Overwatch

New Overwatch Short Explores Mei’s Tragic Origins

There’s a new Overwatch CGI short, and no, it’s not that painfully brief Junkrat and Roadhog comedy sketch from the other day. This time around, Mei’s the star of the show, largely because all of her friends are dead. The new short is a re-telling of Mei’s origin story, beginning with a cryo-hibernation gone wrong…

Blizzard Making A Bunch Of Changes To Overwatch‘s Competitive Mode

Overwatch’s fifth competitive season was not the game’s finest hour. Doom and gloom dominated the proceedings, and no, those aren’t the names of Reaper’s shotguns. For season six, Blizzard is changing things up, albeit with a series of tweaks, as opposed to a total overhaul. The biggest news is that competitive seasons will be shorter…

Overwatch Pro Leaves Wedding Reception, Wins Big Match, Goes Back To Reception

Over the weekend, Overwatch pro Joonas “Zappis” Alakurtti had a decision to make: attend a friend’s wedding, or play his first match in Blizzard’s $100,000 Overwatch Contenders tournament. He chose both. Alakurtti is a member of Finnish organization Team Gigantti, a team with a solid backbone (its members previously played Overwatch for major org Ninjas…

Pro Overwatch Had A Weekend Of Upsets

The first “real” season of Overwatch’s official minor league, Contenders, kicked off over the weekend, and it was characterized by underdog teams repeatedly flipping the script. It began on the UK side of things, with top-ranked European team eUnited losing 1-3 against the recently-founded Team Gigantti. Gigantti, a team made up of former members of…

Overwatch‘s Next Map Is Junkrat And Roadhog’s Old Home

One man’s town made of trash is another man’s treasure. Though honestly, the other man could take or leave the trash and treasure, as long as he gets to blow shit up. Overwatch is about to get a new map called Junkertown. It’s a city made of scrap and sheet metal, a slice of putrid…

Overwatch Pros Melt Before The Zarya-Doomfist Double-Ult

The Zarya-Doomfist combination, sometimes referred to as a “gravfist,” is a simple but effective one-two punch. It’s brutal in public games, but seeing it land in a professional Overwatch match is spectacular. Zarya starts it off with her Graviton Surge, which launches a gravity bomb, sucking opponents into one confined area. Then Doomfist launches into…

Overwatch‘s Best Korean Team Loses To Underdogs’ Daring Doomfist Gambit

So far, there have been three Overwatch APEX tournaments in South Korea. Lunatic Hai has won two of them. Widely regarded as one of the best Overwatch teams in the world—if not the best—they were expected to dismantle relatively unheralded team MVP Space without breaking much of a sweat. Instead, they lost. Lunatic Hai started…

A long-awaited, much-needed report system is finally coming to Overwatch on consoles. It’ll be part of the next big patch, which is in testing but does not yet have a release date. Over the past year, Overwatch’s problems with toxicity and harassment have become dire. Jeff Kaplan says the team is working hard to improve…

Overwatch Player Creates Zombie Mode

Blizzard’s only just now getting around to FPS mainstays like deathmatch with Overwatch’s official modes, but custom games have allowed players to tunnel their way outside the box. In order to create an Overwatch-flavored variant of the ever popular “zombie” FPS mode, one player got very creative. An Overwatch fan by the name of “Deltin”…

Overwatch’s New Deathmatch Modes Still Need Some Work

Down in the cavernous cellars of Château Guillard, it’s just me—playing as Mei—and an enemy Soldier 76. I freeze him, but at the last second he throws down an HP-restoring biotic field, negating much of my hard work. I freeze myself to heal, as well. Then, with our safety nets gone, we dart, dodge, and…

Lúcioball Players Ham It Up For The Camera

Today on Highlight Reel we have Lúcioball celebrations, Sniper Elite physics, GTA V pirouettes, and much more! Watch the video then talk about your favorite highlight in the comments below. Be sure to check out, like, and share the original videos via the links below. Subscribe to Kotaku on YouTube for more! Skyrim – You’re…

Internal Blizzard Memo Details Efforts To Hire, Retain More Women

Blizzard is launching a “global diversity and inclusion initiative” aimed at raising the percentage of women and underrepresented minority groups in its workforce and improving the work environment for those groups, according to an internal company email recently received by Kotaku Only 21 percent of Blizzard employees are women, wrote company president Mike Morhaime in…

True Rich Asshole Stan Kroenke Adds Overwatch Team To L.A. Sports Empire

The Overwatch League has added to its rapidly expanding collection of widely loathed traditional-sports honchos, as Stan and Josh Kroenke, owners of Arsenal, the Los Angeles Rams, a dizzying array of Colorado franchises, and whatever is on Stan’s head have bought a Los Angeles team for a reported $20 million The Kroenkes aren’t the first…

Overwatch, A Game About Teamwork, Is Getting A Free-For-All Deathmatch Mode

For the longest time, Blizzard has been staunchly against the idea of deathmatch modes in Overwatch. It’s a game about teamwork and objectives, after all. Deathmatch has a way of drastically de-prioritizing both of those things. Now, though, the dev team has had a change of heart. In a new video, Jeff “From The Overwatch…

Overwatch Fans Can’t Decide If McCree Is Hot Or Not

Terrible news, everyone: professional doof McCree, a fake cowboy who can’t even quote a more famous fake cowboy correctly, got hot. The Overwatch community is struggling with this sudden and confusing development. Yesterday, Blizzard updated Overwatch with a new Summer Games event that includes a bunch of themed skins, among them a lifeguard skin for…

The New Overwatch Beach Skins Are 🔥

With a new Overwatch event comes new skins, and the new outfits for the Summer Games are pretty dope. Summer is for lying out on the beach, getting your tan on, and grilling, and the new Overwatch skins got that on lock. You can check ‘em all out on the Overwatch website, but my personal…

Rad GTA Trick Backfires

Today on Highlight Reel we have new friends, cool tank jumps, detectives, FIFA poses, and much more! Watch the video then talk about your favorite highlight in the comments below. Be sure to check out, like, and share the original videos via the links below. Subscribe to Kotaku on YouTube for more! L.A. Noire –…

Mercy by ladymelamori, photo by Kirchos.

South Korea’s Overwatch World Cup Team Is Annihilating Everybody Else With Weird Picks And Wild Plays

As one astute observer on Reddit pointed out, South Korea’s Overwatch World Cup team hasn’t just deviated from the meta; they’ve used nearly every hero in the game. Even Hanzo Going into Blizzard’s big, multi-national bash, South Korea was a heavy favorite, but I’m not sure anybody expected them to clean up to this degree.…

Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon, a teen girl Overwatch phenom, will be the first female pro gamer to compete in OGN Overwatch APEX. ROX Orcas has signed her, according to ESPN. Geguri fans will recall that her haters wrongfully accused her of cheating at last year’s Nexus Cup. She didn’t cheat; she’s just that good.