Blizzard have always been great at seeing how the wind is blowing, not only that but they have always been quick to adapt to the modern gaming world, even if that means cancelling a game out right. In that light we can see how they would love to introduce a Battle Royal mode to Overwatch, after all this is what everyone’s after. After their dabbling in PVE, Duels, Horde Mode and Capture the Flag, this would be the next logical step. Not only that but it would allow them to compete with their major rivals. On the topic of Horde Mode Jeff Kalpan had this to say:

“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 ‘Fuck, that would be awesome,’” Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan told Kotaku. “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.”

And Kaplin is correct there are a lot of hurdles for the development team  to overcome before they could even consider creating a Battle Royale Mode.

The first is balancing, before you could even create Battle Royale you would have to look at the characters and see how they would affect the game play, so lets take two of my favorites. Mercy and D.Va, throw them into a room together and we all know D.Va should win the fight, because Mercy is designed to support not fight. So how could they get around this well, perhaps in Battle Royal everyone creates their own Avatar and its set up as a training simulator for Overwatch or Talon. The Avatars would have traits based on characters in game where you get to pick their weapons and abilities, so at least its a fair fight.

The second major issue is the size of the current maps. All the maps we have now are two small for Battle Royal, with possible the exception of Junker Town. The only option here would be to make a whole slew of brand new maps.

Though Jeff does sound eager to create this he is well aware of what work would need done to make this happen.