Bang! Zoom! Straight to the new Overwatch map which is set on the Moon
Lunacy
Overwatch [official site], aka the one you still think about when you fall asleep at night even though you are in a happy relationship, is getting a new map. It’s set on the moon. According to the increasingly tangled folklore of the multiplayer hero shooter, the Horizon Lunar Colony is where tanky gorilla Winston comes from. It’s an assault map and, although most of it will be grounded and normal, there are parts of the map where you can prance about in low gravity. But come down here to see what the map itself looks like.
Moon scientists and experimental apes. Yep, that sounds like Overwatch lore, all right. More specific and fun news comes from the accompanying developer update from Jeff Kaplan which goes into details about the effects of changing the gravity during playtests.
“We explored a lot of different options for the moon map,” he says. “At first we had low gravity for the whole map and we felt like it sort of turned the game a little bit into a gimmick… It broke the game in some ways - while fun - that took away from the competitive nature of Overwatch and sort of the solid feel of the game. But we didn’t want to get rid of that altogether.”
So they came to a compromise. Nearby one of the capture points there's an airlock which lets you enter an external low gravity area - an alternative route to the point. You can still breath out here for “whatever magical reason” says the developer. But you can also dance around, you could say, like a lunatic.
But Blizzard do want to let people try this out as a gimmick as well. So there’ll be an arcade mode that enables low gravity on all maps, not just the whole of the new Lunar map, and gravity options will be coming to the custom game browser too, so you can invent your own wacky Moon Modes there.
It’s all live on the Public Test Realm, where enterprising Overwatchers try out the new things Blizzard comes up with (here are the patch notes for that update) but it will be coming to the rest of us sometime later. Carry on, mooners.