Watch live: Ars aims its brightly colored guns at Overwatch’s launch day [Updated]

Ars Technica plays Overwatch, starting at 7:30 p.m. EDT Monday, May 23 (12:30am BST)

After an extensive beta period, Blizzard’s first foray into first-person combat, the new team-based shooter Overwatch, finally launches on Monday, May 23. The game’s final version didn’t get a preview period for press, but our time with the game’s beta has left us convinced that we’re in for a pretty quality shooting game—and quite possibly the best entry in the “hero shooter” genre.

While Ars staffers and contributors have logged significant time in the beta, we’re not ready to turn in our “review” call just yet, especially with a game so reliant on online play. Thus, we’re going to whet your appetite with a live stream of Ars’ dive into the game’s first few hours of retail existence.

The game goes live at 7pm EDT, and while all of Ars’ eager gamers are pre-installed and ready to rock on our gaming PCs, we’re going to give the game’s servers a little while to breathe before soft-launching our livestream at 7:30pm EDT today (and “officially” starting at 8pm, or 1am if you’re in the UK). Click the above YouTube Gaming video box, or this link, to tune in. The feed will star yours truly on both webcam and gameplay feed, but Ars’ Kyle Orland, Steven Strom, and Peter Bright will be on board as both voice chatters and party members. We’ll do our best to respond to questions in both the YouTube Gaming chat scroll and on the Ars comments thread. Expect the live feed to last until roughly 9:30pm EDT tonight.

What exactly is a “hero shooter,” anyway? For some games, that means slapping MOBA stylings (a la Dota 2 or League of Legends) into a first-person shooter—a tradition that dates all the way back to Xbox 360 Live gem Monday Night Combat. While most hero shooters have stuck strongly to MOBA traditions like mobs and jungling, Overwatch has taken a looser approach, and we’ll talk at length about how Overwatch mixes the formula up, and whether that’s for the better or for the worse.

As for the game itself, our Steven Strom shared a full review earlier today. The new release positions Blizzard to attract new players who are unfamiliar with titles like Team Fortress 2 by offering a wide array of characters, a smooth sense of progression within each map, and easy-to-grasp abilities. As Strom put it, “Rather than take a complicated game and make it simple, with Overwatch, Blizzard has taken a simple game and made it better.”

Update: Our live session with Overwatch has ended, but you can enjoy its archive here in the meantime. Watch us attempt to win as a full-Mei team. (We won’t spoil the outcome, but… well…)