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every hero has a ultiment and 3-2 normal abilities wich have a timers on when you can use them i know most of the heros abilities but theres 32 heros so that would take a long time

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every hero has a ultiment and 3-2 normal abilities wich have a timers on when you can use them i know most of the heros abilities but theres 32 heros so that would take a long time

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https://overwatch-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Ability

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For ultimate abilities, see Ultimate Ability.

Abilities are the offensive and defensive capabilities of the heroes in . Normal abilities are accessed via keybinds which can be swapped based on player preference in Game Options. Abilities help to differentiate roles from one another, as well as heroes from one another within roles.

Damage is a sweeping role used to contain heroes that deal a very large amount of damage per second. Prior to their combination into this single category, damage heroes were previously one of two types:

Tank heroes protect allies, disrupt enemies, and occupy the front line. They have abilities that protect themselves and others with shields and crowd control.

Support heroes heal, buff, debuff and provide utility.

Ability types

In this page, abilities are unofficially classified into multiple categories; an ability can belong to several categories. This is the list of categories and their brief explanation:

Ranged abilities: abilities which belong to this category are capable of taking effect at range.

Melee abilities: abilities which belong to this category are capable of taking effect within short range, mainly through the use of weapons.

Movement ability: abilities which belong to this category provide hero a method to move to another location beside walking.

Barrier abilities: abilities which belong to this category evoke the use of barrier.

Healing abilities: abilities which belong to this category can be used to replenish health.

Buff/debuff abilities: abilities which belong to this category can be used to provide an advantage for self/teammates or a disadvantage for enemies.

Crowd-control abilities: abilities which belong to this category can be used to affect the movement or ability usage of enemies.

Area-of-effect abilities: abilities which belong to this category affect multiple targets within a specified area.

Ranged abilties

Ranged abilities are abilities capable of taking effect at range, either through launching a projectile or through generating an effect at a specified location.

Most ranged abilities are referred to as being either hitscans or projectiles.

A hitscan ability has no travel time, and will hit a target within the shooter's crosshair as soon as the weapon/ability fires.

A projectile ability has a travel time, and will hit a target only if the projectile collides with the target.

Damage falloff is the damage deterioration inflicted on distant target. An ability with damage falloff does less damage the further the shooter is away from the target. Due to the difficulty of timing a long-distance projectile headshot, some weapons suffer reduced or no damage falloff.

Ranged abiltities also come with two other attributes: headshot and falloff damage. An ability can have both attributes, or have neither:

A headshot is any shot that successfully hits the enemy's critical points, the name coming from this typically being the head. Each headshot deals 2 times the damage of a bodyshot, the sole exception being 2.5 times for Widowmaker's scoped headshot. When a headshot is made a red X mark will glow in the crosshair and a unique hit noise will be made.

The location of the critical headshot spot is not always the head due to the nature of different heroes. Exceptions include:

Bastion's Configuration: Sentry instead places his head at the back of his model, as a large blue glowing box. Configuration: Tank has no critical spot and suffers only bodyshot damage.

D.Va's headshot location is her MEKA cockpit, making it somewhat larger. Outside of her MEKA, standard headshot rules apply.

Wrecking Ball's headshot spot is Hammond himself. In ball configuration, he has no critical hit location.

List of hitscan abilities

The abilities listed below are considered hitscan abilities:

List of projectile abilities

The abilities listed below are considered projectile abilities:

1. D.Va's Call Mech can damage enemies when it drops right on top of them.

2. Only when deflecting projectile abilities.

3. Reinhardt's Earthshatter is not technically a projectile ability, but it will take a small amount of time to travel. Nonetheless, the further enemies will have more chance to avoid the attack.

Melee abilities

For a type of melee that almost all heroes can perform, see Quick Melee.

Melee abilities are abilities that take effect only within a short range of the hero using the ability, generally within arms' reach of the hero's position. Some melee abilities allow hero to move and attack at the same time, making those abilities a perfect choice to make a follow-up attack or escape.

Almost all heroes can use melee in the form of Quick Melee, except for Brigitte, Reinhardt, Torbjörn (when holding Forge Hammer), Genji and Winston (when using their Ultimate abilities).

Other abilities listed below are considered melee abilities:

Movement abilities

Movement abilities are abilities which improve movement for a hero. This includes: increasing the speed at which a hero moves to a location, giving a hero an alternate path to a location, or letting a hero move to a location which is inaccessible through walking. Some movement abilities have additional perks such as dealing damage to enemies. By default, every hero's movement speed is 5.5 m/s, with the exception of Genji and Tracer, who both move at 6.0 m/s. The abilities listed below are considered movement abilities, and are disabled by Steel Trap and Graviton Surge.

Jump

Ashe's Coach Gun (self-knockback ability with damage)

Baptiste's Exo Boots (vertical movement ability)

Brigitte's Shield Bash (quick forward movement with damage and stun)

D.Va's Boosters (controlled and steered temporary forward flight with damage and knockback on point of contact).

Lúcio's Wall Ride (horizontal movement with slight upward movement along vertical surfaces).

McCree's Combat Roll (quick omnidirectional movement with instant gun reloading).

Reaper's Shadow Step (forward-facing self-teleportation).

Reinhardt's Charge (steered fast forward movement with stun, knockback, and damage to enemies).

Sigma's Gravitic Flux (grants omnidirectional levitation during ultimate)

Soldier: 76's Sprint (increased movement speed).

Symmetra's Teleporter (point to point teleportation).

Widowmaker's Grappling Hook (flight towards point of contact).

Winston's Jump Pack (forward catapult with damage and knockback on point of contact).

Wrecking Ball's

Strangely, Symmetra's Teleporter cannot be disabled by Steel Trap or Graviton Surge.

Unorthodox movement abilities

Some abilities are able to improve movement in unorthodox ways, such as increasing jump height by self-damage. These abilities are capable of improving movement in unorthodox methods:

Junkrat's Concussion Mine (pushes players away from the mine; can be used to give Junkrat a super jump if detonated when he is on top of it).

Mei's Ice Wall (can be used to elevate players by building the wall underneath them).

Pharah's Concussive Blast (horizontally pushes players away from point of contact; can be used to give Pharah a horizontal movement boost).

"Rocket Jump"

With certain abilities, if a hero faces the ground and presses both the jump button and the ability button simultaneously, they can use the knockback from the ability to increase their jump height. This is a common tactic in games with explosives and is dubbed "rocket jump" by the gaming community. All of these abilities will cause self-damage. The abilities listed below can be used to perform a rocket jump:

Speed-increasing abilities

These abilities, while increasing movement speed, are not classified as movement abilities, and therefore are not disabled by Steel Trap and Graviton Surge.

Barrier abilities

For more details on barriers and associated abilities, see Barrier.

Barrier abilities are abilities which create a translucent barrier in a certain area. Barriers block all incoming enemy damage and allow all friendly damage to pass through them. The abilities listed below are considered barrier abilities:

Healing abilities

For more details on healing abilities, see Health, Armor, and Shield#Healing abilities.

Healing abilities are abilities which replenish a hero's health. The abilities listed below are considered healing abilities:

Buff/debuff abilities

Buff and debuff abilities are abilities which, when activated, can apply either a positive effect or negative effect to one or more heroes.

Buff abilities

The abilities listed below are considered buff abilities:

Bastion's Ironclad (reduce damage taken).

Brigitte's Rally (add armor)

Doomfist's The Best Defense... (gain decaying temporary shield)

Hanzo's Sonic Arrow (visibility through walls)

Reaper's Wraith Form (invulnerability and increased movement speed)

Reinhardt's Steadfast (damage resistance to knockback abilities)

Sigma's Kinetic Grasp (gain decaying temporary shield).

Sombra's Stealth (invisibility and increased movement speed)

Torbjörn's Overload (added armor, increased movement, reload and attack speed)

Widowmaker's Infra-Sight (visibility through walls)

Winston's Primal Rage (increased health and reduced Jump Pack cooldown)

Wrecking Ball's Adaptive Shield (add temporary shields)

Zenyatta's Transcendence (invulnerability and increased movement speed)

Debuff abilities

Zarya's Particle Barrier and Projected Barrier remove debuffs in addition to their normal functions. The abilities listed below are considered debuff abilities:

Crowd Control abilities

For more details on crowd control abilities and associated abilities, see Crowd control.

Crowd control abilities are abilities which reduce, restrict, or prevent movement, as well as usage of weapons and/or abilities. Crowd control also includes displacement of enemy positions such as knockback. Some abilities use debuffs to crowd control. Orisa's Fortify ability makes her immune to all the crowd control effects of the abilities. Abilities which hamper the user's movement but don't have other crowd control traits are not considered crowd control abilities. The abilities listed below are considered crowd control abilities.

Area-of-effect abilities

Area of effect (AoE) abilities are abilities which can affect multiple targets within a specified area. The affected area can be on the path of the projectile or in the surrounding zone of a hero or the point of contact. Some AoE abilities may harm the user if they are in the effect area. The abilities listed below are considered AoE abilities:

Ana's Biotic Grenade (affects an area around the point of contact).

Ashe's
B.O.B. (affects every enemy in path).

Baptiste's

Bastion's Configuration: Tank (affects an area around the point of contact).

Brigitte's

Rocket Flail (affects a conical-shaped area in front of user)

Rally (affects an area around the user).

D.Va's

Defense Matrix (affects a cylindrical area in front of the hero's face).

Boosters (affects every enemy on the path).

Self-Destruct (affects a large surrounding area when exploding).

Call Mech (affects a small area in front of the hero, from the ground to far up above).

Echo's

Junkrat's

Frag Launcher (affects every enemy in the area around the point of contact).

Total Mayhem (affects an area around the point of contact).

RIP-Tire (affects a surrounding area when exploding).

Lúcio's

McCree's Flashbang (affects an area around the point of contact).

Mei's Blizzard (affects a round area around the point of contact).

Mercy's Resurrect (affects an area around the hero).

Moira's

Pharah's
Barrage (affects an area around the points of contact).

Reaper's Death Blossom (affects an area around the hero).

Reinhardt's

Fire Strike (affects every enemy on its path).

Rocket Hammer (affects an arched area in front of the hero).

Charge (affects every enemy in front of the hero and in the path of the charge).

Earthshatter (affects a cone area in front of the hero).

Roadhog's Whole Hog (affects a wide area in front of the hero).

Sigma's

Soldier: 76's

Sombra's EMP (affects an area around the hero).

Symmetra's
Photon Projector (secondary fire; affects every enemy around the point of impact).

Tracer's Pulse Bomb (affects surrounding area when exploding).

Torbjorn's Molten Core (affects every enemy with a pool of lava).

Widowmaker's Venom Mine (affects every enemy in the surrounding area when triggered).

Zarya's

Zenyatta's Transcendence (affects an area around the hero).

Patch changes

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For ultimate abilities, see Ultimate Ability. Abilities are the offensive and defensive capabilities of the heroes in Overwatch. Normal abilities are accessed via keybinds which can be swapped based on player preference in Game Options. Abilities help to differentiate roles from one another, as well as heroes from one another within roles.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwatch_(video_game)

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This article is about the video game. For the franchise it belongs to, see Overwatch.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_of_Overwatch

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originally featured 12 characters at its November 2014 BlizzCon convention announcement, but expanded to 21 by the next year's convention. The game is character-driven, and reviewers noted Overwatch's emphasis on the individual differences between characters in the same class (e.g., between two snipers) as a departure from dominant class-based shooter paradigms. Critics widely praised the game's accessible and detailed character design and its role in the game's overall success.

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blizzard said that they wanted there game to be like  an awesome [first-person shooter] experience that's more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love

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blizzard said that they wanted there game to be like  an awesome [first-person shooter] experience that's more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Overwatch

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is a team-based first-person shooter developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in May 2016. The game, while having several different play modes, generally features two teams of six players each, selecting pre-made heroes from the game's roster, to either attack or defend various objective points on the game's maps. The game supports casual game modes as well as ranked competitive play. Since release, Overwatch has been both critically and financially successful, with a player base of 35 million players as of October 2017.

The development of Overwatch started in the fallout following Blizzard's decision to cancel continued development of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game around 2013. After most of the rest of the team was transferred to other projects, the remaining team members, led by director Jeff Kaplan, came up with the concept of a team-based shooter that borrowed elements from other online shooters like Team Fortress 2 and multiplayer online battle arenas. Many of Overwatch's early assets were borrowed from Titan to obtain a proof-of-concept to greenlight further development. The consequences of Titan's cancellation also led into creating a narrative of an optimistic near-future setting for the game, taking place some decades after the formation of the peacekeeping Overwatch team, created in response to a robotic uprising known as the Omnic War.

Since release, the Overwatch developments continue to produce more content, released free for all, for the title, including new hero characters, maps, game modes, seasonal events, customization options for the characters, and external media such as digital comics and shorts to help support the narrative and character's backstories. Blizzard has also made changes to make Overwatch more compatible for professional eSports, including support for its Overwatch League that started its first season in January 2018.

Development of Overwatch followed after the cancellation of the ambitious massively multiplayer online role-playing game , a game that had been in development at Blizzard for seven years since around 2007. Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan said that Titan was a class-based shooter game, with each class having a core set of abilities that the player would expand upon via a skill tree progression; these skills got more powerful the farther the player progressed, and Kaplan said that it ended up being "very cluttered and confused". Blizzard co-founder Michael Morhaime stated that with Titan, "We didn't find the fun. We didn't find the passion." even after re-evaluating the project. Titan had been canceled internally by May 2013, though this wasn't publicly reported until 2014. The large Titan team of 140 members was broken up: 80 were permanently relocated to other divisions in Blizzard, twenty put on loan to other Blizzard projects, and the remaining 40 tasked to come up with a new project within six weeks, otherwise they would be assigned to other groups within Blizzard. Among ideas tossed suggested by this time was Crossroads, an MMO set in an outpost in space that would have been a crossroads for many different alien species. This game would have featured several different character classes, upwards of fifty, which Kaplan thought would be difficult but remained a core concept of Crossroads. They also considered developing a tie-in to the Starcraft universe, focused around individual characters within that universe.

Creative director Chris Metzen noted that to avoid the same failure that Titan became, their group had to rethink how Blizzard's more successful games had come about, ignoring the scale and business opportunity of the end result and instead understand what tools and skills they had already to build from. In brainstorming ideas, the team thought about the current state of first-person shooters (FPS), a genre that many on the team had played throughout their careers, which has enjoyed many groundbreaking titles but still has a potential for innovation, according to Kaplan. Kaplan stated that some of the ideas in the current FPS they wanted to emulate were the use of in-game maneuvers like rocket jumping and grappling hooks that helped players move with fluidity across maps and team-based shooters such as Team Fortress Classic and Team Fortress 2. At the same time, multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games were starting to take off, which required players to cooperate with others to successfully win the match. Kaplan said that their team considered how to adapt the large-scale and fast-paced gameplay of Team Fortress 2 with the smaller scale and cooperative nature of MOBAs, forming the basis of Overwatch. Metzen also commented that the concept of teamwork in Overwatch was partially influenced by their own team's current morale following the cancellation of Titan. Metzen said that during Titan's development, the team was highly fractured which impacted the project's cancellation. On starting Overwatch with a smaller group, they all wanted to come together and support each other to make their next game a success, "a redemption story for us as people and as craftsmen". Morhaime described Overwatch's intention as to "create an awesome [first-person shooter] experience that's more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love." On the FPS nature of the game, Kaplan commented that "the real focus of the shooting in the game is not to chase realism. We don't have real world guns in the game. You're not playing a soldier in a present-day military conflict." Simplicity of design was a high-value goal, taking cues from the success of the simple approach used in Blizzard's Hearthstone.

From a narrative and artistic standpoint, Overwatch' approach came out of emotional impact of the failed Titan development. Kaplan said his small team was "very nervous about our future" when tasked to come up with a new game concept, but this soon solidified into the idea of "a future worth fighting for", which had also been a phrase used internally for Titan's development. This gave them the idea to set the game in a near future, and started evaluating other games set in the same period, including recent Call of Duty and Battlefield games as well as The Last of Us and , but found all these titles presented a dark version of the future. Further, they were aware that of the various expansions for World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, had some of the least-visited areas, which they attributed to the oppressive visuals. Instead of these darker futures, they wanted to present a narrative and world that was more optimistic with brighter visuals that would help draw in players.

With core ideas down, the remaining Titan team began putting these together as a prototype to present to management. They took the classes they had made for Titan and remade these as Heroes, giving them core abilities from the Titan skill set they believed worked best together, and developing backstory and personality for the heroes. Existing art assets from Titan for the various player avatars were also reused and refined to create the appearance of the heroes. The initial gameplay used maps they had developed for Titan along with Tracer, one of the reworked Titan heroes; at that point, they had not included any animations so Tracer would fire by shooting lasers out of her eyes. The prototype proved successful within Blizzard, and the team was given the greenlight to proceed. Overwatch became Blizzard's second attempt at launching a new franchise since in 1998. Some of the additional heroes came from the classes they created for the Crossroads concept as well as the Starcraft tie-in that they brainstormed prior to settling on Overwatch.

Initial development of the game began with creating the first Hero character, Tracer, who was based on a character from Titan with similar time-manipulation abilities. They used Tracer and a single map based on the Temple of Anubis, to test how well the core mechanics played, according to assistant game director Aaron Keller. They added three more Heroes- Widowmaker, Reaper, and Pharah, all of whom had been developed from Crossroads classes-to start polishing the gameplay mechanics, which even at this stage Keller stated that it compared very closely with what the released game would present. They had even considered releasing Overwatch with a limited set of heroes at this point, as they had felt the game already had a finished feel to it.

Instead, they spent about two years on developing out the rest of the characters, gameplay balance, and graphics. Characters were generally added to the game for one of three reasons: to introduce a new gameplay mechanic or balance gameplay, to incorporate a new character design created by their artistic team, or to help support Overwatch's narrative. Some characters were adaptions from the Titan classes: Reinhardt had started as the "Juggernaut" character from Titan, for example. In addition to character balance, the development team needed to find ways to balance the characters with the various maps, wanting to provide areas across the maps for each character to have an area where they could be effective. The number of characters in the game was not fixed; though released with 21 different heroes, Kaplan stated the team played around with various goals, potentially as high as 40 unique heroes and across six different classes. Kaplan knew they had to have more than nine heroes as to separate themselves from Team Fortress 2, which featured nine distinct classes. Kaplan credits Geoff Goodman, a veteran designer in Blizzard, for figuring out the right number of heroes, classes, and balance between the characters. Keller noted that as the cast approached 15 characters, the team started to worry that there were too many for players to learn and may dilute the experience, but they strived to assure both uniqueness and balance across the slate of Heroes. The team felt the game was ready for release in November 2015 after adding the last two characters, Mei and D.Va, to the roster.

Overwatch was developed with half a dozen features to bring in a wider audience, including an accessibility feature for color blind individuals. During development, one important goal was to have "combat clarity" for the player, so that when a player moved into a new area, enemy characters would be clearly visible. This was enabled by contrasting the hues and saturation levels used for players to those used within the maps, and creating characters with distinctly different silhouettes to allow a player to identify the hero from a distance, including whether they were friend or foe. They found during development that having players be able to change heroes in mid-match to be important to gameplay. This inspired them to forego plans to release Overwatch as a free-to-play model with microtransactions or with paid downloadable content but instead make it a single-purchase title. Keller said that they wanted players to be able to jump to any Hero as necessitated by the situation, and the free-to-play or downloadable content approach could limit that ability if none of the team's players had purchased access to that hero. Keller also stated that the free-to-play/downloadable content model could fragment their player community, with gamers only playing with friends that had the same content instead of all available players. The game's engine was developed from scratch within Blizzard as to target a wide range of personal computers, including laptops that use integrated graphics processors. Senior software engineer Ryan Greene said that they looked to create a hardware "minspec" that would assure the game ran at nearly 30 frames-per-second on these lower-end machines, which once met would allow higher end machines as well as the consoles to run at 60 frames-per-second, as well as optimizing other performance-related issues.

A further goal in development was to avoid the negativity that often occurs in other competitive game environments, and, along with strides to make the narrative give a positive message, made specific choices in gameplay design to remove elements they felt fed negativity. One such choice was omitting kill/death ratios from the various statistic summaries, as according to Kaplan "some characters don't need to kill to be effective". To promote a friendlier playing environment, Blizzard penalizes players that "rage quit" (purposely leaving a match before it is complete) with a penalty on player experience points after a match, and will permanently ban players that they find "cheating or using hacks, bots, or third-party software".

While the game's primary gameplay modes were easily developed to account for unique abilities of all characters, the developers also had thought about a Capture the Flag mode for several years, recognizing that most team-based first-person shooters included some type of variant on this mode. The largest issue that this mode faced was the speed or warping abilities of some of the characters, like Tracer, which could pick up the flag and warp back to their base, leaving the other team unable to stop them. Thus they would either find matches reduced to players selecting the speediest characters, or having to put so many restrictions in place that the result game no longer felt like Overwatch. Over several iterations, they devised a scheme that they put to public testing in January 2017 through the "Capture the Rooster" special event to celebrate the Chinese New Year; here, to prevent speedy characters from running immediately after collecting the flag, they must wait a few seconds before they can run or use their special powers, leaving them vulnerable for that period. Initially having no plans to retain the Capture the Flag mode after the event, Blizzard announced that they will keep the event as a custom game mode with additional options.

Blizzard's initial idea for competitive mode were to limit play to six-on-six matches where players had formed their own teams outside of normal matchmaking, with rankings based on team rather than individual performance; Kaplan stated that this would avoid issues relating to matchmaking and players dropping out mid-game in terms of tracking the team's rating. When they presented this concept to players early on, they received a large amount of negative feedback, with many players wanting to be able to play competitively solo rather than grouped with a team. From this feedback, they redesigned competitive mode to be based on a progression system, similar to Hearthstone, where initially a player would generally progress along a five-tier ladder system the more matches they played, but as they moved into higher ranks, would find further progression to be based more on skill. This approach had been tested in the beta period but Blizzard found that low-ranked players to be pitted frequently against much more highly ranked players, and that they had not accounted for players to fall out of a tier if they started to perform poorly. They further found players wanting a finer resolution of their competitive ranking to be able to better compare to other players. They opted to hold back on including competitive mode at release, and later redeveloped the mode to use the 100-point ranking system to meet these issues while continuing to look for other ways to improve the ranking system.

An improved competitive mode entered open beta testing within Battle.net's public test region on June 21, 2016. Competitive mode for Windows, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 was added on June 28, June 30 and July 1, 2016, respectively.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office suspended Blizzard's application for a trademark for Overwatch due to "a likelihood of confusion" with a previously registered trademark by Innovis Labs. On October 13, 2015, Innovis Labs and Blizzard settled a pending lawsuit. A week later, on October 21, 2015, Innovis Labs surrendered their trademark registration for Overwatch.

To develop the game's themes, Kaplan stated that they wanted to create a future that was not typical of what a post-apocalyptic world might be like, opting instead for a future where conflict still exists but a "bright and aspirational vision" is maintained. The title's creative director, Chris Metzen, acknowledged that parts of Overwatch, such as maps, share "continuity" with . Citing a desire to keep its game styles "simple", and because it contradicted its emphasis on accomplishing goals as a team rather than trying to achieve large numbers of kills, Overwatch does not contain a traditional deathmatch mode. Metzen stated that "we have a long legacy of developing multiplayer games, and it came down to 'is it even possible to build a shooter that doesn't feel cynical, that doesn't feel cruel, that doesn't feel nasty? Can you build one that really promotes teamwork and relationship and having fun with your friends, and not getting killed with a thrown knife from halfway across the map as soon as you jump in?'"

Kaplan has expressed that this theme continued into the aesthetics of the game, commenting, "when it comes to the setting and art style and tone of the universe, a lot of games like to approach the future in either a very dystopian way, or a post-apocalyptic way," and adding, "we wanted to make something bright and welcoming, that featured a lot of deep, rich colors. A lot of the modern realistic games tend to focus on gritty gray, brown palettes." Several of the initial maps, Ilios, Dorado, and Nepal, were developed based on the idea of vacation spots and drew from various imagery of those locations. Kaplan noted that Dorado, set in Mexico, was inspired by a photograph they found while searching for images of colorful Mexican towns, but only later realized that the photo was that of Manarola, Italy. Others, like the Hollywood map, were created by a multicultural team that used only their perception of what Hollywood was like, rather than any reference material, with the result being better than a realistic version, according to Kaplan. A more recent map, Oasis, set in Iraq, was portrayed as "one of the most technologically-advanced places in the world" to contrast how other games set in the near-future present the country as ravaged by war.

The narrative for Overwatch is led by Blizzard's senior game designer Michael Chu. Creating a narrative for the game was a challenge compared to past Blizzard titles as the game lacks a single-player mode or a traditional story-telling mechanic. Instead, the story crafters for the game sought to create a spanning narrative that could be interjected into the game through short in-game dialogue and unlockable hero skins. A March 2017 patch for the game added short character biographies, as well as lore details about specific character skins in the Hero Gallery. Outside of the game, the narrative is primarily driven by a transmedia storytelling method, which includes animated shorts and digitally released comics. This gives the developers some flexibility as to where they can take the story as Overwatch is expanded over the years. The narrative can still be seen being hinted at through map environments and character dialogue within the game itself; Chu explains that "you get a character like Soldier: 76 and he says, like: 'back in my day we'd have this payload delivered'. And then you get a character like Zenyatta, the robot monk, and he would say something like, "becoming one with the objective." So we find these ways to really differentiate them and it makes for unexpected and sometimes ridiculous lines." Blizzard also found ways to include narrative elements through limited-time events, such as the "Junkenstein's Revenge" event during October 2016 and the April 2017 "Uprising" event. Chu said that with these types of events, they will encourage players to explore the other forms of media that Blizzard is using to develop the Overwatch narrative, as well as prompt fans to continue to explore and speculate on the world and characters they created.

Blizzard felt they had strength in developing a narrative for a large universe of characters as they had done for Warcraft. Chu expressed that they wanted to diverge from the fantasy and science fiction elements that were prominent in their main three franchises (, , and ), stating "we wanted to try something different with Overwatch, so what we decided to go for was the future of Earth. We always wanted the game to be about heroes, so we took a lot of inspiration from comics and superhero stories of our youth and today." Once it was determined Overwatch would be played on a near-futuristic version of Earth, the writers recognized the possibility of having a global-spanning set of characters and locations set in an "inspirational future". Metzen sees the Overwatch universe as having potential dynamics over time, but Blizzard does not yet have plans for how to implement this within the game.

The cast of playable characters in Overwatch was selected to portray diverse representations of genders and ethnicities, including males, females, and non-human characters such as robots and a gorilla. The need for a diverse cast was important to the developers, as some of Blizzard's previous games had been criticized before for missing this mark; Metzen explained that even his daughter had asked him why all the female characters from Warcraft seemed to be only wearing swimsuits. Metzen stated: "Specifically for Overwatch over the past year we've been really cognizant of that, trying not to oversexualize the female characters." Kaplan explained that the industry was "clearly in an age where gaming is for everybody," going on to say that "increasingly, people want to feel represented, from all walks of life, boys and girls, everybody. We feel indebted to do our best to honor that." Michael Chu expressed that the diverse group of characters is a result of Blizzard's approach to game design, elaborating that "We've tried [to] have a diverse cast of characters and diverse locations that you go through, and hopefully these characters - even beyond national diversity; just seeing their personalities, their backstories, their occupations - hopefully people will find things in common with these characters."

Overwatch's diversity also extends to other character facets. Blizzard has said that some of the characters have LGBT identities; Metzen said that the inclusion of LGBT characters was not "to be a data point or feel contrived in any way", but instead to have these identities "play out organically". Tracer was the first identified as one of the LGBT characters via one of the promotional online comics. Blizzard said on this reveal "as with any aspect of our characters' backgrounds, their sexuality is just one part of what makes our heroes who they are. From the very beginning of our work on Tracer's story, it just felt right to make this an aspect of her character." Blizzard reiterated their goal to have a diverse cast with Tracer's reveal, stating, "from the beginning, we've wanted the universe of Overwatch to feel welcoming and inclusive, and to reflect the diversity of our players around the world." Additional lore released in January 2019 revealed that Soldier: 76 had been in a same-sex relationship earlier in this life, making him the second LGBT character on the roster. Similarly, the character of Symmetra is considered autistic by the development team, with Kaplan saying, "we think she does a great job of representing just how awesome someone with autism can be".

The team envisioned the characters akin to superheroes in this narrative, each with their own abilities, background and personality that could stand on their own, but could also fit into the larger story; this notion translated into the characters being agents for the game, which Metzen said still captures the "heroism and vibe" that superhero stories carry. The team did not want to have any characters that served solely as villains in the game, but did develop some of the characters, like Soldier: 76, to have an unsure purpose within the narrative. Several characters evolved out of the characters and their abilities they had developed for Titan, including Tracer, Widowmaker, Bastion, Soldier: 76, Symmetra, Torbjorn, and Reinhardt. Characters were designed to avoid outright characters stereotypes. In some cases such as McCree, they took a stereotypical character but created a story and approach to embrace the stereotype. Other cases was presenting a character one would never typically see in a modern game, such as Ana, an older mother who remains a skilled sniper. The choice of Tracer as the cover art was purposely to contrast Overwatch from most other shooter games that feature a grizzled-looking older male soldier, with Kaplan saying this was to show that "normal things are normal".

Kaplan credits artist Arnold Tsang from coming up with the preliminary designs of all the heroes in the game. The narrative and characters themselves were then developed through an iterative process between the gameplay developers, artists, and promotional media as they worked to bring the narrative together. In this regards, Torbjörn was the defining character for the game, as while he was not created first, his art style was originally created by Tsang to help bridge the gap between the Warcraft universe to Overwatch. Blizzard's art director Sam Didier reviewed Tsang's original design, prompting several questions to help tighten the art design that led to Torbjörn's gameplay mechanics, and subsequently, Torbjörn's appearance was used as a baseline in all other character and map designs to make sure that these assets would appear to fit into the same universe as Torbjörn. Another example is Doomfist, a character introduced into one of the game's promotional videos where his gauntlet was on display. This led to the creation of one of the maps that expanded upon the Doomfist concept, making that a title passed down among others in the past, and seeding some of the existing heroes' backstory has had connections to the Doomfist title. This process gave them a sufficient starting point to work from in introducing Doomfist as a playable hero in Overwatch. Other examples of similar iterative expansion to the characters given by Metzen and Chu include the heroes Genji and Hanzo who were characters borne out of an initial single character concept and leading to them being rivals of each other, and the introduction of Lúcio as a means to expand upon the loosely connected Vishkar Corporation concept that was part of Symmetra's backstory.

Character animations were created by Blizzard's David Gibson. To help give more personality to the 3D-rendered animation, Gibson applied traditional methods used in 2D limited animation, such as smear animation, instead of relying on motion blur effects, creating more exaggerated animations that support the feel of the game.

Blizzard has pledged to support the game through various updates. Nearly all such updates are made available for testing on a special region called the Public Test Region (PTR) which any player can select instead of their local geographic region. In February 2020, Blizzard plans to add an "experimental card" to the game where they will test elements that are not related to debugging but for testing game balance, such as tweaking of gameplay rules or character abilities. Players will be able to access the experimental card from any region and are optional modes to the main gameplay elements.

Some updates included features promised as part of the long-term release plan. as the competitive mode that was added in June 2016, and potential changes to how the Play of the Game is selected to showcase non-attacking-based Heroes. Other updates will come from monitoring the game and adjusting various attributes of the Heroes to better manage their expectations they had in designing the game and in response to player feedback. For example, one of the first planned updates was to change the strength of McCree's alternate fire "Fan the Hammer" ability, which could do a great deal of damage to most targets. Blizzard felt this attack should be lethal to most of the Heroes but should not be able to take out Tank-based characters in a single shot, and reduced the damage to address this. Similarly, Symmetra had major character update in late 2016 that gave her additional abilities including a second Ultimate ability, the changes made in response to Blizzard's observations that she had been infrequently selected by players. Kaplan said that while they do want to promote lesser-played heroes, their goal of these updates is not to strive for equal selection rates for all heroes, but to work with the fluctuations in the meta-game as new heroes are introduced and new strategies by players are developed to counter new heroes or updates made to other heroes. Kaplan described their overall approach in these post-release adjustments as part of a "balance triangle", weighing the various statistics they collect, the feedback and general attitudes from the player base they monitor, and their own personal opinions and gut feelings where the balance should be. Not all three points are equally weighed, but they consider avoiding allowing one of these areas overwhelm the other two.

Not all updates will be equivalent across platforms; a planned update will reduce the damage of Torbjörn's auto-aiming turrets on console versions but will not be applied to the Windows version, while a later patch for consoles helped to improve the precision of aiming with controller analog sticks. In September 2016, Blizzard added in support for high bandwidth network play on the Windows client for users with sufficient Internet connections, which reduces the amount of interpolation delay in client and server-side prediction, making the game smoother and more reactive for those players. Players on slower bandwidth connections are grouped with others of this type of avoid any disadvantage of connection speed. Blizzard is looking for how to implement high bandwidth support in the console versions.

At launch, there were no plans for a version of Overwatch for OS X, with Kaplan saying that the OS X architecture and their optimizations for Overwatch were "just too challenging" to support initially. Kaplan has stated that they have looked into a version for the Nintendo Switch which they considered similarly challenging due to its specifications, and would complicate the nature of updating the game in a timely fashion on all consoles, but still consider the platform a viable one for the game.

Blizzard has plans to add new characters and maps to the game. With respect to characters, Kaplan expected they will release these one at a time, rather than in groups, allowing the new character to be stabilized before adding the next. Kaplan referred to the negative feedback received after the grouped introduction of the final three characters-Genji, Mei, and D.Va-during the closed beta period, which if repeated could be "disruptive" to the game's community. For example, the first new character, Ana, was revealed and playable on the Public Test region from July 12, 2016, and made available to all on the Windows version on July 19 with console versions following in the days after. Other characters like Sombra were added in a similar manner, along with other new features. In regards to maps, the first new map added, "Eichenwalde", was on August 16, 2016, first available in the PTR before being offered to all players. New maps are developed to be as future proof as possible in considering the potential of new characters. Blizzard level designer Aaron Keller led map designs to make sure that players were generally contained within the expected battle path, and was fortunate enough with a character with near limited flying ability, Pharah, was available from the start as part of this testing. Keller noted that with introduction of Wrecking Ball, a character capable of rolling and grappling for fast maneuvering, future maps may have sections well tailored to new characters like Wrecking Ball. Keller strove to give each character an equal number of maps the can excel on.

Blizzard is also able to add in new game modes and cosmetics, such as sprays and skins, among other things. Themed limited-time modes and cosmetics have also been made available for events and holidays, such as the 2016 Summer Olympics or Halloween. Some of these additions are derived from player feedback to Blizzard. In the case of the "Overwatch Uprising" event during April 2017, Kaplan said that players wanted to have more story put into the game, inspiring them to create a new story-driven player-vs-environment mode set during Overwatch's past that helped to create some new narrative and provide cosmetic items to reflect that. In May 2019, Blizzard introduced "The Workshop", a script-based environment for players to create their own custom game modes. According to Keith Miron and Dan Reed, software and gameplay engineers for Blizzard, the development team knew they wanted to explore options for players in custom games. As a result of a "hack-a-thon" in 2017, they had developed a simple scripting language that could be used to create custom games for those that were not programmers. The work was put on hold until late 2018, following another hack-a-thon event where they fleshed out more game ideas and scripting to support it, at which point it was determined to make this a feature of Overwatch.

Blizzard has said it is committed to maintaining a competitive landscape for the game and will take proactive steps to prevent cheating through hacks and other tricks. Blizzard performed one such mass-ban of players they had found to be using aimbots and other cheating assistants in late July 2016. Following Overwatch's release, Blizzard sought legal action against Bossland Hacks for Watchover Tyrant tool that enables certain cheats and advantages to players in Overwatch, among other features, eventually winning the case by default and being awarded $8.5 million in damages. To this end, Blizzard has also explicitly warned users of using third-party applications that provide additional in-game feedback to players about their performance, such as Visor, software that fed into an artificial intelligence system to provide additional information in-match to the player's performance, and Pursuit, which tracked players' performance and gave additional statistics after the conclusion of a match.

Blizzard had also emphasized the need to prevent Overwatch from becoming a toxic environment, with Kaplan saying that they want to remove players that frequently contribute toxicity from the game. By September 2017, Blizzard has taken action over 480,000 users, including 340,000 reported by other users, but have encouraged the community to continue to help support these efforts. Due to the rise of toxic behavior in the game, the Blizzard team has had to slow down development of additional content to deal with reports of toxic players. An endorsement system was added in June 2018 to discourage toxicity. Through this, players can give up to three endorsements in leadership, teamwork, and sportsmanship to any other player after a match. Players receiving endorsements gain experience that can help lead to earning loot box rewards faster, and players that continually receive endorsements are favored in the matchmaking system. According to Blizzard, by March 2019, the endorsement system had helped to reduce disruptive behavior in the game by up to 40%, and through surveys, players found the system to be trustworthy, helping to enforce the value of the endorsement system.

A major change to the game was announced in July 2019, called "Role Queue". Prior to this, players in Quickplay and Competitive modes could select any heroes at any point in the match. With the Role Queue requires players to select one of the three roles, Damage, Tank, and Support, before QuickPlay or Competitive games, which limits them to playing and switching between those heroes for the duration of the game. Players then would be matched so that each team would have two of each role. Groups of players would need to make sure their group does not exceed this before joining a match. Changes were made to support the Role Queue: competitive players would have separate skill rankings for each role, while heroes like Brigitte, originally designs to have some flexible capabilities between roles, would be adjusted to better fit their intended role. The intent of the change according to Kaplan was to "improve match quality, give players more control over their gameplay experience, and provide more positive social experiences between teammates." However, many observers believed the change was needed to combat the popular "GOATS" composition - a three-tank, three-support team named for the Overwatch Contenders team that popularized this. GOATS proved difficult to disrupt by opposing teams unless they also played GOATS. The GOATS composition had been dominating both Overwatch League play for most of its 2019 season, and was very common in normal competitive play, causing players and viewers to become disinterested. The Role Queue eliminates GOATS and thus expected to bring new life to Overwatch according to journalists. The Role Queue was introduced on the PTR in July 2019, and a short 2-week competitive season was held in August 2019 to test the system across all platforms before its full planned release in September 2019.

Separately, Blizzard, through its China regional offices, have taking developer 4399 to court over its mobile title Heroes of Warfare in October 2017, citing it as a clone in art, heroes, and gameplay design from Overwatch; this is the second such cloned title produced by 4399, the first that Blizzard had already succeeded in having removed from the various app stores. Blizzard and NetEase won the lawsuit by November 2019, with US$569,000 awarded in damages for the copyright violations on both games.

Overwatch was playable through backward compatibility on the next console generation, the Xbox Series X and Series S and the PlayStation 5, launched in November 2020. Blizzard released a performance optimization patch for the Xbox Series X/S version on March 9, 2020 that allowed players to run the game at up to 120 frames per second on supported monitors.

Overwatch was formally announced at the BlizzCon event on November 7, 2014; the game was playable during the event to all attendees, with fourteen characters available to select from. During this event Blizzard released a cinematic trailer and an extended gameplay video for the game. A month after the BlizzCon event, in December 2014, Blizzard published character introduction videos to its YouTube channel, and followed up on this May 2015 by posting weekly videos of game footage and character highlights.

A closed beta period for Overwatch across all three platforms began on October 27, 2015. The closed beta was put on "extended break" in December and brought back in February 2016. Following the March 2016 release announcement, Blizzard also announced an open beta period from May 5 to 9 for any registered user of the Battle.net client. The open beta proven popular with Blizzard reporting over 9.7 million players participating, and as a way of showing thanks, extended the open beta period by one extra day.

In the week prior to release, Blizzard arranged to have three giant-sized boxes (approximately 15 feet (4.6 m) tall) of various Overwatch heroes, as if being sold as packaged action figures, put on display across the globe at Hollywood, Paris, and Busan, South Korea. The displays were created by Alliance Studios, led by Steve Wang, who has collaborated with Blizzard before on past projects, and Eddie Yang. After planning the design of the sculptures in January 2016, teams across the world, including Droga5, Scicon, Stratasys and Egads, raced to print, finish and assemble the works in time for the game's release. Propelled by Overwatch, Blizzard had over 50% of the American advertisement share among gaming industry brands from May 16 to June 15, 2016.

Overwatch was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One platforms on May 24, 2016, with the game servers coming online at 00:00 BST that day. Blizzard allowed retailers to sell physical copies of the game on May 23 to help players prepare for the servers' launch. The game will be supported by updates, including new maps and characters. All of the additional content will be free for existing players and does not require additional payment. Blizzard hoped that through this method they can alleviate the concerns of some players.

Two special editions of Overwatch were released alongside the base game. The Origins Edition, available both as a downloadable and retail product, includes the base game and five additional character skins, as well as other bonus items for other Blizzard games via Battle.net. The Collectors Edition, only available as retail, includes the Origins Edition content as well as a statue of Soldier: 76, one of the playable characters, along with the game's soundtrack and a source book. Those that purchased either the Origins or Collectors Editions received the Baby Winston battle pet in World of Warcraft. Blizzard released a digital Game of the Year edition of Overwatch in honor of its first anniversary on May 23, 2017; it includes all content from the Origins Edition, in addition to ten free loot boxes.

Blizzard has expressed interest in supporting cross-platform play between console systems in the future, though has no plans for Windows-supported cross-play due to the precision advantage of keyboard and mouse controls over controller-based ones.

Blizzard opted to tell the story of Overwatch across various mediums, rather than include a story mode; Chu stated, "One of the things that's really great is we're able to leverage the strengths of these different mediums to tell different parts of the story," citing Soldier: 76's appearances in fake news reports, an animated video narrated from his perspective, as well as the short. Chu has also remarked that the reasoning for Blizzard's method of storytelling with Overwatch was an emphasis on a "gameplay first" philosophy.

In March 2016, Blizzard announced that they would be releasing comics and animated shorts based on Overwatch in 2016. The related media included plans for a graphic novel called Overwatch: First Strike, which would have focused on the story of several in-game characters including Soldier: 76, Torbjörn, Reaper, and Reinhardt. The novel was to be penned by writer Micky Neilson and artist Ludo Lullabi. Blizzard opted to cancel First Strike in November 2016, with Chu stating that since the announcement of the graphic novel, Overwatch's narrative development has gone in a somewhat different direction, changing out these origin stories would work. Blizzard still plans to reveal more of the characters' backstory in time.

Blizzard began releasing the series of animated shorts in March 2016; the shorts maintained the style of the game's cinematic trailer, which centered on a battle in which Tracer and Winston fought Reaper and Widowmaker in the Overwatch Museum. A collection of these cinematic sequences played in movie theaters across the United States as part of the game's launch event. The first episode of the animated short series, Recall, was released on March 23. It centers on Winston and Reaper, and features flashbacks to Winston's childhood. The second episode, Alive, showcased a standoff between Tracer and Widowmaker, and was released on April 5. The third episode, Dragons, featuring the brothers Hanzo and Genji, was released on May 16. The fourth and final episode of the series' first season, Hero, stars Soldier: 76, and was released May 22.

Overwatch characters and elements have been brought over to the crossover MOBA game Heroes of the Storm. Nine characters appear as playable heroes in the game, along with battlegrounds based on the Overwatch maps Hanamura and Volskaya Industries. Tracer debuted as a playable character in the video game Heroes of the Storm in its April 2016 update, nearly a month prior to the release of Overwatch. Hanzo has been added alongside Alexstrasza as part of the "Dragons of the Nexus" event in December 2017.

Blizzard and Dark Horse Comics announced a partnership at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con International that will have Dark Horse publish the existing Overwatch comics to date under their label as well as future comics, and will publish a 100-page art book The Art of Overwatch to be released mid-2017.

Funko has produced several Overwatch character figurines in their Pop line since the game's launch. Good Smile Company announced they will produce Nendoroid figurines of various Overwatch characters in 2017 and onward, starting with Tracer, and followed by Mercy and Mei.

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is a team-based first-person shooter developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in May 2016. The game, while having several different play modes, generally features two teams of six players each, selecting pre-made heroes from the game's roster, to either attack or defend various objective points on the game's maps.

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all the heros have a short film about there origen story

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all the heros have a short film about there origen story

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEL2avWp2Uc

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Overwatch ALL HEROES ORIGIN STORY (2015-2020)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#:~:text=U.S.&text=Blizzard%20Entertainment%2C%20Inc.%20is%20an,publisher%20based%20in%20Irvine%2C%20California.

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Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California. A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the company was founded on February 8, 1991, under the name Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles: Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce and Allen Adham. The company originally concentrated on the creation of game ports for other studios' games before beginning development of their own software in 1993 with games like Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. In 1993, the company became Chaos Studios, Inc., and eventually Blizzard Entertainment after being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

Since then, Blizzard Entertainment has created several sequels, including highly influential massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft in 2004, as well as three other multi-million selling video game franchises: and . Their most recent projects include the expansion for , Reaper of Souls; the online collectible card game Hearthstone; the multiplayer online battle arena Heroes of the Storm; the third and final expansion for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Legacy of the Void; the multiplayer first-person hero shooter and the eighth expansion for World of Warcraft, Shadowlands. The games are operated through online gaming service Battle.net.

On July 9, 2008, Activision merged with Vivendi Games, culminating in the inclusion of the Blizzard brand name in the title of the resulting holding company. On July 25, 2013, Activision Blizzard announced the purchase of 429 million shares from majority owner Vivendi. As a result, Activision Blizzard became a completely independent company. Since 2018, the company's reputation has suffered from a series of poorly received games, controversies involving players and staff, and allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct against leading Blizzard employees.

Blizzard Entertainment hosts annual gaming conventions for fans to meet and to promote their games: the first BlizzCon was held in October 2005, and since then, all of the conventions have been held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. BlizzCon features game-related announcements, previews of upcoming Blizzard Entertainment games and content, Q&A sessions and panels, costume contests, and playable versions of various Blizzard games. Blizzard WorldWide Invitationals were events similar to BlizzCon held in South Korea and France between 2004 and 2008.

Blizzard Entertainment was founded by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse in February 1991, after all three had earned their bachelor's degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, the year prior. The name "Silicon & Synapse" was a high concept from the three founders, with "silicon" representing the building block of a computer, while "synapse" the building block of the brain. The initial logo created by Stu Rose. To fund the company, each of them contributed about $10,000, Morhaime borrowing the sum interest-free from his grandmother. During the first two years, the company focused on creating game ports for other studios. Ports include titles such as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I and Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess. In 1993, the company developed games such as Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions).

Around 1993, co-founder Adham told the other executives that he did not like the name "Silicon & Synapse" anymore, as people outside the company were confusing the meaning of silicon the chemical element used in microchips with silicone the materials used in breast implants. By the end of 1993, Adham changed the name to "Chaos Studios", reflecting on the haphazardness of their development processes.

In early 1994, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for $6.75 million ($11.8 million today). Shortly after this point, they were contacted by a Florida company, Chaos Technologies, who wanted the company to pay US$100,000 to keep the name. Not wanting to pay that sum, the executives decided to change the studio's name to "Ogre Studios" by April 1994. However, Davidson & Associated did not like this name, and forced the company to change it. According to Morhaime, Adham began running through a dictionary from the start, writing down any word that seemed interesting and passing it to the legal department to see if it had any complications. One of the first words they found to be interesting and cleared the legal check was "blizzard", leading them to change their name to "Blizzard Entertainment" by May 1994. By May, Chaos Studios was renamed Blizzard Entertainment.

Shortly thereafter, Blizzard Entertainment shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a real-time strategy (RTS) game in a high-fantasy setting.

Acquisition by Vivendi and World of Warcraft (1995-2007)

Blizzard Entertainment has changed hands several times since then. Davidson was acquired along with Sierra On-Line by a company called CUC International in 1996. CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger. Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, Sierra On-line (which included Blizzard) to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard, at this point numbering about 200 employees, became part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi.

In 1996, Blizzard Entertainment acquired Condor Games of San Mateo, California, which had been working on the action role-playing game (ARPG) for Blizzard at the time. Condor was renamed Blizzard North, with Blizzard's main headquarters in Irvine renamed to Blizzard South to distinguish the two. Diablo was released at the very start of 1997 alongside Battle.net, a matchmaking service for the game. Blizzard North developed the sequel (2000), and its expansion pack Lord of Destruction (2001). Following these releases, a number of key staff from Blizzard North departed for other opportunities, such as Bill Roper. Vivendi made the decision in August 2005 to consolidate Blizzard North into Blizzard South, relocating staff to the main Blizzard offices in Irvine, and subsequently dropping the "Blizzard South" name.

Following the success of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Blizzard began development on a science-fiction themed RTS and released the title in March 1998. The title was the top-selling PC game for the year, and led to further growth of the Battle.net service and the use of the game for esports. Around 2000, Blizzard engaged with Nihilistic Software to work on a version of StarCraft for home consoles for Blizzard. Nihilisitic was co-founded by Robert Huebner, who had worked on StarCraft and other games while a Blizzard employee before leaving to found the studio. The game, StarCraft: Ghost, was a stealth-oriented game compared to the RTS features of StarCraft, and was a major feature of the 2002 Tokyo Game Show. However, over the next few years, the game entered development hell with conflicts between Nihilisitic and Blizzard on its direction. Blizzard ordered Nihilistic to stop work on StarCraft: Ghost in July 2004, and instead brought on Swingin' Ape Studios, a third-party studio that had just successfully released Metal Arms: Glitch in the System in 2003, to reboot the development of Ghost. Blizzard fully acquired Swingin' Ape Studios in May 2005 to continue on Ghost. However, while the game was scheduled to be released in 2005, it was targeted at the consoles of the sixth generation, such as the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox, while the industry was transitioning to the seventh generation. Blizzard decided to cancel Ghost rather than extend its development period to work on the newer consoles.

Blizzard started to work on a sequel to the Warcraft II in early 1998, which was announced as a "role-playing strategy" game. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, the third title set in the Warcraft fictional universe, was released in July 2002. Warcraft III has inspired many future games, having the influence on real-time strategy and multiplayer online battle arena genre. Many of the characters, locations and concepts introduced in Warcraft III and its expansion went on to play major roles in numerous future Blizzard's titles.

In 2002, Blizzard was able to reacquire rights for three of its earlier Silicon & Synapse titles, The Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing and Blackthorne, from Interplay Entertainment and re-release them for Game Boy Advance, a handheld console.

In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices in the Paris suburb of Vélizy, Yvelines, France.

Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on the Warcraft franchise, on November 23, 2004, in North America, and on February 11, 2005, in Europe. By December 2004, the game was the fastest-selling PC game in the United States, and by March 2005, had reached 1.5 million subscribers worldwide. Blizzard partnered with Chinese publisher The9 to publish and distribute World of Warcraft in China, as foreign companies could not directly publish into the country themselves. World of Warcraft launched in China in June 2005. By the end of 2007, World of Warcraft was considered a global phenomenon, having reached over 9 million subscribers and exceeded US$1 billion in revenue since its release. In April 2008, World of Warcraft was estimated to hold 62 percent of the MMORPG subscription market. Blizzard's staff quadrupled from around 400 employees in 2004 to 1600 by 2006 to provide more resources to the game and its various expansions, and Blizzard moved their headquarters to 16215 Alton Parkway in Irvine, California in 2007 to support the additional staff.

With the success of World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment organized the first BlizzCon fan convention in October 2005 held at the Anaheim Convention Center. The inaugural event drew about 6,000 people and became an annual event which Blizzard uses to announce new games, expansions, and content for its properties.

Up through 2006, Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision, had been working to rebound the company from near-bankruptcy, and had established a number of new studios. However, Activision lacked anything in the MMO market. Kotick saw that World of Warcraft was bringing in over US$1.1 billion a year in subscription fees, and began approaching Vivendi's CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy about potential acquisition of their struggling Vivendi Games division, which included Blizzard Entertainment. Lévy was open to a merger, but would only allow it if he controlled the majority of the combined company, knowing the value of World of Warcraft to Kotick. Among those Kotick spoke to for advice included Blizzard's Morhaime, who told Kotick that they had begun establishing lucrative in-roads into the Chinese market. Kotick accepted Lévy's deal, with the deal approved by shareholders in December 2007. By July 2008, the merger was complete, with Vivendi Games effectively dissolved except for Blizzard Entertainment, and the new company was named Activision Blizzard.

Blizzard established a distribution agreement with the Chinese company NetEase in August 2008 to publish Blizzard's games in China. The deal focused on StarCraft II which was gaining popularity as an esport within southeast Asia, as well as for other Blizzard games with the exception of World of Warcraft, still being handled by The9. The two companies established the Shanghai EaseNet Network Technology for managing the games within China. Blizzard and The9 prepared to launch the World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King, but the expansion came under scrutiny by China's content regulation board, the General Administration of Press and Publication, which rejected publication of it within China in March 2009, even with preliminary modifications made by The9 to clear it. Rumors of Blizzard's dissatisfaction with The9 from this and other previous complications with World of Warcraft came to a head when, in April 2009, Blizzard announced it was terminating its contract with The9, and transferred operation of World of Warcraft in China to NetEase.

They released an improved version of Battle.net (Battle.net 2.0) in March 2009 which included improved matchmaking, storefront features, and better support for all of Blizzard's existing titles particularly World of Warcraft.

Having peaked at 12 million monthly subscriptions in 2010, World of Warcraft subscriptions sunk to 6.8 million in 2014, the lowest number since the end of 2006, prior to The Burning Crusade expansion. However, World of Warcraft is still the world's most-subscribed MMORPG, and holds the Guinness World Record for the most popular MMORPG by subscribers. In 2008, Blizzard was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for the creation of World of Warcraft. Mike Morhaime accepted the award.

Following the merger, Blizzard found it was relying on its well-established properties, but at the same time, the industry was experiencing a shift towards indie games. Blizzard established a few small teams within the company to work on developing new concepts based on the indie development approach that it could potentially use. One of these teams quickly came onto the idea of a collectible card game based on the Warcraft narrative universe, which ultimately became Hearthstone, released as a free-to-play title in March 2014. Hearthstone reached over 25 million players by the end of 2014, and exceeded 100 million players by 2018.

Another small internal team began work around 2008 on a new intellectual property known as , a more contemporary or near-future MMORPG that would have co-existed alongside World of Warcraft. The project gained more visibility in 2010 as a result of some information leaks. Blizzard continued to speak on Titan's development over the next few years, with over 100 people within Blizzard working on the project. However, Titan's development was troubled, and, internally, in May 2013, Blizzard cancelled the project (publicly reporting this in 2014), and reassigned most of the staff but left about 40 people, led by Jeff Kaplan, to either come up with a fresh idea within a few weeks or have their team reassigned to Blizzard's other departments. The small team came upon the idea of a team-based multiplayer shooter game, reusing many of the assets from Titan but set in a new near-future narrative. The new project was greenlit by Blizzard and became known as , which was released in May 2016. Overwatch became the fourth main intellectual property of Blizzard, following Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo.

In addition to Hearthstone and Overwatch, Blizzard Entertainment continued to produce sequels and expansions to its established properties during this period, including StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010) and (2012). Their major crossover title, Heroes of the Storm, was released as a MOBA game in 2015. The game featured various characters from Blizzard's franchises as playable heroes, as well as different battlegrounds based on Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch universes. In the late 2010s, Blizzard released StarCraft: Remastered (2017) and Warcraft III: Reforged (2020), remastered versions of the original StarCraft and Warcraft III, respectively.

The May 2016 release of Overwatch was highly successful, and was the highest-selling game on PC for 2016. Several traditional esport events had been established within the year of Overwatch's release, such as the Overwatch World Cup, but Blizzard continued to expand this and announced the first esports professional league, the Overwatch League at the 2016 BlizzCon event. The company purchased a studio at The Burbank Studios in Burbank, California, that it converted into a dedicated esports venue, the Blizzard Arena, to be used for the Overwatch League and other events. The inaugural season of the Overwatch League launched on January 10, 2018, with 12 global teams playing. By the second season in 2019 it had expanded the League to 20 teams, and with its third season in 2020, it will have these teams traveling across the globe in a transitional home/away-style format.

In 2012, Blizzard Entertainment had 4,700 employees, with offices across 11 cities including Austin, Texas, and countries around the globe. As of June 2015, the company's headquarters in Irvine, California had 2,622 employees.

On October 3, 2018, Mike Morhaime announced his plans to step down as the company president and CEO while remaining an advisor to the company; he formally left on April 7, 2019. Morhaime was replaced by J. Allen Brack, the executive producer on World of Warcraft.

Frank Pearce announced he would be stepping down as Blizzard's Chief Development Officer on July 19, 2019, though will remain in an advisory role similar to Morhaime. Michael Chu, lead writer on many of Blizzard's franchises including Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch, announced he was leaving the company after 20 years in March 2020.

On January 22, 2021, Activision transferred Vicarious Visions over to Blizzard Entertainment, stating that the Vicarious Visions team had better opportunity for long-term support for Blizzard. Vicarious had been working with Blizzard for about two years prior to this announcement on the planned remaster of , Diablo II: Resurrected, and according to Brack, it made sense to incorporate Vicarious into Blizzard for ongoing support of the game and for other Diablo games including .

In celebration of the company's 30th anniversary, Blizzard Entertainment released a compilation called Blizzard Arcade Collection in February 2021, for various video game platforms. The collection includes their three classic video games: The Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing, and Blackthorne, each of which containing additional upgrades and numerous modern features.

Activision Blizzard was the subject of a lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in July 2021, asserting that for several years the management within Blizzard as well as Activision promoted a "frat boy" atmosphere that allowed and encouraged sexual misconduct towards female employees and discrimination in hiring practices. The lawsuit drew a large response from employees and groups outside of Activision Blizzard. In the wake of these events, Brack, one of the few individuals directly named in the suit, announced he was leaving Blizzard to "pursue new opportunities", and will be replaced by co-leads Jen Oneal, the lead of Vicarious Visions and the first woman in a leadership role for the company, and Mike Ybarra, a Blizzard executive vice president.

Blizzard Entertainment has developed 19 games since 1991, the majority of which are in the , , and series. Since the release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994), (1997), and (1998), the focus has been almost exclusively on those three franchises, with the (2016) as sole exception. Additionally, Blizzard has released two spin-offs to the main franchises: Hearthstone (2014), and Heroes of the Storm (2015).

Currently, Blizzard Entertainment has four main franchises: Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch. Each franchise is supported by other media based around its intellectual property such as novels, collectible card games, comics and video shorts. Blizzard announced in 2006 that they would be producing a Warcraft live-action movie. The movie was directed by Duncan Jones, financed and produced by Legendary Pictures, Atlas Entertainment, and others, and distributed by Universal Pictures. It was released in June 2016.

In 2015, Blizzard Entertainment formed "Classic Games division", a team focused on updating and remastering some of their older titles, with an initially announced focus on StarCraft: Remastered (2017), Warcraft III: Reforged (2020), and Diablo II: Resurrected (2021).

In February 2021, Blizzard Entertainment released a compilation called Blizzard Arcade Collection for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. The collection includes five Blizzard's classic video games: The Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing, Blackthorne, The Lost Vikings 2 and , with the last two games added in April 2021. Some of the modern features include 16:9 resolution, 4-player split-screen, rewinding and saving of game progress, watching replays, and adding graphic filters to change the look of player's game. Additionally, it contains upgrades for each game such as enhanced local multiplayer for The Lost Vikings, new songs and artist performances for Rock n' Roll Racing, as well as a new level map for A digital museum, which is included in the collection, features game art, unused content, and interviews.

Notable unreleased titles include Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, which was canceled on May 22, 1998, Shattered Nations, and StarCraft: Ghost, which was "Postponed indefinitely" on March 24, 2006, after being in development hell for much of its lifespan. After seven years of development, Blizzard revealed the cancellation of an unannounced MMO codenamed Titan on September 23, 2014. The company also has a history of declining to set release dates, choosing to instead take as much time as needed, generally saying a given product is "done when it's done."

Pax Imperia II was originally announced as a title to be published by Blizzard. Blizzard eventually dropped Pax Imperia II, though, when it decided it might be in conflict with their other space strategy project, which became known as . THQ eventually contracted with Heliotrope and released the game in 1997 as Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain.

The company, known at the time as the Silicon & Synapse, initially concentrated on porting other studio's games to computer platforms, developing 8 ports between 1992 and 1993.

As with most studios with multiple franchises, Blizzard Entertainment has organized different departments to oversee these franchises. Formally, since around the time of World of Warcraft in 2004, these have been denoted through simply numerical designations. The original three teams were:

Team 1 manages the Starcraft property. The team also oversees the development of the Starcraft spin-off Heroes of the Storm. Team 1 also included the Classics Team to work on remastering Blizzard's earlier properties for modern computers, which have included StarCraft: Remastered and Warcraft III: Reforged. The Classic Games team was disbanded around August 2020, about eight months after Warcraft III: Reforged was released; according to Jason Schreier of Bloomberg News, this was due to Activision driving Blizzard away from remastering its old properties, which figured into the launch issues with Warcraft III: Reforged.

Team 2 continues to manage and create content for World of Warcraft.

Team 3 oversees the Diablo franchise.

Since 2004, two new teams were created:

Team 4 was created around 2007 to work on Blizzard's first new IP since World of Warcraft, that being . Titan had development difficulties near 2013, and most of Team 4 was reallocated to the other teams, but the remaining members, led by Jeff Kaplan, revised Titan's concept into Overwatch, which remains in Team 4's hands since its release in 2016.

Team 5 was created in 2008 to explore smaller games that could fit into Blizzard's portfolio. This resulted in the creation of Hearthstone, a collectible card game based on the Warcraft property, which became Team 5's priority.

Blizzard Entertainment has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client'. The Warden client is known to be used with Blizzard's online games such as Diablo and World of Warcraft, and the Terms of Service contain a clause consenting to the Warden software's RAM scans while a Blizzard game is running.

The Warden client scans a small portion of the code segment of running processes in order to determine whether any third-party programs are running. The goal of this is to detect and address players who may be attempting to run unsigned code or third party programs in the game. This determination of third party programs is made by hashing the scanned strings and comparing the hashed value to a list of hashes assumed to correspond to banned third party programs. The Warden's reliability in correctly discerning legitimate versus illegitimate actions was called into question when a large scale incident happened. This incident banned many Linux users after an update to Warden caused it to incorrectly detect Cedega as a cheat program. Blizzard issued a statement claiming they had correctly identified and restored all accounts and credited them with 20 days play. Warden scans all processes running on a computer, not just the game, and could possibly run across what would be considered private information and other personally identifiable information. It is because of these peripheral scans that Warden has been accused of being spyware and has run afoul of controversy among privacy advocates.

Blizzard Entertainment released its revamped Battle.net service in 2009. The platform provides online gaming, digital distribution, digital rights management, and social networking service. Battle.net allows people who have purchased Blizzard products to download digital copies of games they have purchased, without needing any physical media.

On November 11, 2009, Blizzard required all World of Warcraft accounts to switch over to Battle.net accounts. This transition means that all current Blizzard titles can be accessed, downloaded, and played with a singular Battle.net login.

Battle.net 2.0 is the platform for matchmaking service for Blizzard games, which offers players a host of additional features. Players are able to track their friend's achievements, view match history, avatars, etc. Players are able to unlock a wide range of achievements for Blizzard games.

The service provides the user with community features such as friends lists and groups, and allows players to chat simultaneously with players from other Blizzard games using VoIP and instant messaging. For example, players no longer need to create multiple user names or accounts for most Blizzard products. To enable cross-game communication, players need to become either Battletag or Real ID friends.

On July 6, 2010, Blizzard Entertainment announced that they were changing the way their forums worked to require that users identify themselves with their real name. The reaction from the community was overwhelmingly negative with multiple game magazines calling the change "foolhardy" and an "epic fail". It resulted in a significant user response on the Blizzard forums, including one thread on the issue reaching over 11,000 replies. This included personal details of a Blizzard employee who gave his real name "to show it wasn't a big deal". Shortly after revealing his real name, forum users posted personal information including his phone number, picture, age, and home address.

Some technology media outlets suggested that displaying real names through Real ID is a good idea and would benefit both Battle.net and the Blizzard community. But others were worried that Blizzard was opening their fans up to real-life dangers such as stalking, harassment, and employment issues, since a simple Internet search by someone's employer can reveal their online activities.

Blizzard initially responded to some of the concerns by saying that the changes would not be retroactive to previous posts, that parents could set up the system so that minors cannot post, and that posting to the forums is optional. However, due to the huge negative response, Blizzard President Michael Morhaime issued a statement rescinding the plan to use real names on Blizzard's forums for the time being. The idea behind this plan was to allow players who had a relationship outside of the games to find each other easier across all the Blizzard game titles. They also planned to add several other features designed to make reading the forums more enjoyable and to empower players with tools to improve the quality of forum discussions.

Apart from the negative side effects of Real ID relating to privacy, the addition boasts features for current Blizzard titles. For instance, real names for friends, cross-realm and cross-game chat, rich presence and broadcasts are included with the Real ID system.

During an October 2019 Hearthstone Grandmasters streaming event in Taiwan, one player Ng Wai Chung, going by his online alias "Blitzchung" used an interview period to show support for the protestors in the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests. Shortly afterwards, on October 7, 2019, Blitzchung was disqualified from the current tournament and forfeited his winnings to date, and banned for a one-year period. The two shoutcasters engaged in the interview were also penalized with similar bans. Blizzard justified the ban as from its Grandmasters tournament rules that prevents players from anything that "brings [themselves] into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages [Blizzard's] image".

Blizzard's response led to several protests from current Hearthstone players, other video game players, and criticism from Blizzard's employees, fearing that Blizzard was giving into the censorship of the Chinese government. Protests were held, including through the 2019 BlizzCon in early November, to urge Blizzard to reverse their bans. The situation also drew the attention of several U.S. lawmakers, fearing that Blizzard, as a U.S. company, was letting China dictate how it handled speech and also urged the bans to be reversed.

Blizzard CEO J. Allen Brack wrote an open letter on October 11, 2019, apologizing for the way Blizzard handled the situation, and reduced the bans for both Blitzchung and the casters to six months. Brack reiterated that while they support free speech and their decision was in no way tied to the Chinese government, they want players and casters to avoid speaking beyond the tournament and the games in such interviews.

In 1998, Donald P. Driscoll, an Albany, California attorney filed a suit on behalf of Intervention, Inc., a California consumer group, against Blizzard Entertainment for "unlawful business practices" for the action of collecting data from a user's computer without their permission.

On June 20, 2003, Blizzard issued a cease and desist letter to the developers of an open-source clone of the Warcraft engine called FreeCraft, claiming trademark infringement. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with different graphics and music.

As well as a similar name, FreeCraft enabled players to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the Warcraft II CD. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge. Soon after that the developers regrouped to continue the work by the name of .

On August 14, 2007, Beijing University Founder Electronics Co., Ltd. sued Blizzard Entertainment Limited for copyright infringement claiming 100 million yuan in damages. The lawsuit alleged the Chinese edition of World of Warcraft reproduced a number of Chinese typefaces made by Founder Electronics without permission.

MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.

On July 14, 2008, the United States District Court for the District of Arizona ruled on the case MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.. The Court found that MDY was liable for copyright infringement since users of its Glider bot program were breaking the End User License Agreement and Terms of Use for World of Warcraft. MDY Industries appealed the judgment of the district court, and a judgment was delivered by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on December 14, 2010, in which the summary judgment against MDY for contributory copyright infringement was reversed. Nevertheless, they ruled that the bot violated the DMCA and the case was sent back to the district court for review in light of this decision.

MDY v. Blizzard's decision did affirm a prior Ninth Circuit ruling in Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc. that software licenses, such as the one used by Blizzard for WoW, were enforceable and enshrined the principle that video games could be sold as licenses to players rather than purchased. This ruling, though limited to the states of the Ninth Circuit, has been used by the industry to continue to sell games as licenses to users.

On December 5, 2008, Blizzard Entertainment issued a cease and desist letter to many administrators of high population World of Warcraft private servers (essentially slightly altered hosting servers of the actual World of Warcraft game, that players do not have to pay for). Blizzard used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to influence many private servers to fully shut down and cease to exist.

Shortly after Valve filed its trademark for "Dota" to secure the franchising rights for , DotA-Allstars, LLC, run by former contributors to the games's predecessor, Defense of the Ancients, filed an opposing trademark in August 2010. DotA All-Stars, LLC was sold to Blizzard Entertainment in 2011. After the opposition was over-ruled in Valve's favor, Blizzard filed an opposition against Valve in November 2011, citing their license agreement with developers, as well as their ownership of DotA-Allstars, LLC. Blizzard conceded their case in May 2012, however, giving Valve undisputed commercial rights to Dota name, while Blizzard would rename their StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm mod "Blizzard All-Stars", which would eventually become the stand-alone game, Heroes of the Storm.

California Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Activision Blizzard, Inc

Following a two-year investigation, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard in July 2021 for gender-based discrimination and harassment, principally within the Blizzard workplace. The DFEH describes the issue as arising from a "pervasive frat boy workplace culture". In the suit, the DFEH allege that female employees were less likely to be promoted over male counterparts, and cite an instance of a female employee committing suicide while on a work trip with her male boss. Activision Blizzard's statement described the suit as meritless, contending that action had been taken in any instances of misconduct. The company also objected to the DFEH not approaching them prior to filing.

Over the years, some former Blizzard Entertainment employees have moved on and established gaming companies of their own. Several of these occurred following the acquisition of Blizzard by Activision in 2008, and more recently as Activision has directed Blizzard away from properties like Warcraft and Starcraft properties that are not seen as financial boons to the larger company. These employees left to form their smaller studios to give themselves the creative freedom that they were lacking at Blizzard. Collectively these studios are known as "Blizzard 2.0".

1. https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23706475/new-leadership-at-blizzard

2. Dean Takahashi: ^ game-development Co-Founder Looks at Chaos in Early Stages and Future Challenges. Archived July 7, 2012, at archive.today In: Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1994. - Interview with Allen Adham.

3. Dean Takahashi: ^ Briefcase: Technology. Archived June 29, 2012, at archive.today In: Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1994.

4. ^ Glenday, Craig (2009). Craig Glenday (ed.). Guinness World Records 2009. GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS (paperback ed.). Random House, Inc. p. 241. ISBN 978-0-553-59256-6. Archived from the original on April 28, 2014. Most popular MMORPG game(sic) In terms of the number of online subscribers, World of Warcraft is the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), with 10 million subscribers as of January 2008.

5. ^ Williams, Becky (August 24, 2009). "Video: Backstage at BlizzCon 2009:Thousands of World of Warcraft fans descend on southern California for Blizzard's epic gaming convention". The Daily Telegraph. UK. Archived from the original on September 1, 2009. Set in the fantasy world of Azeroth it currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most popular MMORPG, which probably accounts for why Blizzard is the most bankable games publisher in the world.

6. ^ Langshaw, Mark (June 6, 2009). "Guinness announces gaming world records". Digital Spy Limited. Archived from the original on February 8, 2012. Blizzard's Mike Morhaime and Paul Sams were handed awards for World Of Warcraft and Starcraft, which won Most Popular MMORPG and Best Selling PC Strategy Game respectively.

7. ^ "Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition - Records - PC Gaming". Archived from the original on April 5, 2008. World of Warcraft is the most popular MMORPG in the world with nearly 12 million subscribers around the world.

8. ^ Allsup, Maeve (July 21, 2021). "Activision Blizzard Sued Over 'Frat Boy' culture, Harassment". Bloomberg Law.

9. ^ Woo, Kwanghee (July 3, 2017). "StarCraft: Remastered interview: 'Doing this right is keeping the core community happy'". . Archived from the original on September 28, 2021.

10. ^ "Blizzard's Real ID Removes Anonymity From Their Forums". Digital Something. July 6, 2010. Archived from the original on June 29, 2011.

11. ^ Farrell, Nick (July 7, 2010). "Blizzard forces users to show real names". TechEye. Archived from the original on July 10, 2010.

12. ^ Howard Wen, Stratagus: Open Source Strategy Games linuxdevcenter.com July 15, 2004 Archived December 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. Linuxdevcenter.com. Retrieved July 8, 2011.

13. ^ McSherry, Corynne (December 14, 2010). "A Mixed Ninth Circuit Ruling in MDY v. Blizzard: WoW Buyers Are Not Owners - But Glider Users Are Not Copyright Infringers Legal Analysis". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Archived from the original on July 21, 2016.

14. ^ von Lohmann, Fred (September 25, 2009). "You Bought It, You Own It: MDY v. Blizzard Appealed". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Archived from the original on September 29, 2009.

15. ^ Eichner, Andrew W. (2013). "Game Over, Insert Coin to Continue: Entering a New Era of Video Game Intellectual Property Enforcement". IDEA. 53: 101.

16. ^ Plunkett, Luke (February 10, 2012). "Blizzard and Valve go to War Over DOTA Name". Kotaku. Archived from the original on February 11, 2012.

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Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California. A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the company was founded on February 8, 1991, under the name Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles: Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce and Allen Adham.

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overwatch was released on the 24th of may 2016 

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overwatch was released on the 24th of may 2016 

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https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/24/overwatch-had-one-of-the-best-first-years-ever/

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One of the most important games to come out in years is celebrating its first anniversary.

Overwatch came out on May 24, 2016 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. In one year, Blizzard's team-based shooter has attracted more than 30 million players. And it's a paid game, not free-to-play. All of these players spent at least $40 (that's the cost of the base version on PC, while the console version goes for $60) up front.

And Overwatch keeps making money from players thanks to loot boxes, which you can earn or buy for a chance to unlock cosmetic items. Overwatch has already brought in more than $1 billion in revenue for Activision-Blizzard. The shooter is influencing the entire industry, changing the way that people think about how to monetize their games.

How has Overwatch done so well in such a short time? It's a great game - we named it our Game of the Year for 2016. But you can attribute its success to more than just quality.

New ground

When Blizzard first announced Overwatch in 2014, some saw it as a curiosity. For years, Blizzard had focused on its three core franchises: Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft. Now, for the first time in decades, it was making something new.

It was also going to be Blizzard's first shooter. Most of the studio's fans knew it for strategy games like StarCraft or its massively multiplayer online role-playing game giant, World of Warcraft. Now, Blizzard was going to tackle one of the most popular genres in gaming.

All of this intrigue helped Overwatch grab people's attention. After years of seeing the same three series from Blizzard, we were finally going to see them start a new series.

The payment model

Overwatch confused some folks after its reveal. When we saw the hero-based shooter, many thought it would be a free-to-play game, similar to multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs) like League of Legends or even Blizzard's own Heroes of the Storm, which came out in 2014.

It seemed like free-to-play was where Blizzard was heading in general. Along with Heroes of the Storm, its digital card game Hearthstone was free-to-play and making a lot of money. So why wouldn't Overwatch follow a similar model?

So when Blizzard said that Overwatch would be a paid game, it caught some observers off-guard. It seemed like a missed opportunity for them to make more cash. Blizzard defended the decision by saying it wanted players to have access to all of the game's characters (21 at launch, now 24) at all times.

But Blizzard also had a financial plan. While Overwatch doesn't sell items like new heroes or maps, it does offer loot boxes. You can earn these slowly by playing, most commonly getting one each time you level up your account. Each loot box gives you four random cosmetic items of different rarities: Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. You can buy them in bundles, with the cheapest costing $2 for two loot boxes.

These cosmetics included items like new outfits for characters, paint sprays that post little pictures on levels, voice lines that you could have you hero say on command, and more. They don't impact gameplay at all, so buying a lot of loot boxes doesn't give you an advantage over other players.

But people want these goodies, even if they don't give you any advantage. Overwatch is a charming, colorful game with likable characters and a lot of personality. These cosmetic items help players customize their heroes to their own tastes and let them show off to friends, teammates, and competitors.

Blizzard's real genius showed when it started offering limited time loot boxes. Overwatch celebrates in-game events that last a couple of weeks. These happen about every two months and have themes like Christmas or the Summer Olympics. During the events, you can earn and buy special loot boxes with new cosmetics. But these are only available for as long as the event lasts.

You can practice some patience with the regular loot boxes. You can convince yourself it's not worth paying money for them since you can earn them for free by playing the game. It takes some time, but they aren't going anywhere. This isn't the case for the events. If you don't unlock that Reaper skin you want before the special loot boxes go away, you're out of luck. So people spend money to help their odds of unlocking more cosmetics.

While you can argue that the loot box system is a bit manipulative, it beats forcing players to spend money on content like maps or characters. This approach doesn't split up the community, but it still gives Blizzard a way to monetize the game after its release. The loot box system is becoming more popular around gaming. Blizzard recently adopted it into Heroes of the Storm, and even non-Blizzard games like the recent fighter Injustice 2 uses loot boxes.

The balancing

Overwatch is a competitive game. When you're playing, you're trying to win. To keep that experience interesting, Blizzard has to make sure that none of the heroes are too strong or weak. If one becomes too powerful, people will feel pressured to play them, or they'll become salty when they lose to them. If a hero is too weak, people who are drawn to that character because they like their design or playstyle can become frustrated when they perform poorly.

Blizzard has done a great job of keeping on top of balance. Problems will arise, but Blizzard addresses them quickly. McCree was too powerful in Overwatch's first weeks. His gun was too strong at long ranges, making actual snipers like Widowmaker obsolete. He could also shred tanks, characters that are supposed to be able to take a lot of damage, with a few button presses. Blizzard weakened McCree so that he wouldn't dominate but still be fun to play.

Blizzard is also good at knowing when not to overreact to community complaints. Listening to your players is important when keeping a live game successful. But popular opinions aren't always the right ones. When Overwatch launched, many new players had a hard time against the hero Bastion, a robot that can turn into an immobile turret. In this form, Bastion could deal a lot of damage.

For inexperienced players, it was frustrating to run out into the open and quickly die to a Bastion. Many wanted to see him nerfed (gamer lingo for when a developer weakens a character). But it turned out that those players eventually learned how to out-play Bastion and his limited mobility, using long-range characters like Widowmaker and Pharah to take him out before he could kill anyone. Bastion was actually outplayed by other characters so much that he become one of the game's least-picked heroes. Blizzard had to rework him a bit, significantly boosting his ability to heal himself.

The esports factor

As Overwatch launched, the esports market was in the middle of a boom that's still going growing. Esports will generate as much as $696 million in revenues this year, according to a market report from intelligence firm Newzoo. It didn't take long for Overwatch to became a popular game in the competitive world.

The shooter has already given out more than $2.7 million to players as prize money in about 400 total tournaments, according to E-sports Earnings. Overwatch esports were even broadcasted on TBS via Eleague, that channel's professional gaming organization that has also aired tournaments for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Street Fighter V.

Blizzard has its own plans for Overwatch and esports. The studio is going to launch the Overwatch League later this year, which will have major cities hosting their own Overwatch teams in a system similar to professional sports. Players will have contracts, giving them a way to earn cash outside of prize money.

The appeal

People don't seem to just like Overwatch. They love it. They don't just want to play Tracer. They want to dress up as her. They want to buy her Funko Pop figure.

And then some people really love Tracer.

And it's not just her. The entire roster has fans, with people making art of their favorite characters or enjoying a specific hero so much that they refuse to play as anyone else. And it's hard not to fall for these guys, gals, and robots. They have interesting designs, wear cool costumes, and have distinct personalities that come through in voiced lines and animations. If Pixar made a team-based shooter, it could look like Blizzard's hit.

And those characters don't just exist in the game. While Overwatch itself is light on story, Blizzard has used digital comics and cinematic shorts to highlight its heroes and world. It's helping players connect with the game in a way that goes beyond loot boxes and costumes. Even as its competitors, like the free-to-play Paladins, grow in popularity, they can't compete with Overwatch's likability.

And this appeal is what will keep Overwatch popular. It's fun. It has successful monetization system. But that's not what has made millions of gamers fall in love with it. Overwatch has found a way to add more character and personality to an online shooter than any of its peers. That appeal is what will keep players engaged with Overwatch for years to come.

Of course, the new heroes and costumes won't hurt.

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Overwatch had one of the best first years ever

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Feature Join gaming leaders online at GamesBeat Summit Next this upcoming November 9-10. Learn more about what comes next. One of the most important games to come out in years is celebrating its first anniversary. Overwatch came out on May 24, 2016 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.