Overwatch’s new Blizzard World map broke the game

Overwatch’s Winter Wonderland 2018 Blizzard World map reskin for the holiday broke the game and has been disabled until further notice.

There was a lot of confusion on Reddit yesterday after user The_Nerk posted footage of a bunch of players stuck in the spawn room of the new, wintery Blizzard World map. All of them were already Tracer and unable to swap heroes because the game didn’t recognize the room as a spawn location yet. The video is full of a lot of questions and NSFW language, but it’s funny nonetheless.

Blizzard responded today by disabling the map from the rotation in all modes and on all platforms until it can be fixed. “We’re sorry about that and have temporarily disabled the map while we investigate and remind it how good maps should behave,” developer Dan Maas wrote on the forums.

If you we’re hoping to play on the new map and see how beautiful it is yourself, you’re out of luck for now. But you can still look at our gallery before it goes live again. And don’t forget that both King’s Row and Hanamura are still playable in their own winter versions.

This isn’t actually the first time that Blizzard has removed whole maps and heroes from the game. There was a time where D.Va was randomly disabled, and the PTR version of the game has had Horizon Lunar Colony and Reinhardt disabled in the past. Blizzard usually does this quickly to avoid massive, game-breaking bugs that could affect modes like Competitive. Nobody wants to lose games because the game is unplayable.

I hope the map will come back soon, but all of the notes about it’s removal have no estimate on when it’ll be restored. The map itself is full of new visual features, but it didn’t appear that anything would clearly break the map. Games find the strangest ways to break themselves though, so maybe I’m not surprised.