'Overwatch' Lunar Map: New Horizon map has Easter Egg referencing the first human in space
Zarya has a new voice line on the Overwatch Public Test Realm (PTR) that's going to sound like nonsense to most people — but it's actually a clever Easter Egg that quotes Yuri Gagarin, a Russian astronaut who was the first human to travel to space.
If you want to hear it in-game, you'll have to play as Zarya on the new Horizon Lunar Colony assault map and interact with the large telescope. Every character has a voice line they'll say when they look through it and gaze at Earth, but unless you know Russian, Zarya's won't sound like much. (You can hear it in the video below at the 3:15 mark.)
Here's the translation of what she says:
Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!
Zarya directly quotes Gagarin's words here, which he said after his 108-minute-long voyage around Earth in 1961. It just goes to show that even in a fantastical sci-fi future filled with floating robotic monks and laser guns, the simple act of gazing at our planet from afar is enough to inspire a sense of wonder.
The Horizon Lunar Colony map should be available on the live version of Overwatch in just a few weeks. You can read up on the current changes here.
More Overwatch news and updates
For more on Overwatch, check out the rest of what Mic has to offer. Here is an essay about how Efi Oladele was a missed opportunity for Overwatch, a deep dive into the issue of sexual harassment in Overwatch voice chat, an unintentionally hilarious infographic showing the most popular Overwatch characters in each state, a criticism of Blizzard's failures in its design of Symmetra and a dive into a cool trend on Tumblr that converts your most-played heroes into a psychedelic illustration.