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While there’s been a fair amount of discussion surrounding Overwatch 2 recently with Season 5’s launch this week, two maps have now been removed from the game’s rotation, Antarctica: Peninsula and Paríaso. The removal itself was due to a game-breaking exploit that would regularly see every player in a match drop to a single-digit framerate.
Funnily enough, the glitch is a returning bug from the original Overwatch except with a new hero now causing the problem. Essentially, if Genji forcibly glitched outside of spawn multiple times he’d be able to activate his ultimate at the start of a round. This in turn would tank every player’s framerate in the lobby to absurdly low levels including the person playing as Genji.
However, the latest variant of this glitch actually has nothing to do with Genji. Ironically enough it’s Mercy this time around killing players’ PCs as she can now replicate the same issue. While Genji’s bug was limited to him using his ultimate ability, in Mercy’s case should a player break out of spawn too many times they will instead visibly pull both their staff and sidearm out at the same time.
Again, this issue results in players’ framerate dipping drastically as well as their latency and interpolation delay spiking immensely leading to a completely unplayable experience. These issues are only worsened too as if Mercy dies in-game this will send players’ frames dropping even further into the single digits.
As a result of these issues, the Overwatch 2 development team have completely removed Paríaso and Antarctica: Peninsula from the map rotation in their latest patch saying, “We [Blizzard] have disabled the Paríaso and Antarctica: Peninsula map as we investigate an issue with performance when certain heroes are played.”
In the update post Blizzard apologised for the inconvenience and thanked players for their understanding. They continued, “Our team is working to resolve these issues, and we will provide more information as soon as we have updates!”
In comparison to Blizzard’s latest controversies, this is relatively small as Overwatch 2 players are furious as PvE missions are gated behind a paywall. Alongside this, it was also announced at the Xbox Games Showcase that the Overwatch 2 New Heroes Starter Pack is coming to Xbox Game Pass on August 10.
