Blizzard has revealed when Bastion and Torbjorn are returning to Overwatch 2.
In a post on the official Blizzard forums, community manager Andy Belcher shared this message:
“Hiya folks,
We have temporarily disabled Junkertown in all queues queues due to a bug that was causing graphic performance issues. Our goal is to re-enable the map, along with Torbjorn and Bastion, with our next planned update on October 25th.
Our apologies for the inconvenience and thank you for your continued support.”
Bastion and Torbjorn were first removed last October 11, 2022, over a week ago, as bugs had made both characters overpowered in specific ways. Bastion was a bigger problem in particular, with his Ultimate breaking Overwatch 2’s character balance completely.
Strangely, when Blizzard did remove Bastion from Overwatch 2, they seemed to have tried to erase him completely. He disappeared from training mode, he stopped being playable vs bots, and he wasn’t even in the list of heroes. It would seem that the problems with having to reprogram and rebalance with Bastion were so serious that they couldn’t keep his model in the game for active players.
Torbjorn was only partly removed, as he remained playable in Quick Play mode.
Overwatch 2 has the dubious distinction of being a definite success at launch, and also being marked with a series of technical issues since launch. As videogamedunkey elaborated not-so-elegantly in this critique video, many players already wish they could play the original Overwatch again, as Overwatch 2 hasn’t added anything notable to the overall package.
Still, Overwatch 2 picked up 25 million players in ten days. That follows days of connectivity issues with even getting into a game. The interest in playing Overwatch 2 was so big that if there were people so frustrated that they didn’t stick around in the queue, more players just came in to replace them. Of course, those players won’t be coming back to a broken game that doesn’t work most of the time forever.
True to form, Blizzard has also not elaborated on the process by which they have fixed Bastion and Torbjorn. They also did not explain why the characters had to be returned via Junkertown, and subsequently, why Junkertown had to be taken down in preparation for their return.
In the same way that Blizzard fans were frustrated with Overwatch 2’s many issues, they have also been frustrated by the lack of communication from the company. Bastion is a popular playable character, for its merits as a character, as well as its featured DPS gameplay.
Ultimately, all these issues will be resolved once Bastion, Torbjorn, and Junkertown, all officially made their return to Overwatch 2. But at the very least, just a little more communication would help Blizzard’s relationship with its own fans.
Source: Blizzard forums via PCGamer
