Imagine playing Overwatch with the sound turned all the way down. No voice chat to help you coordinate with your allies, no audible clues when an enemy is looking to flank you, and no warning when McCree yells out what time it is. Now imagine playing around all that, all the time, and still managing to be one of the best players in the world.
For one player, that’s not something that’s limited to their imagination. Over the weekend, Overwatch streamer Maxim76 – who is deaf – broke into the game’s top 500 for the very first time. Boasting a skill rating hovering around 4,000, Maxim76 peaked at 482 on the leaderboards last night.
You can check out the exact moment that happened in the Twitch clip embedded below, and it’s heartening to see how much this milestone means. It’d be a pretty impressive feat for any player to have achieved, but in a game as audibly complex as Overwatch, for a deaf player to have done so is an incredible achievement.