Florence Rhodes

Blizzard promised us new maps in 2017, and boy did they deliver! The new king-of-the-hill map Oasis was released just three days into the new year. Now that's what you call making good on a promise. With 362 more days in the year, though, Overwatch players are wondering what else may be in the works for the development team. Oasis comes chock-full of backstory as a technologically advanced utopia society, founded by eight of the world's leading scientists. Despite having killer traffic (watch out, the cars will knock you off the map!) and boasting an amazing elevator of death, the three Oasis maps are actually quite symmetrical and seemingly basic. King-of-the-hill maps are fun, but players are also hoping to see more payload or multiple objective maps in the future. And although a flashy story is nice, fans also want to see more of the places they've already seen in Overwatch 's digital shorts and comics. Can we build upon the lore a little more before expanding the unive

Genji is the aforementioned brother of Hanzo. Whereas his big bro prefers to take his targets out from a distance, Genji holds to the way of the ninja, which afford him a bit of variety in terms of assassination methods. His already incredible skills were further increased by the cybernetic implants Genji had to have installed following his brother’s failed attempt to kill him. He’s the ultimate warrior on the outside, and a tortured soul wit

February is a month I'm really looking forward to, as my most anticipated game for the year (now that Metro: Last Light is delayed), Binary Domain releases in latter half of the month. In addition, I've also got a PlayStation Vita First Edition Bundle on pre-order, which means I'll be playing both that and the pack in game Little Deviants , though I also plan to pick up WipEout 2048 at launch. Lastly, alongside the aforementioned Binary Domain I'm also going to be purchasing HyperDimension Neptunia Mk.2 , though I probably won't get around to playing it until I finish the first FPS Game News, which is going to take up the first half of February. I also really want to play Alan Wake's American Nightmare , but with my 360 currently out of commission I'm going to have wait until I get a new cons

I looked over at Brian Raffel, our studio head, and we just kind of smiled at each other and we nodded and for me it was just so gratifying to hear the response that we felt for so long. When this project was first proposed I don't think there was a single person at Raven that wasn't like 'yes yes we want to do this. Absolutely we're all in.' That's very exciting right? It's also many moons ago that we started on this, and we knew we had something good and something fun but we didn't know know. Until you get in front of gamers you're not really gonna know. So today's reveal was king of the hold our breaths for a little bit, and the applause and the excitement; it resonated and I kept smiling most of the morning because of it. I got an opportunity to go and take pictures and the lines were long afterwards and I was like 'they screamed and in a good way, and the lines are long so they really meant it.' So I did a little bit of walking around and listening to people. So that was a fun thing for me to get on my break was a chance to hear what people thought. So I think it went pretty well, social media seems to be going pretty well for us too.

You mentioned that there were classic things and animations that you were wary of changing, where do you draw that line? How do you figure out what people considered to be the classic experience and what you might need to change?

There are a few great candidates for the role, but Donald Glover stands out from the pack. As anyone who has seen Community will tell you, Glover is capable of making an audience fall in love with him by virtue of his almost childlike enthusiasm. Fans who've been following the performer’s recent efforts (such as his contributions to the Golden Globe-winning FX series, Atlanta ) know that he’s also able to use comedy to deliver a more serious message. That's an admirable quality when you’re looking for someone to play a character who once spurred on a rebellion through mu

It’s not long into most people’s Overwatch journeys before they realize that Mei is designed to be the bane of your existence. She’s able to manipulate ice in several ways , which all usually translate to freezing you where you stand or otherwise making it so you can no longer move through your desired path. Her stall tactics become all the more frustrating when paired with her unwavering optimism and cutesy demea

Activision Blizzard's esports network, Major League Gaming, in partnership with Facebook, recorded about 50 million views, growing 67% quarter-over-quarter 4 . At peak, a record 11 million users were reached in a single day

I don't think there was ever any hesitancy, but there was a realization that this is freaking terrifying. Because it's not just important to us, right? Being in the COD family it really means a lot, but dude I remember skipping school for this game. So it's one of those things that it means a whole lot to be playing that game and it means a whole lot be able to bring that to the fans and trying to figure out 'what's the most important thing to me as a gamer,' and 'what's going to resonate with the community,' because there's actually a really healthy community out there. Like 20,000 people still playing on Steam pretty regularly. It's crazy, but dude they love it. If you haven't played some of their mod severs they're friendly, it's fun to play, but they're really really engaged. The Steam forums will let you know that. It is a daunting task and it has been. I would probably say regularly it was like 'okay is going to make a fan pissed off?' I think we got out in front of that really early with that 'don't f*ck with the gameplay,' as our number one tenet, and that coincides with Raven's mantra of gameplay first. So our entire team already had that mentality of we're not going to mess with what the designers say is important. We were pushing for you keep the timing the same, you keep the feel, you keep the spacial design/the level design cannot not change, but we can add personality and we can add character to it.