Thank you to everyone who participated in the Rivals Workshop Character Creation Contest! Once again the community has surpassed our wildest expectations by creating some of the coolest characters we’ve ever seen. We can’t wait to go through all of the submissions, and can already tell you’ve all put in a lot of work and time.

With that in mind, we wanted to be upfront that judging will take a lot of time as well. There will be a couple of months before we’re ready to announce the winner. Our team will be deliberating and comparing characters on all kinds of metrics — design, fun, fit, potential lore and more.

For players interested in checking all of these original characters out – you can download any of the contest characters here by browsing with the Rivals 2 Contest tag on Steam.

Next Stop Genesis X

One of our goals is to give these characters a chance to show off how cool they can be in a tournament setting. To achieve that, our plan for the Workshop bracket at Genesis this year is to only use contest characters to fill out the roster. This will be a great chance to see how some of the designs shake out in competitive play. You can start practicing now, and we’ll pare things down and announce an official legal character list February 1st that removes any that may break Steam ToS or has any other issues we find on review.

For creators, we know people already have plans to update characters for the event and we encourage bugfixes and balance tweaks as long as huge changes aren’t made. Final judging will still be conducted on the versions submitted at the end of the contest, but we wanted to stipulate this so people feel alright making small changes without feeling like they’re breaking the contest rules.

We also wanted to make sure that people knew along with some time before the winner is announced, there will be a much longer period of time before the character joins the Rivals 2 roster. Because our team members each have their own expertise, we employ parallel development. We already have post-launch characters and content at different stages of development. The Workshop Contest winner is currently slated to between the 15th and 20th character that joins the Rivals 2 roster. We have already seen some amazing ideas that excite our team and we can’t wait to dig in and find out which character will be the best fit to join the Aether Universe.