Screenshot: Activision Blizzard / Kotaku
Overwatch 2 is haunted right now, and no, it’s not because the game is buggy as hell. If you’ve recently started up Blizzard’s hero shooter, you may have noticed some creepy avatars around a certain loading screen, stuck in super creepy A and T poses. How fitting, especially as we’re getting terrifyingly close to Halloween.
Overwatch 2 arrived this month with a slew of issues, from long queues to locked characters. The game hasn’t had a smooth launch to say the least. But now that things are largely under control – although some issues still exist – players are freaked out by something less urgent but more disturbing: strange avatars posing on the loading screen for Ilios.
Ilios is a Capture the Flag and Control map, one of the few taken from the OG game that just closed in the wake of Overwatch 2’s rocky launch. It’s not a terrifying map per se, with the beautiful sun in the background and the elegant architecture that populate the location. However, things are always sinister when you take a closer look, which is what players have been up to recently. All over the internet, from Reddit to Twitter, there are screenshots of some disturbing little gray dudes randomly frozen in A and T poses during the Ilios loading screen.
Read more: Overwatch 2 accidentally locked out a third of the roster for some players as Blizzard tries to put out fires [Update]
Kotaku fired up Overwatch 2 to check if these creepy mannequins were really there, and yes, they are at the time of writing. We created a custom game and waited on the loading screen of Ilios, to find the bizarre avatars standing there like scarecrows or something, waiting to scare players foolish enough to go looking for them. This is all likely a coincidence, a possible heist during the game’s development, or something in between.
Given how quickly Blizzard is tweaking the game to address the various issues plaguing the live service hero shooter, it’s possible this oversight will be short-lived. Of course, compared to some of the other issues players face like locked rosters or the incessant disconnections, having a few little guys in the background of something most might not even notice is probably low on the priority list. . Still creepy, especially if you weren’t expecting them.
Kotaku has contacted Blizzard for comment.
Read more: Blizzard: Overwatch 2 ‘Launch experience is frustrating for many’
After its October 4 launch, the hero shooter was pretty much a busted mess. It suffered from multiple DDoS attacks that made it unplayable for some, had a chat bug that randomly bought in-game skins without the player’s permission, was full of an error message preventing people from playing with their friends, and a host of other issues which is still ongoing. Those trying to play now will also notice that characters like Torbjorn and Bastion have disappeared from some game modes as Blizzard tries to fix problems with their skill kits.