Overwatch devs reveal hilarious Genji rework you didn’t know you needed

Andrew Amos
Genji with shurikens out in Overwatch

The Overwatch developers love recreating the community’s ideas for hero reworks. From giving Orisa and Torbjorn the ability to wall climb and making Zenyatta walk, Team 4 have now come up with quite possibly their best one yet: giving Genji Torbjorn’s turret.

Back when the Overwatch League had crowds, seeing community request signs were commonplace. Cult favorite characters like Torbjorn often got the most rework requests, like giving the short Swedish engineer the ability to wall climb like Genji or Hanzo.

The devs typically oblige with the funnier ⁠— and easier ⁠— ones. After all, they love the game, so why not have some fun with it?

Genji throwing shurikens in Overwatch on King's Row
The Overwatch devs have had a bit of fun reworking Genji’s kit.

This time though, the big boss ⁠— Jeff Kaplan ⁠— has come through with a suggestion he wanted his team to work on, and they delivered.

“Can Genji build a turret? I wanna see that,” Kaplan said in a September 7 video. In true Overwatch fashion, Team 4 jumped onto the task right away, giving Genji his own little Torbjorn turret.

Now, Genji’s turret doesn’t shoot out any regular bullets you’d get out of Torbjorn’s contraption. No, the Shimada brother has to do things his own way ⁠— firing out one of his katanas whenever locking onto an enemy. Well, kind of ⁠— they are little noodle-like things.

They didn’t give any new voicelines for Genji deploying his turret, so it’s a bit weird seeing the Japanese DPS character speaking with a thick Swedish accent. However, they managed to bring Kaplan’s vision to life.

That’s not the only horrifying ⁠— or amazing, depending on your opinion ⁠— reworks the Overwatch devs are thinking about. They want to make B.O.B. fly, give Baby D.Va Tracer’s blink, and best of all, let Torbjorn fly like all the recent memes.

“Let Bastion fly! It just seems like such an obvious thing you know? He can already turn into a tank and a big mini gun. Why can’t he turn into a helicopter and fly away? Seems legit to me,” said lead character technical artist Dylan Jones.

Between the wall climbs and fused abilities, soon enough, Overwatch is going to have enough of these crazy community ideas to potentially make an arcade mode. Jeff, if you’re reading, we’re pretty sure this will go gangbusters.

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