For the longest time, Blizzard has been staunchly against the idea of deathmatch modes in Overwatch. It’s a game about teamwork and objectives, after all. Deathmatch has a way of drastically de-prioritising both of those things. Now, though, the dev team has had a change of heart.
In a new video, Jeff “From The Overwatch Team, Just To Be Sure You Don’t Think I’m From Any Other Teams” Kaplan announced that Overwatch is adding free-for-all and team-based deathmatch modes to the game’s Arcade. He acknowledged that he once said deathmatch would “never” come to the game, but said the Arcade, which was added to the game late last year, has proven to be a game-changer. “The coolest part of the Arcade,” he explained, “is that it’s opened up our ability to as developers to introduce game modes to you guys that we wouldn’t normally feel comfortable putting in the quick-play or competitive rotation.”
The core mode will be a free-for-all deathmatch where eight players face-off in a battle presumably to determine whose ‘ships are canon. All you’ve gotta worry about is eliminations. In an interesting wrinkle, you don’t have to come in first to earn a “win” toward your weekly allotment of Arcade loot boxes. Rather, you’ve just gotta be in the top half of players in a match.
Deathmatch will use a series of modified versions of maps that are already in the game as well as a brand new one: Chateau Guillard. It’s a fitting (?) place to host a deathmatch, because it used to be Widowmaker’s home before her husband kicked the bucket. We’ll get to learn more about her backstory while defiling any remaining good memories she had of the place with even more bloodshed. Fun!
There’ll also be a team deathmatch option where two teams of six rush to get 30 kills. Kaplan said Mercy’s resurrects will take away kill credits from the other team, which sounds heinously frustrating and basically makes Mercy a required pick. I’ll probably steer clear until Blizzard realises this idea, while interesting on paper, is extremely bad.
You can try out Overwatch‘s new deathmatch options on the PC public test realm right now.
Comments
6 responses to “Overwatch, A Game About Teamwork, Is Getting A Free-For-All Deathmatch Mode”
What the game really needed was more game modes, deathmatch is perfect though 30 kills is not nearly enough it is a step in the right direction.
The rounds end soo fast as is you spend more time on loading screens than you do actually playing the game.
I like how they keep adding and tweeking stuff. Team death match sounds cool. I hope they keep the random hero mode, it forces me to play characters I’m weak with and team up with different combos
Apparently Mystery Heroes is one of the more popular game modes so I can’t see them removing it any time soon.
Mystery Heroes is great because I get to try a bunch of different characters and show off all my sweet skins.
So basically they said “Everyone plays it like a deathmatch mode so we may as well make it official.” Maybe now it means the team based modes will have people who play as a team.
It will be a good chance to practice skirmishing though because I’m terrible at dealing with multiple enemies.
Didn’t even think of that. We might have more comp matches that don’t start with 4 instalocked DPS.