Overwatch Director Wants to Make a Battle Royale Mode

There’s no avoiding Battle Royale games these days. They’re on our computers, on our consoles, and on our phones… You can’t throw a rock without killing some naked man who was just dropped out of a plane with 99 other competitors. And because this new genre has become so popular, all kinds of games have been copying the formula: from Fortnite to Paladins to friggin’ Path of Exile (I don’t care if it was an April fool’s day joke, they still did it), it seems every studio is trying to get a piece of that pie.

And as it turns out, that includes Overwatch developer Blizzard, who has, apparently, seriously considered exploring what an Overwatch Battle Royale match would look like.

As Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan explained in an interview with Kotaku:

“A lot of times when I hear some of our fans pitch it, they’re like ‘Oh, just put a card in the Arcade one day that’s a battle royale mode,’ and I’m like ‘F@#k, that would be awesome.. . But there’s a lot of design and tech work to get us to that place and not just feel like a me-too game.”

He didn’t stop there; he explained in detail just why this idea would need some work:

“First and foremost, Overwatch is a game about heroes, and part of what makes the core loop work in a battle royale game is the search, the looting, and the fairness that everybody’s sort of equal. Overwatch wasn’t designed to be a 1v1. Every hero’s not balanced against every other hero… [plus] Our primary engagement distance is usually around 15 to 40 meters. The Hanamura dojo point B is 45 meters across. I don’t think people realize how tiny it is. Part of what makes Fortnite and PUBG so awesome is that you can have these really long engagement distances.”

Dropping 100 Bastions into Route 66 and watching them go at it would certainly prove entertaining for all of five seconds, but it’s hardly the kind of thing Battle Royale players enjoy. Something that the director sadly acknowledged near the end of the interview.

“Building those systems and getting that many players—I think battle royale for Overwatch starts to get into new game territory,”

Me, I’m not heartbroken by the news, given how much I don’t care about either Overwatch or the Battle Royale genre. But for those fans who had asked for it… well… who knows? Making a new Battle Royale game set in the Overwatch universe? That’s not a bad idea if Blizzard thinks they could handle the endless torrent of money it would generate.