Blizzard is ditching the Battle.net name

Battle.net has been synonymous with Blizzard for most of the game studio's history, and for good reason: from Diablo onward, the online service helped usher in the concept of free, fully-integrated multiplayer matchmaking. Times have changed, howeve...

‘Overwatch’ season two takes cues from ‘League of Legends’

Overwatch's 15 million-plus players are going to see some pretty big changes come the game's second season. First up is how rankings work. The current 1 - 100 skill ranking is going away in favor of a 1 - 5,000 rating that breaks down into seven tier...

The new ‘Overwatch’ hero is causing all kinds of trouble

Online shooter Overwatch is dominating the conversation surrounding video games lately, but not for the reasons developer/publisher Blizzard probably wants. First with the good news: healing sniper Ana is finally available for PC players. And, well,...

Blizzard will permaban ‘Overwatch’ cheaters

Overwatch's massively popular beta might be over, but the game's cadre of developers at Blizzard are already making plans of how to deal with cheaters ahead of launch: Banning them. Permanently. No three strikes rule. No cool down. Just an outright p...

Fans persuade Blizzard to pull sexualized ‘Overwatch’ pose

Sometimes a beta test is more than a glorified demo that the marketing department pushes for to drum up pre-orders. Fans of Overwatch, Blizzard's colorful new shooter, discovered just that recently. Over on the game's official forums, a user noticed...

Blizzard rolls out Battle.net voice chat starting with ‘Overwatch’

Blizzard has been in the online gaming business for decades with massively popular games like StarCraft and World of Warcraft, but it's never implemented a native voice-chat system in its Battle.net client. Now, it appears that's about to change. B...