I'm tired of seeing only Numbani at noon or Necropolis at midnight." Blizzard is adding a playful touch to its "Overwatch 2" maps.

In a fairly technical blog post on the "Overwatch" site, software engineer Marco Alamia and developers Bruce Wilkie and Fabien Christin introduced a new feature called "Environment States" that the team is using. Simply put, it combines the map's environmental properties (fog, lighting, shadows, weather effects) into a single entity that can be hot-swapped between levels.

Currently, lighting and environmental effects are grouped by level and carefully crafted to get the look and feel of a particular "overwatch" space just right. However, with environmental states, that atmosphere can be plugged into a completely different arena.

"Take a look at the fast-paced deathmatch map of 'Necropolis,'" Christine explains. 'You've probably played it in a night scenario. The cold blue of the night contrasts harmoniously with the bright orange of the torches lit around the buildings.

"But let's say you want to try another scenario and decide to try the hot desert colors of the 'Temple of Anubis. With the new environmental state system, all you have to do is take the environmental state from the Temple of Anubis and apply it to the necropolis."

The rest of the blog post delves deeper into the technical details of how this all works. This is very much a developer tool, and many of its uses are far less dramatic (e.g., changing the camera's exposure on a particular part of the map). However, it seems to have expanded the world of gameplay scenarios beyond simply looking at Kings Row in daylight.

"Suppose you are sent on a mission to restore the connection to the Overwatch satellite link at the Necropolis, and while defending against a null sector attack, a sandstorm quickly approaches the location and blows all around you! Adding a new sandstorm environmental condition on top of the sunny scenario could make the mission a little more difficult.

We recently took a closer look at PVP in Overwatch 2, and Blizzard has announced some significant changes to its format: with 5vs5 matchups and more capable tanks, it looks like we can expect more dynamic battles, with the ability to play with more than one player at a time. What could be more dynamic than a thunderstorm suddenly surging across the map?