Blizzard scraps another Overwatch 2 mode following crushing community reception

Overwatch 2’s Hero Mastery Gauntlet is the latest game mode to be scrapped by Blizzard, joining hero missions and PvE content in the development graveyard.

Released in Season 9, the Hero Mastery Gauntlet was an off-shoot co-op version of the Hero Mastery mode that had players completing obstacle courses and unlocking rewards by doing so.

The co-op mode tasked players with protecting towers from enemy bots in order to earn high scores and compete in a leaderboard.

According to Blizzard, the team has been evaluating which modes have the most play time, and Hero Mastery Gauntlet “hasn’t resonated with players” as they had hoped.

“We have decided to discontinue Hero Mastery Gauntlet as a permanent mode, and it will not be available to play starting in Season 11,” they said. “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.”

This is hardly the first mode to get canned in OW2. When the game first launched, players were promised a PvE campaign alongside “deeply replayable” hero missions that would introduce new abilities via skill trees.

The dev team would later fall back on this promise, insisting they struggled to create a “polished, cohesive experience” and felt they could no longer deliver. As such the decision was made to cut the content.

Instead, a batch of three PvE story missions was released to lukewarm fanfare and Blizzard reportedly pulled the plug on future campaign content due to low sales, firing a majority of the devs involved.

While Hero Mastery Gauntlet may be departing, Hero Mastery isn’t going anywhere just yet. The devs say that more Hero Mastery Solo Courses are on the way in upcoming seasons.

Interestingly, new job listings by Blizzard indicate that the company is working on yet another PvE game with “multi-season story arcs.”