Esports Express

Overwatch Director Becomes Supervillain, “Sudden Death”

 
The first weeks of Overwatch’s competitive launch saw an once-eager community lambast a shriveled game with broken competitive features. But games besides League of Legends also had their share of problems.

Blizzard’s Overwatch team faced massive internal issues when director Jeff Kaplan snapped into maniacal insanity. Wielding a two-sided coin and a pre-nerf McCree revolver, Kaplan has conducted a villainous spree of extortions and assaults, ending both lives and rankings by pure chance.

“Despite Kaplan’s attempts to incite some sort of political revolt by jumping from rooftop to rooftop, spraying ‘OVERWATCH IS A VIABLE ESPORT’ onto various political landmarks across California, the game has been performing remarkably well,” a scrambled voice from Blizzard headquarters reassured ESEX writers.

“We attribute our success to our gameplay, our well-written characters, and our callbacks to our previous games,” the anonymous source added. “For example: Widowmaker is a cold, dead assassin who murdered the only thing she loved and now goes through the motions of a once-vibrant and enjoyable existence. This is a classic reference to the Starcraft 2 community.”

Reports say that Kaplan had been showing subtle symptoms of his condition for months, such as hiring monkeys with dartboards to group the Overwatch heroes into roles, falling into the vat of volatile chemicals next to the interns’ office, and creating Bastion.

Kaplan is not the only supervillain in the world of hero shooters. Battleborn director Randy Varnell has gained the ability to shapeshift at will, transforming into such nefarious disguises as “Not a MOBA,” “Not Overwatch,” and “Not a Successful Game.” Battleborn writer Aaron Linde developed similar powers, but can only transform into Anthony Burch.

Meanwhile, Team Fortress 2 designer Robin Walker is attempting to hone his time travel powers. He hopes to go back in time in order to release matchmaking when it would have been relevant.

At the time of writing, Jeff Kaplan was found on a burning pile of stopwatches. “Don’t you understand?” Kaplan cackled, as desperate fans attempted to corner him. “We’re all the same. It just takes one bad patch, and we’re all on the same rank.”