Overwatch just broke one of its big design rules: Every car is a flying car. And in response, fans are deeming the game “unplayable.”
In a 2015 interview with the L.A. Times, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan explained that the rule came out of Titan, Blizzard’s never-released MMORPG project. Titan’s dev team had hard-banned flying cars. As Titan’s successor, Overwatch, in contrast, would only include cars that fly. And that, the L.A. Times writes, is its “lone arbitrary rule.”
Last week, Overwatch introduced a new PvE mode along with its “Uprising” event. I love it. But I didn’t notice a crucial thing: There is a car that has wheels. Sure, the events of “Uprising” occur seven years before Overwatch, which itself takes place around 2076. But is seven years a large enough gap to justify this horrible transgression?
Athread on Battle.net declared that “THE NEW PVE MODE IS TOTALLY UNPLAYABLE!!.” Some sample comments:
Inspired, DarwinStreams made a video illustrating the issue at hand:
The conversation continued over on Reddit, where Overwatch players exclaimed that “This is why I don’t play Overwatch anymore. . . I already called my lawyer” and “This is absolutely shocking and I will probably stop playing until this issue is resolved.”
It’s good that us Overwatch fans can joke about our tendency to lose our shit over small tweaks to the game. It is good. But we also hope that this glaring error will get fixed immediately, or at least immediately after Soldier’s ultimate attack is nerfed.