The meteoric rise of the Battle Royale genre means every game is compared either to PUBG or Fortnite, and Blizzard's Overwatch is no different. However, the game's director Jeff Kaplan crushed any hopes of his game going Battle Royale way.
Even though the idea may seem mouth watering at first, Kaplain pointed out that Overwatch is a game that relies on non-linearity of its characters, which is the first and most probably the key stumbling block to the idea.
Blizzard
Indeed, Battle Royale games are built around the notion of a fair start for each player, so forcing Overwatch into the formula would be a prime example of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. In fact, Kaplan's wording is probably perfect, as he said the task would feel like "sloppily grafting battle royale onto" Overwatch.
Additionally, there is an issue of playing space to consider, seeing as how Overwatch's maps such as Hanamura Dojo are 45 meters across. This is easily dwarfed by both Fortnite and PUBG, even if the latter promises some serious walking mileage to be had.
Blizzard
Overwatch's engagement distance apparently tends to span from 15 to 40 meters, whereas Battle Royale doesn't really care about distance most of the time. In fact, with PUBG's sniping and Fortnite's sniping and building, Battle Royale engagements often start way beyond that.
Interestingly enough, Kaplan said that much of the Overwatch team are PUBG addicts, which is why they've discussed the idea to begin with. However, implementing it ultimately seems to require so much reworking of the game's foundations that it sounds more like making of an entirely new game.
Blizzard
While we're sure Blizzard wouldn't mind dipping their feet into the Battle Royale pool, we doubt this would be the way to go about it. On the other hand, we're sure that the phrase "fair start" is one of Blizzard's major turn-offs, in spite of their heavily advertised participation in the so called Fair Play Alliance. In fact, that just may be why we haven't seen them announce anything of the sort.
Overwatch
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