New maps in games often cause people to get lost when fist exploring them. The new Overwatch map Petra, has kicked this entire concept up a notch. The map is a dizzying maze of passageways that lead to the center of the map where a single health pack spawns, however, players wandering around these passages can get lost easily. The problem has become so bad that Overwatch is now kicking players for inactivity because they can’t find their way out of the passages.
A player on the forums posted that he was kicked out of the game due to inactivity because he didn’t interact with any other players, reason being that he couldn’t find them at all. He said that in most Death Match games you get shot at around every corner but in Petra it’s not uncommon to walk for minutes without finding anybody. Many other Overwatch players jumped in on the discussion and criticized the map for a variety of reasons.
Some people state that the map is indeed too big, while others argued that the map wasn’t too big but that there were just too many passageways and that some of these had to be closed off. There were also points being made about the spawn points on the map, and that they were way too far away from the action. If you died you’d have to wander around for a while before being back in the fray. There were also complaints being made that the high ground was too high on this map, and the only way to win is by playing Pharah. Some players reported that they didn’t find any problems with the map and never got lost, but not everyone has such a great sense of direction. Clearly this map has some issues for a large amount of people.
One of Overwatch’s developers, Bill Warnecke, responded stating “we appreciate the feedback on AFK timings for Petra. We’ve been looking into this and are planning an adjustment to the timing in an upcoming patch or hotfix.” It’s clear that for the time being they have no intention of altering the map design or size of the map, but will instead increase the AFK timers for this map specifically so that players don’t get punish for being lost.
