Overwatch

Swapping Overwatch Character Animations Is A Good Time

A new set of animation tools released last week have made it a lot easier for people to import Overwatch’s characters into Source Filmmaker and mess around with stuff. Like swapping player animations. Created by speeder99123, there are already some cool clips being made: Not every character or animation is working right now (some, like…

After Yesterday’s Overwatch Video, People Hate Bastion A Little Less

Yesterday, Blizzard released a cinematic video about Overwatch’s Bastion, a killer robot built for the specific purpose of annoying everyone to death. It told the heartfelt story of a budding bird/bot relationship. And also PTSD. Bastion isn’t exactly Overwatch’s most popular character. In the game’s early days, especially, he was the bane of everyone’s existence,…

Overwatch’s McCree Says ‘I’m Your Huckleberry’ Wrong And It’s Killing Me [Update]

In the popular cosplay game Overwatch, one of the characters is a robot cowboy named McCree. He has a cowboy hat and a cowboy six-shooter. He’s pretty good at being a cowboy. Yet he does not seem overly familiar with the best cowboy cinema. One of McCree’s most popular voice lines is “I’m your Huckleberry.”…

Thanks To New Emotes, Overwatch Players Are Sitting Through Matches

In Overwatch, sitting and laughing are totally OP. Just like in real life. Yesterday’s new test patch didn’t just nerf Genji, make Gremlin D.Va canon, and stuff smelly socks down the throats of bad sports. It also added a ton of new sitting and laughing emotes. Here are all of them, courtesy of Seba: It’s…

New Overwatch Test Update Filters Popular Insult Into Polite Confessionals

If you’ve just wrapped up a hard-fought multiplayer match, it’s polite to say “gg” to all involved as a show of sportsmanship. Jackasses, however, have taken to corrupting it by adding “ez” to the end, essentially saying, “Beating you losers was a piece of cake.” As of yesterday’s new test server patch, Overwatch now filters…

Touchingly, Blizzard dedicated today’s new Bastion-centric Overwatch short to Yvain Gnarbo, a Blizzard animator who died in a motorcycle accident last June.

Blizzard Tries To Humanize Bastion With New Overwatch Video

The animated Overwatch short nobody but Bastion players wanted, “The Last Bastion,” just premiered at Gamescom. According to Overwatch Project Director Ben Dai, Bastion,“an artificial intelligence programmed to do one thing, and one thing only—to fight—comes face-to-face with a choice to alter his destiny” in the short. That’s right, one thing: posting up in a…

Gremlin D.Va Is Now Overwatch Canon

Gremlin D.Va, one of Overwatch’s most beloved fan creations, is canon now thanks to a new emote on the game’s test server. She’s got her Doritos, Dew, and a custom stream overlay. She’s the hero we deserve and need right now. (Thanks, David!) Here’s a video, courtesy of Seba: This is the most overt instance…

Overwatch Test Patch Nerfs Genji, Buffs Mei And Mercy 

Overwatch’s competitive season two patch just hit the public test servers, and it’s a doozy. Nerfs, buffs, laughter, tears of delicious, delicious salt—it’s all here. The centerpiece of this PTR patch is, of course, competitive season two. The skill rating system has been overhauled and divided up into tiers, and sudden death is dead, unloved…

Why Overwatch Players Hate Genji Now

Some relatively minor tweaks aside, Overwatch’s cyborg ninja dragon blender Genji hasn’t changed much since launch. Over the past few weeks, though, I’ve come across dozens of threads begging Blizzard to nerf Genji so hard he starts throwing rubber ducks instead of ninja stars. What happened? In hero-based games like Overwatch, there’s always a “nerf…

Overwatch Heroes Look Sharp In Their Street Clothes

What, you think Widowmaker buys bread and milk in that skinsuit? Korean artist YD has drawn these images of some of Overwatch’s cast looking very cool on their days off, just hanging out, enjoying each other’s company, maybe taking in a movie, maybe doing some shopping.

Overwatch’s beloved particle cannon-wielding tank, Zarya, will have a new canon soon: Heroes of the Storm Blizzard revealed at Gamescom today that Zarya will be a playable HotS hero in the new Machines of War event. Two StarCraft stages are also being added as new battle maps.

Blizzard Reveals New Overwatch Map, Eichenwalde

Overwatch is about to get its first post-launch map. It’s a castle village in Germany with a distinctly medieval vibe, and it’s called Eichenwalde. Blizzard revealed the map at Gamescom in—wait for it—Germany. Pretty cheeky, Blizz. Here’s a video: It’s an Assault/Escort hybrid map, and it’s got an Omnic Crisis (read: robot apocalypse) related story…

Women Sported Some Killer Overwatch Cosplay At Baltimore’s Otakon

Last weekend, I hopped a train to Baltimore to report at Otakon, an anime convention with upwards of 20,000 attendees, many of whom were decked out in mind-meltingly good cosplay. One thing I noticed was that, on the whole, Otakon’s women were absolutely killing it cosplaying Overwatch heroes. One of Overwatch’s main draws is its…

Overwatch‘s Competitive Mode Is About To Get An Overhaul

Overwatch’s first competitive season is winding down in a couple days, but season two is set to kick off in a few weeks. If you didn’t love season one, Blizzard’s really hoping season two will be more to your liking. In a new video, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan broke down the upcoming changes to competitive…

Fans Have Turned Overwatch‘s Roadhog Into A Shy, Emo Teen

Overwatch’s Roadhog, the wheezing, porcine tank from Hell, is my favorite video game character of 2016. The rush of visceral win I feel when I hook an enemy and blast scrap metal in their face is unparalleled. I love it all: the way his Scrap Gun bounces up and down when he lumbers to the…

Blizzard Is Making Overwatch More Responsive On PC

It’s been known for a while that Overwatch has a lower tick rate—that is, how often servers update to reflect what players are doing—than most other competitive first-person shooters. Thankfully, Blizzard’s finally upping it on PC. While Blizzard has said that Overwatch uses predictive server techniques to make up for the potential delay produced by…

Overwatch Fans’ Sombra Investigation Reaps A Skull Code

The hunt for details about Overwatch’s alleged next hero, Sombra, has finally reaped something—and it’s literally a reaper (not to be confused with the hero Reaper). The 5,000 Overwatch fans struggling to unravel Blizzard’s increasingly obtuse information puzzles have been investigating the latest Sombra clue for nearly two weeks. Last night, they finally made some…

Overwatch’s Reaper sure uses up a lot of guns. This SFM short by ArcadeCloud explores where his guns might come from and why he doesn’t just, you know, keep them. It made me laugh.