Overwatch's McCree is being renamed

There have been some significant changes to Blizzard over the past few weeks, as the developer has been the subject of a lawsuit from the state of California that has been investigating the allegations of a "frat boy culture" that harassed and discriminated against the female employees.

As part of that investigation, several senior members of Blizzard's staff are no longer working at the company for being tied to the lawsuit, including Diablo 4's lead designer Jesse McCree, who was the very person that the Overwatch character was named after.

Due to this, the Overwatch team has released a statement revealing that it will be renaming the character, which will subsequently delay an upcoming narrative arc that the developer had planned.

"As we continue to discuss how we best live up to our values and to demonstrate our commitment to creating a game world that reflects them, we believe it's necessary to change the name of the hero currently known as McCree to something that better represents what Overwatch stands for."

The Californian developer continued, "We realize that any change to such a well-loved and central hero in the game's fiction will take time to roll out correctly, and we'll share updates as this work progresses. In the near term, we had planned to kick off a narrative arc in September supported with new story and game content, of which McCree was a key part of. Since we want to integrate this change into that story arc, we will be delaying the new arc until later this year and instead launch a new FFA map this September. Going forward, in-game characters will no longer be named after real employees and we will be more thoughtful and discerning about adding real world references in future Overwatch content."

In terms of the new free-for-all map that will be coming to the live game on September 28, that will be called Malevento, and if you want to check it out, you can find it on the Public Test Server today.