Keeping a Promise, McCree Renamed to Cole Cassidy in Overwatch Next Week

While the complicated ongoing legal situation facing Activision Blizzard continues, one promise from the company is soon to come true. The character of McCree in Overwatch finally has a new name, Cole Cassidy, which will go live next week. 

According to the Overwatch Twitter account, "But in every cowboy’s life, there comes a time when he has to stop and make a stand”. So, the cowboy that had been hiding his real name until now, will instead be revealing it, setting up a lore reason for the shift. "Cole Cassidy faced the world at dawn," the tweet ends with the date of the change, October 26th.  

Activision Blizzard responded to employee misconduct after the initial lawsuit was filed in California and evidence of the employees’ behavior began circulating. The Overwatch team vowed to rename the character, who had been named after one of the company's employees. When several employees were fired due to their behavior, the company promised to both remove their names from their games, as well as to not name game content after employees in the future. 

Over the past couple of months, we've seen several name and content changes start rolling out across Hearthstone and World of Warcraft. In WoW, some changes include changing the town of Mac’aree to Eredath, renaming NPCs and items that were named after several of the fired employees as well. In addition to just removing the names of employees they fired for their behavior, the company also began going over some of its other older content from throughout the years, sometimes finding things that were inappropriate or insensitive, and making changes to those things as well. 

There's no indication that the company is done making changes after the renaming of McCree, but when Cole Cassidy appears in Overwatch, it will probably be the biggest and most visible one of these changes yet.