The first video showing the bug seemed to emerge from YouTube channel “Jeff Why” over the weekend. In it, he shows the gorilla Winston doing some dances that he most definitely should not have been doing, as well as little tutorial on how to replicate it. Naturally, I had to give it a go. Most of the dance emotes I tried don’t seem too out of place. Zenyatta’s actually seemed like it could’ve been a real emote for Echo. I also tried out Sigma’s sitting emote, which kind of works for some characters, though does break their arms a little.
The real terror comes into play when you use Bastion’s Halloween zombie emote on heroes that are much shorter than him. When Bastion does it, one arm shoots forward while the other droops down, and he drags his legs like a shambling corpse. Apply that same animation to Torbjorn, however, and his body stretches and contorts so much I’m surprised no one tried to exorcise him. (It actually looks weirdly similar to Cyberpunk 2077’s V when you’re using the third-person mod.) If you fancy giving the emote-swapping a go yourself, it’s pretty easy to replicate. It only works in Mystery Heroes, so queue up for that game mode and quickly jump into the hero gallery while you’re searching to select the character you want to knick an emote from. The emote you pick has to be a looping one (like most of the sitting or dancing ones), or it won’t work. Then, when the emote wheel comes up asking where you want to assign your chosen emote, click it right before you get placed into a match (for me spamming this was the best way to ensure it worked). But be warned: if you die in a match, your emotes will be reset as you roll a new character. A little extra incentive to not die, I suppose. My biggest hope is that this bug doesn’t get patched. It’s not game breaking or anything, just a bit of daft fun to kick off your Mystery Heroes sessions. Elsewhere in the land of Overwatch, a new deathmatch map will arrive this year - complete with a cat café. Jeff Kaplan also teased that there’ll be more info on Overwatch 2 at BlizzCon Online in February.
