Ever gaze into the hoary peaks of Overwatch’s Nepal map and wonder what’s out there? What lies beyond the map space’s endless combat purgatory, Blizzard’s tiny death island? A couple of Overwatch players managed to break free. Here’s what they found.
In this video, hulkman503 and friend of hulkman503 demonstrate how to break outside Nepal’s usual boundaries. Playing as two Mercys, they manage to gently drift onto an entire second map:
You might recognise the second map as another playable portion of Nepal. However, it’s meant to be accessible only during a different round. The fact that players can reach it now is a pretty gigantic exploit, and it will almost certainly be patched asap.
Still, it’s pretty interesting to get this brief under-the-hood (and, er, the mountain) look at how Overwatch maps function. While you can’t capture points on the second map, you can go inside your team’s spawn point and switch heroes. I guess Blizzard saw no reason to deactivate that functionality even when a map isn’t the active one in the rotation.
So, why are multiple maps connected in Overwatch? Well, for one it’s pretty cool to be able to look out and see another area you’ve played in. It makes the whole place feel a bit more real. Players, though, have speculated that having multiple maps fully loaded also eliminates load times between rounds.
Maybe, though, Blizzard is just really into ancient memes. Who needs dank when you can have vintage?
Comments
6 responses to “Overwatch Map Glitch Reveals Entire Second Map”
A pretty gigantic exploit? It’s entirely useless.
The only thing it could be possibly useful for would be for a troll symmetra. Otherwise, it’s a cool but ultimately useless glitch
This was known ages ago, I believe there was a post on reddit during the beta about this from memory.
Splatoon does a bit of this to connect the world.
And then you try and check out the train station and fall into oblivion 🙁
I guess this makes sense if all three maps are actually built on the one map. Reduce load time between rounds. Also the POTG would need to re-load the map every time if they were seperate maps and the POTG wasn’t from the last round.