Overwatch

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…

Overwatch Finally Gets A Reporting System For Consoles And Here’s How It Works

A year after release, Overwatch players on PS4 and Xbox One now have recourse for the trash Mei who won’t stop icing her teammates into the spawn point. Overwatch, a pleasant game that recently has taken a turn for the toxic, has gotten flack for how long console players waited to get their reporting system.…

Overwatch‘s Mercy Is More Deadly Now, But She’s Still A Healer

Mercy is a Valkyrie now, and she’s not taking anybody’s crap. Yesterday, Blizzard revealed a surprising overhaul of Overwatch’s most straightforward healer, replacing her uber-powerful resurrection ult—which could potentially bring her whole team back from the brink—with “Valkyrie,” an ult that lets her soar around with a giant clip of super-powered bullets as well as…

Blizzard Overhauling Overwatch‘s Mercy With New Ultimate

Overwatch’s Mercy has two roles on the battlefield: 1) stalwart, reliable healer of your team and 2) stalwart, reliable infuriator of the other team every time she nails a massive resurrection ult, canceling out all their hard work in a single, blinding flash. Blizzard’s decided to change the latter. “It’s pretty disheartening to have Mercy…

Top Genji Player Can’t Compete In Blizzard’s Overwatch League Because He’s Just 16

This week, Seoul, Korea’s Overwatch League team announced their player roster. Unsurprisingly, they opted to basically snatch up Lunatic Hai, the two-time winners of South Korea’s biggest Overwatch tournament, APEX. There were, however, a couple curious omissions. Overwatch’s pro scene, largely the result of a series of smaller, unaffiliated tournaments held over the course of…

Top Lucioball Players Create Strategies Blizzard Never Imagined

Overwatch’s Summer Games end on August 29, which means there’s not much time left to get good at Lucioball. Except no one is that good at Lucioball, even the players ranked in top 500. But while players who hate it have already gone back to playing Rocket League, the competitive Lucioball players left standing have…

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…