Overwatch 2 players won’t let Blizzard forget a 7 year old Reaper ability yet to arrive

Jeremy Gan
Reaper in Overwatch

Overwatch 2 players are not letting Blizzard forget a seven-year-old teaser of a Reaper ability that has still yet to arrive in-game. 

From Overwatch’s beta in 2015 to today’s version of Overwatch 2, it is essentially a completely different game. And through its lifetime, many of its original heroes have gotten major reworks to their kits. 

Included among them is Reaper. Back in the beta days for those who remember it, Reaper had healing orbs he could pick up after killing an enemy. Obviously, things have changed since then as now he has a healing passive, but it goes to show that no heroes ever truly stay the same.

Back before Overwatch released, it was first unveiled with an animation that featured a fight between Winston and Tracer vs Widowmaker and Reaper. And players noticed a missing ability. 

In a Reddit thread posted on the Overwatch subreddit, a player pointed out the reveal cinematic saw Reaper use grenade launchers as his primary fire, even dropping grenades as he fled away. 

Naturally, the player then jokingly questioned when it would be coming into the game? As you would expect, the community saw this as an opportunity to riff on the ability coming with the canceled talent trees.

Others in the thread also pointed out that the animation saw Winston throw Tracer in the air, wondering if the game would ever get a “Tracer catapult”. 

Of course, it really is doubtful if Reaper would ever get an update to his abilities on the whole, especially one as drastic as giving him a grenade launcher. However, Reaper’s scrapped grenade launcher lives one in other heroes. 

In an old Developer Update, the devs actually offhandedly mentioned how some of Reaper’s old abilities eventually made their way into the game through Junkrat and Roadhog. 

About The Author

Jeremy is a writer on the Australian Dexerto team. He studied at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and graduated with a Bachelors in Journalism. Jeremy mainly covers esports such as CS:GO, Valorant, Overwatch, League of Legends, and Dota 2, but he also leans into gaming and entertainment news as well. You can contact Jeremy at jeremy.gan@dexerto.com or on Twitter @Jer_Gan