Except that very nearly wasn’t the case. In a post on the Overwatch forums last night, one player asked how different the game would be if you had to account for gravity-based accidents. As they point out, Junkrat would have to be careful with his mine jump, while Pharah couldn’t just launch into the air with no consequences.
The thread caught the attention of Overwatch’s lead designer, Jeff ‘Papa Jeff’ Kaplan, who chimed in to say that “we actually tried falling damage in the early development of Overwatch.” Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t the gravity-obeying characters who caused problems – Reaper, Widowmaker, and Pharah were all on the list of problematic heroes, while more ground-bound heroes like Reinhardt and Roadhog remain off Kaplan’s list of airborne troublemakers.