Overwatch

My Hunt For The Mysterious Man Or Machine Controlling The Blizzard Arena’s Light-Up Halo

The Blizzard Arena stage has a massive light-up halo on the ceiling that serves as a progress bar for Overwatch objectives. As a team captures a point, the halo fills up with that team’s colors. It’s an impressive illustration of who’s winning. And it’s all manual. Or so I’ve been told. The other elements on…

My First Night As A Philadelphia Fusion Fan

I’m too old for this. “This” is the official viewing party of the first match of the Philadelphia Fusion, the Overwatch League team owned by Comcast. I’m 34, and I’m at a college bar in West Philadelphia on a Thursday night. It’s crowded. I’m surrounded by cosplayers, cheerleaders, college kids and actual kids. I did…

An Overwatch (Cosplay) Love Story

For their one-year wedding anniversary last year, Kalindi and her husband decided to indulge in a little Overwatch cosplay. Kalindi made both outfits: a standard Mercy for herself, and Soldier 76’s Daredevil skin for her husband. You can see more of Kalindi’s cosplay at her Facebook page

Last Night’s Dallas-Seoul Game Showed How Fun Overwatch League Can Be

The Overwatch League’s first night of competition kicked off with hundreds of thousands tuning in on Twitch to watch a slightly tuned up broadcast, OWL’s experienced commentating crew, and two boring, lopsided opening games. Both the Los Angeles Valiant and the Los Angeles Gladiators steamrolled their opponents (San Francisco and Shanghai, respectively) without much resistance…

A couple audience members at the Overwatch League season one debut just got their Pepe sign taken away. They’d been using Pepe, a meme commonly associated with alt-right movements, to cheer on Dallas Fuel. Oddly, the video feed in the arena briefly zoomed in on it at one point. Eventually, the two audience members were…

The Blizzard Arena has a slick setup for in-person Overwatch League spectators, featuring screens with the faces of all six players throughout every match, underneath larger screens of their hero lineup. You can’t get that on the Twitch stream, nor can you hear the crowd scream “USA! USA!” whenever Seoul Dynasty makes a mistake.

No Overwatch League Team Signed The Game’s Most Notable Female Pro To Their Roster

LOS ANGELES, Calif.—During yesterday’s Overwatch League media day in Los Angeles, one of the most mentioned names belonged to a player who’s not even on an OWL team. Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon, a top-level Zarya player who overcame a rash of cheating accusations and threats in 2016, was on the tip of everybody’s tongues, but nowhere…

No One Knows How To Run An Overwatch League Team Yet

When it launches tonight, Overwatch League will become the biggest undertaking in the history of esports. Backed by massive investments from sports billionaires and tech companies, esports, if you choose to believe the hype, has finally grown up. And yet, despite the fact that Overwatch League is ostensibly a global undertaking with teams “based” on…

Report: Twitch Signs Two-Year Deal With Overwatch League Worth At Least $90 Million 

Overwatch League’s two-year deal to stream its matches on Twitch is the biggest such contract in esports history, worth at least $90 million, according to a new report from Sports Business Journal Twitch will stream all regular season and postseason contests and serve as the sole broadcaster for half of the league’s 12 weekly matches,…

A Viewer’s Guide To Overwatch League

Overwatch League kicks off tomorrow in the Blizzard Arena in Burbank, CA with a trio of matches starting at 7 pm Eastern. Blizzard will broadcast the league’s games via both Twitch and Major League Gaming. Preseason matches only broadcasted on MLG, which had the dubious benefit of no available viewership statistics. Now that the debut…

Fan Creates New Overwatch Maps That Look Like The Real Deal

It would be easy to look at this video, listen to the music, check the quality of the design and lighting and models and think hey, these are our first looks at some new maps for Overwatch. But nope, they’re all the work of 3D artist Joshua Llorente. NOTE: I published this post in error…

There’s an official Overwatch League app now. It gives you quick access to match streams, VODs, a season schedule, team standings, results (with or without spoilers), alerts that matches are happening, and a few other odds and ends. Seems useful! You can grab it for free on the App Store or Google Play

Genji On The Roof

Liam “Mangachu” Campbell is a Canadian Overwatch player who’s quite good, as shown in his use of Eichenwalde’s rooftops to strike with Genji’s ultimate. Campbell is still a free agent, if any teams are still looking to fill out their roster.

Overwatch APEX Tournament Series Is Over

Ahead of the kickoff week of Blizzard’s Overwatch League, South Korean cable network OGN announced that its long-running Overwatch APEX league is over. A statement from OGN went into the specifics: We did our best and agreed to most of Blizzard’s conditions on continuing the competition, but we were notified that Blizzard was preparing a…

Blizzard Can’t Leave Mercy Alone

All of the support players in Overwatch League will have a tough time during the first competitive season, slated to start next Wednesday night, and it’s all because of the character Mercy. The angelic healer has undergone multiple makeovers in the past few months, all with the intent to balance her most controversial ability: the…

How Not To Stop Your Nerdy Child From Becoming A Pro Gamer

Pro gaming has yet to become normalized enough for the parents of America to feel proud of their offspring for pursuing it professionally. At least, not until those children defy all expectations and start making hundreds of thousands of dollars in tournament winnings. Parents of pro gamers told the Wall Street Journal all the tactics…

Overwatch Fan’s Cairo Map Looks Good Enough To Be In The Game

Overwatch already has one map set in Egypt, but fan Joshua llorente has made a very good case for the addition of another. llorente spent two months creating his own Cairo map from scratch in Epic’s Unreal Engine. “All assets including textures and models are created by me,” he said on Reddit. “No downloaded content.” It’s…

I Just Got A Bunch Of Overwatch Gift Cards, And I’m Terrified To Use Them

Before we went out for Christmas dinner, my mom handed me a small bag stuffed with wrapping paper. I dug into it, expecting to find candy, money, or some mix of the two. I did find those things, but also Overwatch loot box gift cards. I was ecstatic. A day later, however, I’ve realized that…

Junkrat Thinks Overwatch Is A Stealth Game

Watch your back, Solid Snake. Seriously. Junkrat is about as far from a stealth character as you can get in Overwatch, or video games in general, for that matter. He makes things go boom. Also, himself. But there is a certain subtle art to deploying his ult, the explosive riptire. I’ve just never seen anybody…

Overwatch League Players Keep Getting In Trouble

Overwatch is still young as far as sports go, but if you’re a professional player of anything, whether that means basketball or Russian knight fighting, you’re gonna be held to a higher standard than most. Overwatch League’s players are having trouble with that. There’s still about a month left until Blizzard kicks off the first…