Overwatch

Overwatch Team with 4-17 Record Could Somehow Win the League Playoffs

Over the weekend, the Washington Justice became the embodiment of Overwatch League playoff chaos. They are other teams’ spoilers and the playoff Cinderellas. They’ve gone from one of the worst regular season performances to knocking out one tournament champ and almost knocking out another. And although their chances of ultimate triumph are still mathematically slim,…

Playoff Season Is The Best Time To Get Into Overwatch League

You do not need to have watched a single match of the 2020 Overwatch League season to follow the playoffs. Playoffs are the playoffs, you already know the stakes, no background information required. The playoffs themselves will provide their own self-contained narrative that newcomers can understand and invest in. The 2020 Overwatch League playoffs began…

Players Are Making Amazing Things In Overwatch‘s Workshop Mode

Overwatch turned four this past June, and despite attempts to keep the game fresh with new events, skins, and game modes, there’s only so many times one can tell a teammate to get on the damn payload. But one way players are keeping the game fresh and exciting is through experimenting in Overwatch’s Workshop, a…

Please Keep Making Silly Soccer Games

Alpaca Ball: Allstars is an upcoming soccer game from Austrian developer Salt Castle Studio. It features alpaca using their long necks as clubs to score goals. I will buy it when it launches on October 15. I hope developers never stop making games that are just “soccer but silly.” While this is a relatively recent…

A Racist Overwatch Team Got Banned, But I Still Feel Like Shit

Despite having not played in a while, I love Overwatch. I love its bright and vibrant characters from every part of the world (with one glaring omission). I love its message of hope for better, and how we all have the capacity to affect positive change. As the heroine Tracer says, “the world could always…

Ringer Alert: Overwatch League Free Agents Can Now Compete In Playoffs

Now that the pandemic’s torpedoed all of Blizzard’s plans for the Overwatch League 2020 season, the League’s head office is making significant changes to its roster construction rules ahead of the 2020 Playoff season. “The League Office has established the following guidelines in place for roster construction, which includes significant changes to contract lengths and…

Even Lapsed Overwatch Players Love Pharah’s New Lifeguard Skin

It’s summer. Per tradition, this means that the Overwatch team must give somebody abs, or face dire consequences. So Pharah is a lifeguard now. Cue the entire internet dramatically leaping into the ocean and pretending to drown in hopes that somebody—nobody specific, of course—might come save them. It would be an understatement to say that…

Overwatch Cosplay Lights Up The Darkness

Cosplayer Zibartas—who we’ve seen here before with some top-tier Overwatch work—has truly outdone himself here, building a complete set of Mercy’s wings made out of steel and aluminium, that move and really light up. Here’s the finished product: God damn If you’d like to see how something like this was put together, Zibartas has made…

Fastest-Ever Overwatch League Match Is 19 Minutes and 23 Seconds of Misery

The fastest match in Overwatch League history took place over the weekend, with last year’s champions, the San Francisco Shock, beating the brakes off the Vancouver Titans in a blisteringly fast match that ran just 19 minutes and 23 seconds. The extremely brief match surpassed a record set just the week before when the Los…

Overwatch Update Removes McCree’s Noose Spray

Since 2016, Overwatch’s McCree, a walking amalgam of cowboy movie references, has been able to slap an image of a noose on any surface he pleases, provided players have unlocked the decal in question. Now, as of the game’s most recent update, it’s gone. The noose was always a curious inclusion in a family-friendly game…

How The NYXL Built A Successful Overwatch Team (In 5 Easy Steps)

In Spring 2018, the New York Excelsior had just won the Overwatch League Stage 2 Championship. In preparation for the next stage, the NYXL Twitter account released a promo. The video is a 15-second spectacle, a highlight reel of the breakout stars of the inaugural season of the Overwatch League laid over M.O.P’s “Ante Up,”…

Overwatch Anime Opening Was Made By One Guy

Joshee Kis to thank for this amazing Overwatch video, imagining the series was an anime with this being the intro. Any one-person animation job is impressive, but the fact it runs for 1:55—an eternity in this situation—makes it even moreso.

Blizzard Removes Controversial Hero Pools From Overwatch‘s Competitive Mode

Earlier this year, Blizzard gave Overwatch fans clamoring for a hero pick/ban system what they were asking for—sort of. The hero pool feature did indeed ban certain heroes, but Blizzard was doing the choosing. This led to regular consternation from pros and regular players alike. As a result, Blizzard has decided to retire the system…

Overwatch League caster Wolf Schröder gives a big-the-scenes look at how he’s working remotely from Los Angeles during the coronavirus covid-19 pandemic. The result is a ten-minute clip at how he’s making do. [Thanks, Sang!]

Mod Gives Overwatch’s Widowmaker Spider Legs And No Thank You

I love it, but also, I hate it. Made by Therister, this mod gives a lady based on a spider actual, enormous spider legs, which aside from looking horrific also let you crawl up walls. If you want to try it out,the workshop code is 5D4FX

Overwatch Player Uses New Feature To Fuse Entire Team Into A Single, Hulking Monstrosity

Overwatch is, at its core, a game about teamwork. Individual heroes do their own things—Reinhardt shields, Mercy heals, and Genji dies—but they’re ultimately contributing to a greater whole. One player, Andy Bohan, has gone and made that idea all too literal. I’m talking “end of Akira” literal. As part of the Overwatch public test server’s…

I Refuse To Regret Spending $450 On A Bright Pink Gamer Chair

Gamer chairs have always struck me as an incredibly funny concept. In 2006, a desperate luxury car seat company called DXRacer decided to roll the dice on pivoting to video games, laying down the racing car-esque blueprint for gamer chairs as we know them. So now professional players and streamers achieve maximum performance in disembodied…

Tiny Anime Reinhardt Is The Overwatch Toy I’ve Been Waiting For

Since the folks at Japanese toymaker Good Smile Company started making big-headed anime figures of Overwatch characters, I’ve been patiently waiting for my spirit hero to make his small but impactful appearance. And here he is, a giant among Nendoroids, Reinhardt. I love him. Available now for preorder from the Blizzard Gear Store, Reinhardt is…

Someone At American Dad Is A Big Fan Of The Overwatch League

In the grand tradition of primetime animated shows mining contemporary pop culture for content, American Dad’s most recent episode featured esports as its topic of the day. In a clip shared by TBS, the show’s main character is tasked with assassinating a North Korean general while he attends an Overwatch League match in Hong Kong.…

Top Overwatch Team Loses Entire Player Roster Amidst Allegations Of Mismanagement [UPDATE]

Between covid-19 and countless other difficulties, Overwatch League’s make-or-break third season has gone as far off the rails as anyone could have imagined. Now, after losing a star player to Valorant last week, the league has lost one of its top teams. At least, temporarily. Today, the Vancouver Titans, last year’s second-place team behind championship…