Overwatch is a game that embraces diversity among its heroes and their various playstyles. Even with its sequel officially announced and on the way, it retains a large playerbase and continues to update regularly. One of the more recent updates introduced Echo, a hero who can mimic other heroes and has a lot of nuances to master.
Another recent new addition to Overwatch is the Workshop, which allows players to experiment with the game and create their own custom modes. It was creative engines like this that led to games like DOTA and Battle Chess in the original Warcraft III, and players are already creating new game modes and ideas with it. One creation, by Andy Bohan, has taken Echo’s power of putting multiple hero powers into one hero to a completely new level.
One function in the Overwatch Workshop allows one hero to be attached to another hero, letting the first hero carry around the second one. Utilizing this feature, a team up of Genji and Bastion could form an incredibly powerful Overwatch duo in the form of a highly mobile turret. Bohan did not stop at two heroes though: he combined the entire team, sticking five heroes onto a sixth who carries them around. The result is a terrifying monstrosity that has all the players controlling their heroes as normal except for movement.
To say the possibilities for this are endless would be an understatement. High damage, low mobility heroes could be attatched to speedsters. Torbjorn could ride Winston into battle. You could even have Orisa climbing walls with the aid of Genji. For the game mode he was creating, Bohan mostly used the slow, high-health, high-healing heroes used for the GOATS meta. This led to the creation of a mode currently titled 1v1 GOATS.
The idea of heroes being combined into one is incredibly entertaining, and does not have to end with Bohan’s new custom game mode. The teamwork necessary to coordinate one player moving and another shooting is worth exploring, and team compositions will look vastly different. Overwatch is already experimenting with competitive play changes, and a new mode might spice things up.
Obviously it would be a casual mode, at least to start. With the huge changes Overwatch is making to the hero pools, no more avenues of serious competition are needed in the game at the moment (especially with more GOATS). Still, there is no doubt that combining all the heroes on a team into a Mechazord style creation will appeal to a lot of players, if only for the spectacle. But after the spectacle, who knows what strategies might arise?
Overwatch is available for PC, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: Kotaku
