Oh, the tunes people are playing on Overwatch's new Parisian pianos
Je t'aime!
Yesterday evening, Blizzard popped the cork on a brand new Overwatch map called Paris, which is set in Paris - wouldn't it be weird if it wasn't?
It's a gorgeous, ornate recreation of the city of love, complete with singing omnic cabaret robots, narrow alleys, macarons, the Eiffel tower and the river Seine. You can even hear familiar French police sirens wailing in the background.
More importantly, Paris has playable pianos - two of them! All their white keys and black keys work as you would expect, which is impressive - this is no mere window dressing. And just in like in real-life, when you plonk a playable piano down in public, people endeavour to play it.
Here, for instance, is Mercy playing the iconic motif from Beethoven's Für Elise. Not to be outdone by Russian powerlifter Zarya playing Für Elise, whose noisy gun gets in the way of her rendition, though her projectile smashing the champagne bottles at the end is inspired. Bravo!
Moving away from Beethoven, and here's Bastion with a rousing performance of the Mario theme:
Followed by Mercy (again - she has an accurate and not-so-noisy gun) punching out the fundamentally familiar Tetris theme:
Which has no doubt frustrated Bastion.
One piano is housed in a fancy green-ceilinged lounge near capture point A - Paris is an Assault map, so it has a point A and a point B for capture - and the other is very near the spawn of the defending team, to the left (if you're running out of the spawn), in the open-aired room of a grand chateau.
Paris is currently playable on the PC Public Test Realm. It has no multiplatform release date beyond "soon". Maybe this coming Tuesday? Maybe the Tuesday after?