Overwatch 2 removes Bastion and Torbjörn, bug locks many more heroes

Overwatch 2’s troubled launch continues: On Monday, Blizzard had to take the game offline for emergency maintenance after a plan to remove Bastion and Torbjörn from rotation had the unintended side-effect of locking a whole swath of characters — around a third of the roster — for some players.

According to a tweet from the official Overwatch account and a known issues tracker on the official forums, Bastion was completely disabled in the game, and Torbjörn disabled in competitive play, at 3 p.m. PDT. “Both of these heroes are experiencing bugs that heavily impact gameplay, and we’ll share an update on them soon,” Blizzard said. According to reports from players, a bug with Bastion’s ultimate ability was allowing players to spam artillery at their opponents, while Torbjörn’s Overload ability could be triggered for double its usual duration depending on the timing of the button press.

Soon, however, players began reporting that large portions of their unlocked heroes had been locked. For Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez, 12 of 34 characters became unavailable.

Blizzard confirmed the issue on its bug tracker at 7:01 p.m. EDT. It blamed the server-side bug. “The team is aware of a new issue that prevents players from accessing all their owned heroes,” the developer said. “This is caused by an issue with our servers that tracks player progression. We are working to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible.”

Soon after, Overwatch 2It was completely offline for one hour. Kotaku reported that the issue was resolved for some but not all players when it returned online.

Overwatch 2 It has been a difficult week for the first week. At launch, the huge influx of new players, plus what Blizzard called a “mass DDoS” attack, caused server issues that rendered the game unplayable for many players. Even with server maintenance, connection problems have continued. Blizzard was forced to remove the controversial requirement that a telephone number be linked to an account on Battle.net for most players. A bug in the in-game store allowed players to buy products accidentally, while the game still registered keystrokes.