than those was the cancellation of Project Titan, a huge MMO that was in active development at Blizzard for more than seven years. After it was eventually canned, 40 members of the original team used the assets to create a new game, which later came to be Overwatch.