Blizzard jumped on the first-person shooter bandwagon with the release of Overwatch for Microsoft Windows, the Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4 in May. It basically pits one team of six heroes against another across more than twelve maps. Each map has a specific focus, such as three that are dedicated to escort scenarios and three that have teams controlling a specific point. However, a few straying players figured out a way to move across the entire Nepal map without having to wait for the current stage to end.
A brief explainer: Nepal is one of the “control” maps consisting of three stages. When one stage is complete, the teams move on to the next stage. The transition between each does not include a loading screen, so essentially players are locked to the stage’s designated area of one large map instead of the game loading up three smaller maps. That stage-based lockdown prevents full access to the entire map, or that’s what Blizzard intended.
There’s really no benefit to this newfound “glitch” other than accessing an area presently not populated by the two opposing teams. However, once this area is reached, visitors will see that all of the map’s assets are already loaded, such as health kits, breakables, and so on. What visitors can’t do is interact with the control point, so don’t expect to get an edge over the enemy team by camping on a stage before everyone else arrives.
To access the map’s restricted areas, the two players used the support hero Mercy. This character has a passive ability called Angelic Descent that allows the player to slowly fall to the ground as if using a slow, invisible parachute. This hero also has resurrect ability that restores full health to a fallen ally. With this combo, both players can jump down onto a brick wall, and then jump into an open realm surrounding all stages that’s filled with sky boxes, ceilings, and death planes.
Eventually, players maneuver into a mountain with no collision detection, hug the rocky wall a bit, and then drop down to hover underneath the targeted stage. There seems to be a specific point of entry where the players can “fly” up and enter the stage without falling back through the “floor.”
“You can do interesting things like, if you head back to your base (within the deserted stage) and change hero, you will spawn and change in this area, and not back above (in the current playable stage)” notes Youtuber hulkman503. “So, for example, if I were to change into Symmetra, I could bring the entire team here. I just have to sit there and wait five and a half centuries for my Ultimate to charge.”
The only way to get back to “civilization” is to die, and when that happens, the game will respawn the player in the current stage area. Nepal, it seems, is the only map in Blizzard’s Overwatch library for the moment that has a “glitch” of this extent. We expect the company to patch this secret exit with an update in the very immediate future.
