Overwatch’s Brawl Modes Datamined; Headshots Only and Ninja Battles Await

Blizzard’s upcoming shooter, Overwatch, is at the peak of its beta phase. In the next two months, Blizzard will implement a constant stream of patches, rebalances, and bug fixes to refine the game as much as possible before its release on May 29. These patches are also often accompanied by announcements of Overwatch’s planned features. For example, this week’s patch – 1.0.3 28072 – brought with it news of a game mode that should be familiar to Hearthstone players: the Weekly Brawl.

In the context of Overwatch, Brawls act as what other shooters would call mutators. They offer matches separate from Overwatch’s standard modes that follow unique, quirky rules: one Brawl may restrict all players to one hero, or they may randomly select a different hero upon death.

The examples Blizzard gave for Brawls were rather sparse. But a datamine posted Friday on Overwatch community website Overpwn.com has found 14 specific Brawls in the patch’s data files.

Images via Overpwn.com.

Among these brawls are more conventional mutators, like All Supports and All Tanks, as well as some more unusual rule sets. For example, the “Head’s Up!” brawl restricts players to accuracy-based characters (Widowmaker, Hanzo, McCree, and Genji), and requires players to score headshots for kills. The “Super Shimada Bros.” Brawl, meanwhile, offers only Genji and Hanzo with faster abilities and slower ultimates. Whether slower ultimates refers to the rate at which their ultimates build meter or otherwise remains to be seen.

You can view the entire list of datamined Brawls here.

This is likely just a sampling of the Brawls we will see at Overwatch’s release. What new and exciting alterations to the base gameplay can you think of?

Overwatch will be launching on May 24, 2016, for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.

Nile Koegel: MXDWN's resident retromancer. Aspiring flavor text writer. Sometimes, he'll even play a video game.
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