Overwatch

Overwatch Hasn’t Felt Quite As Toxic Lately

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot more “Great ult!” and “Thanks for switching!” in Overwatch than “Get wrecked, you useless piece of s***.” After toxicity in Overwatch’s competitive mode reached critical saturation last season, this season, which began September 1st, has felt markedly more positive. Doom and gloom marked Season 5 of Overwatch’s competitive mode,…

Overwatch‘s Most Popular Player Says Picking New Team Was ‘One Of The Hardest’ Decisions Of His Life

As was foretold (by himself), Brandon “Seagull” Larned is back. But the DPS dynamo didn’t return to partially Shaq-owned team NRG Esports. In a move that surprised many, he’s jumped ship to Team EnvyUs Earlier this year, Seagull stepped away from the highest levels of pro Overwatch play to dedicate himself to streaming. At the…

Pro Overwatch Players Use Wall Of Tanks To Overwhelm Enemy Team

A good Overwatch team composition requires balance, offense and defense, light and shadow, yin and yang. Or you can just smother your problems by throwing a bunch of meat at them. That’s what Chinese Overwatch team Miracle Team 1 decided to do against FTD Club in an Overwatch Premier Series match, and it worked shockingly…

Student’s Overwatch Concept Art Is So Good, Even Blizzard Is Talking About It

One Thai computer art student gave the Overwatch community something we didn’t even know we wanted, and now, a lot of us want it very badly. Yesterday, student who goes by RM-Parfait posted a concept design (a project for her Master’s) for a Thai support hero on the Overwatch forumsand, in response, fans begged the Overwatch team…

Overwatch League has finalized all 12 teams and announced the start-date for its inaugural season: January 10, 2018. We’ll get to see the teams in action before then. Starting on December 6, the Blizzard Arena in LA will host a series of preseason exhibition matches.

A Bold New Overwatch Strategy: Being Nice

Become a better Overwatch player with this one neat trick: being nice. You’ll get results almost instantly! “Think about all the times somebody’s said something negative to you in the game and imagine now if somebody had said something positive to you instead,” Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan said in a recent video. Some (myself included)…

Here’s Overwatch’s Mercy In XCOM 2

There’s a mod for XCOM 2 called [WotC] Overwatch Mercy Squadmate. It does exactly what the name and picture here suggest, adding the angelic healer to XCOM 2’snew expansion, War of the Chosen (Though she’s also available for the base game). The mod brings multiple options. You can choose from nine skins, and also from…

Blizzard Says Fighting Toxic Behavior Is Slowing Down Overwatch Updates

Overwatch has serious issues with toxic players, and in recent months, those problems only seem to have gotten worse. Blizzard swears up and down that it’s working to improve player behavior, but according to game director Jeff Kaplan, those efforts are taking a direct toll on other aspects of the game’s development. In a new…

Pro Overwatch Team Starts Cooking Show

Team EnvyUs is a major esports organization whose Overwatch team is like a circling bird of prey. Other teams might be flying high, but Envy’s shadow always looms heavy. So anyway, they’ve started a cooking show. The first episode of EnvyUs’ YouTube show “Envy Eats” stars Overwatch aim god Timo “Taimou” Kettunen and follows him…

It Isn’t Easy Being An Overwatch Fan In Africa

When Shuaib Sookia, an Overwatch fan who lives in the African country of Mauritius, posted to both the game’s subreddit and official forums about how much of a pain it can be to play Blizzard’s team-based shooter without servers located anywhere on the continent of Africa, he wasn’t expecting much in the way of response.…

Two more Overwatch League team buyers have emerged from the world of traditional sports. ESPN reports that Neil Leibman, co-owner of the Texas Rangers, has purchased the Houston Overwatch League slot. Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Philadelphia Flyers, has staked its claim on Philadelphia.

Portraits Of Overwatch Heroes

Jai Kamat is an artist and illustrator from Rochester, New York. You can see more of Jai’s work at his personal site To see the images in their native resolution, click on the “expand” button in the top-left corner. Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of…

Pro Overwatch Players Sing Smash Mouth While Obliterating Opponents

Somebody once told me Envision is gonna roll me. It was a very good weekend for Envision, an American pro Overwatch team that’s recently risen up from obscurity to knock a handful of top teams down a few pegs in Overwatch’s official minor league, Contenders. Confirming their status as up-and-comers with a serious upside, they…

Overwatch’s Mercy Problem

A big controversy within the Overwatch community this year revolved around the healer Mercy. Top players experienced hostility and harassment just for picking the character, and major Overwatch personalities derided the hero for supposedly having a low skill ceiling. Mercy players, the argument went, weren’t actually good. They were just “one trick ponies” who hid…

Pro Doomfist Has Clutch Reaction To Tracer Ultimate

Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb, but you can still try to give it back to the Tracer who threw it. In yesterday’s Overwatch Contenders match between EnVyUs and Kungarna, Michael “mykL” Padilla stuck Kim “Effect” Hyeon with Tracer’s Pulse Bomb, all but ensuring Kim’s imminent demise. Rather than share the…

Zelda vs Overwatch

You can’t get Overwatch on the Switch, but if you could, I bet it’d be full of cameos like this. This is by 3D artist Aaron Walker. If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s a big fancy render of some fan art that we posted last year by French artist Jeremy Vitry The rig and…

Blizzard Fixes “Culturally Insensitive” (Not Really) Overwatch Sign

Blizzard “upset” (not really, but bear with me) many Australians recently with a “culturally insensitive” sign in the new Junkertown map on Overwatch. That sign has now been fixed, and we are all free to get on with our lives. As first detailed in this Kotaku Australia story, the map—which is set in a desolate…

Overwatch Fans Are Losing It Over A Character Who Has Barely Appeared

The Overwatch fandom’s favorite new character has only appeared within an in game poster, but that hasn’t stopped players from drawing fanart of her, cosplaying her, or declaring her as their wife. A week ago, Bizzard previewed a new map for Overwatch, Junkertown, and dropped a new short featuring Junkrat and Roadhog. In the short,…

Overwatch‘s New Map, Junkertown, Winds Like A Damn Snake

Overwatch’s new escort map, Junkertown, has a precarious, hacked-together feeling to it—a greasy, grimy look that stands in stark contrast to the game’s usual utopian beauty. It never lets you get comfortable, either, mostly because it never stops winding. Junkertown, which is now live on Overwatch’s PC public test realm, doesn’t reinvent the exploding death…

Overwatch ‘Bronze To Grandmaster Challenges’ Are Fun To Watch, But A Little Shady

“We’re gonna have some fun here,” Beeftipsy said, spraying his tag on the ground of Overwatch’s Oasis map, the Overwatch equivalent of cracking one’s knuckles. It was the first day of the Twitch streamer’s “Bronze to Grandmaster challenge,” a trendy stunt in which master players who want to flex their competitive muscle live for fans…