Remember Bastion? He was a robot attack character in Overwatch and its recently released free-to-play sequel, Overwatch 2. However, if you’ve played Blizzard’s character shooter in the last ten days, you’ll have noticed that the dangerous robot is uh…missing. Actually, Bastion has been out of the game longer than he’s been in the game at this point. Fortunately, Blizzard has revealed that Bastion as well as Torbjorn and a recently removed map will all be returning to the game on October 25, by which point they will have been out of the game twice as long as they were in it.
Overwatch 2 hasn’t had a great launch. The hero shooter rolled out across PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC on October 4. And almost immediately it ran into server issues caused by DDoS attacks. Then there were issues with a cell phone requirement, problems with inviting friends to your group, extended downtimes, and more. It’s been a big mess!
And then on October 10, after players discovered some nasty tricks that allowed for infinite and stacked abilities, Bastion was removed completely from the game. The dwarf warrior and turret lover, Torbjorn, was also removed, but only from competitive play. At the time, Blizzard said the characters were taking a “quick trip” back into the garage for some fixes. 10 days later… they aren’t back yet. But at least we know when they will return. And players will have to wait an additional five days to see Bastion and Torbjorn return on October 25. Character removals from live service games aren’t totally unprecedented, of course, but they don’t typically happen right at launch, and they don’t typically go on quite this long.
Also, on top of all this, yesterday, Blizzard announced it will now be removing the Junkertown map from Overwatch 2 due to a bug that was causing “graphic performance issues” during gameplay. It’s reported that folks could cause these issues on purpose. So Overwatch 2 currently is down a map and two characters, with one of them being completely gone. You can’t even play with Bastion in practice mode or against bots. You can’t even look at your cosmetics for the robot. It’s like he never existed, a dream for some players, no doubt.
Despite these issues, Blizzard says that Overwatch 2 has reached 25 million players across all platforms. It’s an impressive number, especially compared to the first game, but the sequel is also free and available on twice as many platforms from the get-go.
While players won’t be able to enjoy Bastion, Torb, or Junkertown just yet, if you log in this weekend, it’ll be the start of the double XP event that Blizzard is throwing as an apology for the rocky launch of the game.
