Overwatch 2 has had a rough road following the early success of the first game. That game, which easily earned Game Informer's Game of the Year in 2016, started with such promise and a massive, enthusiastic audience, but following the 2019 announcement of Overwatch 2, support for the original Overwatch floundered, and so, too, did the community. Last year's release of Overwatch 2's PvE elements in its Invasion update pushed the hero shooter back in the right direction, but it didn't make the splash Blizzard had hoped for. With Overwatch 2 Season 9, which kicks off next week, Blizzard is making a ton of sweeping behind-the-scenes changes to make the game more approachable for players.
Players of all modes will notice updates to how moment-to-moment gameplay, encounters, and matches as a whole play out. Hit consistency is being improved, with projectiles growing in size; those characters that don't have projectile-based weapons or abilities and, therefore, receive no benefits from this change will receive additional balance updates. Those changes to non-projectile heroes will happen at a later date so the development team can assess how significant the projectile changes are in a live environment.
Additionally, all heroes will have more health starting with Season 9. Any hero with 150 to 175 HP will receive a 25 HP increase, while heroes with 200 to 300 HP will get an extra 50 HP. Meanwhile, tanks with 300 HP or more will receive between 75 and 100 additional HP at the start of Season 9. On top of that, all heroes can now regenerate health passively after five seconds of not taking damage, while support heroes can now start passively healing at two and a half seconds. To even it out, if a character is taking damage, the amount they heal while being dealt damage is reduced by 20 percent.
The ninth season of Overwatch 2 introduces massive changes to the structure of competitive play. First up, competitive ranks are receiving a reset, with all players getting 10 new placement matches to play through and calibrate their new starting rank. Starting with Season 9, rank is updated after every match, with a progression bar giving visual feedback for how much progress was gained or lost with each match. The best competitive players have a new rank to strive for: Champion. This top-tier ranking is only attainable by the best players in the world.
Competitive will also allow players to unlock Jade weapon variants by earning Competitive Points by playing in competitive matches. Season 8 Competitive Points are being turned into Legacy Competitive Points that can be used to unlock Gold weapon variants. At the end of 2024, all 2024 Competitive Points will be converted to Legacy Competitive Points.
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A wild recent rumor is suggesting that the video game adaptation of beloved movie Shrek 2 is going to be receiving a remake for modern consoles. While the franchise has largely fallen dormant, the Shrek series served as one of the early 2000s' most iconic film series. The quadrilogy of Shrek movies following the titular green ogre, his donkey companion, and the princess Fiona received multiple accolades for its feature films, while also releasing a variety of video game adaptations. Now, one popular game from the franchise is rumored to be receiving a remake.
Sony PlayStation VR2 Review: Virtual reality (VR) has been dominating the headlines recently. This is largely due to the recent launch of the Apple Vision Pro, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg taking shots at it by saying his Meta Quest is a better option. While these tech behemoths battle on, Sony's latest VR headset, the PlayStation VR2 (or PSVR2), is secretly making its name in the world of gaming, delivering an unmatched experience. It certainly is a huge generational leap over its predecessor but does its promise of PC-grade gaming at $550 have some truth to it? I spent a few weeks with the Sony PlayStation VR2 and it certainly delivers on most aspects, but there are strings attached. Here's why.
A Palworld player has found a clever trick that can stun and kill most boss Pals in the game, sharing a short video of their defeat of Paladius and Necromus on social media as proof of their deed. The Palworld player then received compliments from their peers and offered some clarification that detailed which Pals their trick would not work on.
Overwatch 2 is making some changes to the Push, Flashpoint, Hybrid, and Escort game modes to make them faster-paced. These speed adjustments are being made in response to positive feedback during the recent Quicker Play test Overwatch 2 held as a part of its new Quick Play: Hacked feature.
The Halo TV show has always held the video game series’ lore at arm’s length. From its early announcement of the “Silver Timeline” (an entirely separate but loosely similar canon that the TV show would be sticking to) to the first season, which gives Master Chief a slightly different origin story, the Paramount Plus series has never been concerned with the things longtime Halo fans hold near and dear. But as the show’s second season gets into more recognizable territory, like the Fall of Reach, it’s still surprising to see how wildly it diverged from the game’s in its fourth episode.
has been largely praised since its launch, with the sequel to the 2015 co-op shooter also attracting far more players than its predecessor. However, there is still one key area that's holding the game back as a whole, and it's partly caused by this unexpected popularity.
A few months ago, Gearbox Publishing turned the servers back on for classic MOBA Hero Shooter Gigantic, which had been turned off for over five years. They were only live for a couple of days, but it was enough to get people talking on the Gigantic Subreddit. What was the point of this two-day event? Is Gigantic coming back in some way? Well, the answer is yes, and it’s looking to come back in a big way with Gigantic: Rampage Edition on April 9, 2024.
Xbox has pledged that its consoles will continue to be the best way to play its games, and that access to those games will not be removed in the near future.
If you told me at the start of the year that Palworld would break Steam records, I would've done a hearty "no no" chuckle. But here we are, with the survival game exceeding 19 million players and Pocketpair probably wondering how they managed such a feat. With its success has come the inevitable slew of impatient people saying the game's dead because it's not received updates fast enough, or folks saying it's lost a hefty percentage of its player base, and others saying its viewership numbers over on streaming services have plummeted. Palworld's community manager Bucky has gently reminded folks that not only is this discourse "lazy", but to play other games instead.