What you need to know
- In shooter games, players are sometimes able to break out of a map and go out of bounds, or OOB.
- Often times, this allows them to shoot at enemies from inside pieces of map geometry, making them impervious to return fire.
- Players in an Overwatch 2 Practice vs. AI match have shared a match replay with the community in which a Bastion bot accidentally breaks out of the map and begins hunting down all the players in the lobby from its out of bounds position.
- The Bastion bot was able to kill everyone so easily that the AI team, hilariously, ended up winning the match.
If you play first-person shooter games regularly, you’ve probably seen players break out of maps before, either accidentally or intentionally. These glitches with map geometry allow players to go out of bounds (or “OOB”) and explore areas that aren’t supposed to be accessible. In many cases, you’ll hit a kill barrier when clipping out of maps, resulting in the death of your character. However, whenever these barriers aren’t present, players can often walk around inside pieces of map geometry and grief others by shooting them from within while remaining completely impervious to return fire.
I’ve seen plenty of OOB exploits get taken advantage of over the years, including several in both the original Overwatch and Blizzard’s revamp of the hero shooter, Overwatch 2. However, something I’ve never seen is an AI-controlled bot accidentally break out of a map…until now.
As seen in the latter half of this video from Overwatch 2 content creator Flats (the exact timestamp is embedded below), a Bastion bot in a Practice vs. AI match somehow manages to fall out of bounds by jumping against a wall near the first point of Shambali Monastery. It then proceeds to hilariously and ruthlessly hunt everyone in the lobby by shooting up through the ground, with the poor players completely unaware of where the damage was coming from.
Adding to the comedy is the fact that Bastion’s Recon and Assault forms fire hitscan bullets that have next to no spread and can deal tons of damage quickly, making it one of the deadliest Overwatch 2 heroes to OOB with. Because of this, the death of every player the bot decided to shoot at was practically guaranteed. Also, since there wasn’t a single part of the map they could use for reliable cover other than their spawn room, they ended up losing the match to the AI team.
“We’re at the point were we can now legitimately report the GAME ITSELF for cheating,” wrote one amused commenter on Flats’ video. “My cheeks hurt so much from [laughing at] seeing the AI Bastion go under the map and hunt the players, like what’s the likelihood of this happening??? I pledge my loyalty to our future AI overlords on desperate attempt to be spared,” said another.
Some viewers also put forth theories about how and why this happened. “So I think that the bot is programmed to take the shortest possible route to players, maybe even with some little things additional like “look for cover” etc. Either way I think the coding worked out in such a way that the bot realized ‘Hey theres this wall here that just lets me go everywhere, I’m going to do that,'” speculated user @ramonyanez89.
After watching the replay of the game, Flats jumped into a private lobby to see if the OOB glitch could be replicated, and thankfully, it doesn’t look like it’s consistent or easy to perform since he wasn’t successful. With that said, there’s clearly something going on here if a bot managed to accidentally clip through a wall, so hopefully Blizzard patches the bug out of the map soon.
Overwatch 2 is one of the best Xbox games on the market for fans of hero shooters, and it’s free-to-play on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows PC, PS5, and PS4.
