Overwatch battle royale? People are already having fun with the new Workshop tool
Oh Mei.
What if Bastion could roll around while in turret form? What if Mei could slide along the ground she freezes like Silver Surfer? What if Widowmaker teleported into the positions of people she headshot? What if Reinhardt could teleport his group to him when he called for them to group up? What if Overwatch was third-person and there was a battle royale mode? All of these questions have been answered - and more! - in Overwatch's brand new Workshop modding mode.
The Workshop was announced and added to the Public Test Realm yesterday evening. It lives within the custom game browser part of Overwatch, where people make their own rules for games, and it allows you to go a step further and tinker with the scripting of the game.
It lets you mess around with how characters' powers and abilities work, and their movement, their guns - everything they do, really - and how the game mode itself works. You cannot, however, import art and mess with level design.
It means, in theory, you could use it to prototype powers of a new hero, or even come up with balance changes for Blizzard - imagine that!
Game director Jeff Kaplan mentioned a couple of examples in a developer diary video, suggesting they may make their way to the game. One was Molten Floor (har har), a variation of 'the floor is lava' where, well, the floor is lava. Imagine it with characters like Pharah or Lucio, who can stay off the ground almost indefinitely if played skilfully enough, and you have yourself a game.
Another mode he mentioned was Mirror Deathmatch, whereby everyone plays the same character for a minute at a time in a deathmatch set-up and it cycles through them, which sounds fun. Kaplan even hinted a mode like this could hit the Arcade mode at some point.
I had a quick nose around the Workshop tool and it's daunting if you have no programming experience. "I have to warn you upfront, this is more of a power-user feature," Kaplan said in the video. Nevertheless, it could give you an introduction to such dark arts, and the ability to import scripts other people have made - or those which exist in the game already - allowing you to see what other people have done.
The Workshop will be available on all three game platforms - PC, PS4 and Xbox One - when it's undergone enough testing on the Public Test Realm.