Halloween isn’t over yet, at least in Overwatch 2. Developer Blizzard Entertainment has announced that a temporary mode introduced for the game’s Halloween event is sticking around for one more week. The announcement comes after the new mode — which incorporates some elements from a canceled Overwatch 2 story campaign — was widely praised by players.
The Junkenstein’s Laboratory mode was added to Overwatch 2 in the Halloween Terror update Oct. 15. While it’s player-versus-player like the rest of the game, Junkenstein’s Laboratory includes some features originally conceived as part of the cooperative mode that’s since been scrapped.
In Junkenstein’s Laboratory, players stack “mutations” on their characters. Every player starts with two, gaining an additional one at the beginning of each subsequent round. Mutations are unique to each character — of which 12 are available in the special mode — and have effects ranging from increased damage for certain abilities to adding new ways to buff teammates. These mutations are based on hero traits, a feature that would have enabled players to customize their chosen character in the announced cooperative mode, had it not been canceled.
Junkenstein’s Laboratory has been extremely well-received since its introduction, and some players are now even calling on Blizzard to make it permanent. Two weeks after the mode launched, game director Aaron Keller announced that 15 percent of daily Overwatch 2 players were still playing it. It was so popular at that point that Blizzard even released a balance patch specifically for the limited-time mode.
Since its launch, Overwatch 2 has had a hard time keeping players happy. It’s been criticized for its expensive microtransactions for character skins, a move to an overall more aggressive style of play, the shift from six-player teams to five players, and its eventual dropping of the promised story mode. The fact that players are now going wild for even a sliver of what was planned for the campaign shows just how much their hopes were riding on its release, and it may send a clear message to Blizzard about what it could take to finally placate them.
Making Junkenstein’s Laboratory, or some version of it, permanent could go a long way toward winning players back, but it’s not clear how likely such a possibility is. Blizzard likely saw the limited-time mode as a way to reuse aspects of the cooperative mode that would otherwise never have seen the light of day, but keeping it around for good and continuing to update it would entail a lot more work than just adding it as a temporary diversion.
Further complicating the picture, Blizzard is already set to work on players’ other biggest gripe about the game. Overwatch 2 is set to begin testing new variants of its 5v5 format this season and two versions of the original’s 6v6 battles beginning next season. Players have been eager to see what this partial return to form has to offer, but maintaining these new modes could make the prospect of keeping Junkenstein’s Laboratory around at the same time untenable. It would be even more of a stretch if Blizzard decides to make 5v5 and 6v6 modes available in the long term, which the developer has already said it’s considering.
For now, players can at least look forward to one more week of what may be the most crowd-pleasing change ever made to Overwatch 2. Even if Junkenstein’s Laboratory doesn’t stick around beyond that, players have made it clear that moving in this direction could mean a brighter future for the game. It’s up to Blizzard to decide what to do about it.
