If you're struggling to find a match in Overwatch 2, Blizzard shared that it is currently under a mass distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, preventing successful matchmaking.

Blizzard president Mike Ybarra shared that the Overwatch 2 servers are under a mass DDoS attack and that the teams are working to mitigate the damage.

Unfortunately we are experiencing a mass DDoS attack on our servers. Teams are working hard to mitigate/manage. This is causing a lot of drop/connection issues. https://t.co/4GwrfHEiBE

— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) October 4, 2022

It's unclear how long it will take for the servers to be fully functioning, but it is marring the launch of Overwatch 2 which Blizzard has been planning for months.

Social media is full of players sharing their failed matchmaking attempts and extended queues, which are partially related to the DDoS attack.

According to the Overwatch 2 official issues page, players on both PC and consoles are encountering "Unexpected Server Errors," along with issues like certain cosmetics and items not showing up in their collection.

Players are also being disconnected from servers.

The official Overwatch Twitter page will likely be the best source for updated information. In the meantime, you can check out IGN's full review of Overwatch 2 to find out our thoughts on Blizzard's long-awaited sequel.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Dune: The Sisterhood has found its lead Harkonnens – Emily Watson and Shirley Henderson.

According to Variety, the pair have been added to the upcoming Dune prequel series in the show’s leading roles – two Harkonnen sisters fighting for humankind.

The show is set 10,000 years before Dune: Part One and “follows the Harkonnen Sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind, and establish the fabled sect known as the Bene Gesserit”.

Based on the novel, Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, the upcoming show is thought to follow Valya and Tula Harkonnen – both characters present in the novels. The character descriptions reveal that the two sisters “have risen to power in the Sisterhood, a secret organization of women who will go on to become the Bene Gesserit.”

Dune: The Sisterhood promises to establish the foundation of the Bene Gesserit – the mysterious sisterhood that Paul’s mother (Rebecca Fergusson) belongs to in Dune.

Emily Watson will play Valya Harkonnen – a member of the Bene Gesserit who eventually becomes the second Reverend Mother Superior in the novels. Watson is best known for Breaking the Waves as well as Hilary and Jackie which both earned her Oscar nominations. She also appeared in the HBO series, Chernobyl.

Shirley Henderson will play Tula Harkonnen – Valya’s sister and fellow member of the Bene Gesserit. Henderson is best known for the role of Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. She also voiced fan-favourite Star Wars character, Babu Frik, in The Rise of Skywalker as well as starring in Trainspotting and its sequel.

IGN’s Dune review gave it 7/10 and said: “Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is beautiful to behold, a faithful adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel. Or of its first half, that is. And therein lies the problem that the film faces, for in cutting this story into two parts, Villeneuve has front-loaded Dune with a lot of set-up and no obvious way to end things… and so it lingers, and eventually overstays its welcome. This is a technically brilliant, visually amazing movie with a top-notch cast and deep sci-fi concepts. A shame, then, that it feels like a drag in its back half.”

Want to read more about Dune? Check out who’s playing Feyd-Rautha in the upcoming sequel and find out about director Dennis Villeneuve’s original epic Dune opening.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Sega and Relic Games have announced that Company of Heroes 3 is being delayed to February 23, 2023.

“As we approach the November 17th launch for Company of Heroes 3, our team has decided the game is not quite up to our players’ or our own high standards. There are still bugs to squash, pixels to polish, gameplay to adjust, and feedback to address,” the development team explained on Twitter.

Important Company of Heroes 3 Update pic.twitter.com/z0Pg7PsE10

— Company Of Heroes (@CompanyOfHeroes) October 4, 2022

They continued, “As a result, we’ve decided to move the launch date to February 23, 2023. While we know many of you are itching to get your hands on the game, we believe this to be the best decision for CoH3, our players, and our studio. This provides our hard-working team and partners with the necessary time to deliver CoH3 in a better overall state.”

Company of Heroes 3 has joined the list of many games being delayed to the next year, which includes titles such as Forspoken, Starfield, and Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals.

Company of Heroes 3 will sport features such as modding tools. In IGN’s Company of Heroes 3 North Africa campaign mission hands-on preview, we said, “It also proves Company of Heroes 3 is really not messing around with stretching your skills as a commander to the breaking point, if you're up to the challenge.”

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @yinyangfooey

PlayStation’s live service games could be seeing a day and date release on PC along with the usual PlayStation launch, but other kinds of games will take at least a year.

In an interview with YouTuber Julien Chieze, PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst says, “I think going forward, we’ll see at least a year between our own platform, PlayStation, and on the PC platform…possibly with the exception of live service games.”

He continues, “Live service games are a little bit different in nature because you want to have a really strong community and really strong engagement right away when you go live. We might, in the case of our live service offerings, go day and date with PC and the PlayStation platform.”

PlayStation has continued to push further into the PC market, releasing games onto the platform like Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Days Gone, and Marvel’s Spider-Man. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection and Sackboy: A Big Adventure are making their way onto PC this month too, along with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and The Last of Us Part I sometime later.

PlayStation is also trying to expand its live service and multiplayer games, as studios such as Haven are working on a live-service title right now and Naughty Dog is developing a multiplayer game set in The Last of Us universe. Sony is also reportedly making a multiplayer game set in the Horizon universe.

While PlayStation is venturing into more live-service games, it also said that gamers won’t have to worry about single-player narrative falling by the wayside.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @yinyangfooey

The Moon may have formed almost immediately following a devastating impact between Earth and a Mars-sized world in the ancient past, according to the results of a new supercomputer study.

Earth’s moon is a silent witness to the history of our entire species. Its gravitational influence is responsible for the tides, and its simple presence in the night sky has profoundly influenced humanity’s cultural development.

Yet despite its ever present nature, the scientific community have yet to come to a consensus on how exactly Earth’s largest natural satellite came to form.

It is widely agreed that the Moon was created when a roughly Mars-sized solar system body — which has been dubbed Theia — collided with Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago. This impact devastated both our planet, and primordial Theia, and sent vast amounts of material from both worlds hurtling into Earth’s orbit.

Many of the previous theories surrounding the Moon’s formation suggest that it slowly coalesced from this soup of orbital debris, until finally the remainder of the material not accumulated by the satellite fell back in towards Earth.

In this scenario, the orbital debris would have been largely comprised of the remains of Theia. However, rock samples recovered from the Moon’s surface by Apollo-era astronauts showed a surprising structural and isotopic similarity to those found on Earth.

Whilst it is possible, the authors of a new study found it unlikely that the material from Theia would have such a close match with that of the Earth.

In the new study, a team of researchers from Durham University in the UK used the powerful DiRAC supercomputing facility to run a range of simulations that could account for the creation of Earth’s moon.

The supercomputer used a significantly larger number of particles to simulate the ancient collision compared to previous studies. According to the team, lower resolution simulations can omit important aspects of the collision process.

Over the course of the study, the scientists ran hundreds of these high-resolution simulations while varying a range of key parameters, including the masses, spins, angles, and speeds of the two unfortunate worlds.

The simulations revealed that a large body with a Moon-like mass and iron content could have coalesced almost immediately in orbit following the Earth-Theia collision. The detailed simulation showed that the newly born hypothetical satellite would have been created beyond the Roche limit - which is the orbital distance at which a satellite can orbit a planet without being shredded by its gravity.

Furthermore, the outer layers of such a world would be rich in material ejected from Earth, thus explaining the similarities between the Apollo-era rocks and those from our planet.

“This formation route could help explain the similarity in isotopic composition between the lunar rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts and Earth’s mantlle," explains study co-author Vincent Eke, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Exeter. “There may also be observable consequences for the thickness of the lunar crust, which would allow us to pin down further the type of collision that took place.”

If the Moon did form quickly following the impact, then its internal structure would likely be different than if it had grown gradually from a circumplanetary disk of debris. Astronauts returning to the Moon in the coming decades under NASA’s Artemis Program will collect fresh samples from the lunar surface that can be used to test the quick formation theory.

The research could help update scientist’s understanding as to how moons form in the orbits of distant worlds spread throughout the universe.

Anthony Wood is a freelance science writer for IGN

Image Credit: Dr Jacob Kegerreis

Elon Musk has agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, averting a trial that had been set for later this month. AP reporter Seung Min Kim broke the news of the agreement.

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk averts trial, agrees to $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) October 4, 2022

This follows a report by Bloomberg, in which Musk reportedly offered to buy the social media app for $54.20 a share — the original offer Musk proposed back in April. In July, however, Musk withdrew his offer to buy the company; in response, Twitter announced it would file a lawsuit to try and get Musk to complete the deal.

"We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC. The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share," a Twitter spokesperson told IGN via email.

The trial date was set for October 17th. Ahead of the trial, Twitter's shareholders announced last month that they approved Musk's original proposal to buy Twitter. During a pretrial hearing last week, Musk argued that Twitter has been withholding the truth about how many bots are on the platform.

As Intelligencer notes, Musk hired five companies to analyze Twitter's bot numbers. One company confirmed Twitter's bot user numbers. However, the outlet notes that the other company says "with only weak confidence that the number of bots in Twitter's mDAU metric was as high as 11 percent."

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Thumbnail image credit: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. government's National Labor Relations Board has found that Call of Duty and Overwatch publisher Activision Blizzard withheld pay raises from some Raven Software employees as a result of their unionization. Activision Blizzard has disputed this, however, saying it wasn't possible to offer raises due to "legal obligations".

As reported by The Washington Post, the NLRB's findings will likely fall in favor of the Raven employees in their ongoing negotiations with Activision Blizzard. The group of quality assurance workers became the first union at a major North American video game company in May 2022 and filed the NLRB complaint in September.

"It’s a very preliminary win for the union at this point. It gives them a little bit of leverage," said former chairman of the NLRB Wilma Liebman. "It’s part of their tactics, you know, hit them wherever they can, to put pressure on the company in order to reach an agreement with them and to stop violating the law."

Activision Blizzard — who announced that the unionized employees would not be receiving a pay rise given to 1,100 other QA workers in July — has maintained that it's not an active decision made by itself but is instead a legal issue.

"Due to legal obligations under the [National Labor Relations Act] requiring employers not to grant wage increases while an election was pending, we could not institute new pay initiatives at Raven," a spokesperson told The Washington Post.

Essentially, Activision Blizzard claims it legally wasn't able to offer the employees a pay rise because they were in the midst of voting to unionize, as per Labor Board v. Exchange Parts Co., 375 U.S. 405 (1964). The company was found to be actively discouraging the union efforts, however, as it sent emails to employees that read: "Please vote no".

It's unclear how long the negotiations between the union and Activision Blizzard will go on, or how successful they will be for either side, but the move has already sparked others to follow suit. What is certain, however, is that Xbox boss Phil Spencer will recognize the union if Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard goes through.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

EA Motive has unveiled a new trailer for its Dead Space remake, teasing some of the nightmarish horrors that await players in the sci-fi survival horror game.

The terrifying teaser follows Dead Space protagonist Isaac Clarke as he navigates the eerie, echoing corridors and workspaces aboard the mining ship, USG Ishimura, where something has gone horribly wrong. He is shown sidling around the vessel to investigate the situation while fighting off any Necromorphs that come into his seemingly treacherous path.

The game features a new damage system called peeling, which actually allows players to shoot the flesh off of Necromorphs. It's a grotesque visual treat that also serves as a sort of diegetic health bar for enemies, much like Isaac Clarke's spine-mounted lights, which deplete as the user takes damage from the deadly ship-dwellers.

Motive's take on Dead Space has been rebuilt from the ground up in EA's Frostbite engine, with Assassin's Creed Valhalla game director Eric Baptizat at the helm alongside creative director Roman Campos-Oriola, who previously promised "all new assets, new character models, [and] new environments" based on the original game designs.

The game's developers turned to diehard fans to help keep them on track in offering all-new gameplay content and improvements while staying faithful to the vision of the original game. The remake team consulted with their very own community council every six weeks to get their opinions on a variety of "polarizing" topics during the project's development.

Dead Space will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on January 27, 2023.

Want to read more about the updated version of the beloved survival horror game? Check out every EA game in development as well as a deep dive into how Dead Space is being remade.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Popeye the Sailor Man is pushing 100 these days, but he's still scarfing down spinach and clobbering bullies as readily as he was back in 1929. To celebrate Popeye's enduring pop culture appeal, Clover Press and Yoe! Books have teamed for an art book dubbed Popeye Variations: Not Yer Pappy's Comics n' Art Book.

As the title suggests, Popeye Variations reimagines and remixes Popeye and friends through the lens of a number of different contemporary artists. No fewer than 75 cartoonists, filmmakers and comic book creators have been tapped to lend their own spin on Popeye's world. You can get a better idea of what's in store by checking out our exclusive preview in the slideshow gallery below:

Popeye Variations is a 10" x 10" hardcover book featuring 100 pages of artwork and comic strips. In addition to a wealth of brand new Popeye strips, the book also reprints the striking cover art from IDW Publishing 2012's Popeye reprint series and various classic strips from legendary Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye artist Bud Sagendorf.

The lineup of creators involved includes Adventure Time's Derek Ballard, The New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, The Book of Life director Jorge Guiterrez, Batman artist Kelley Jones, Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell, Darth Vader and Son's Jeffrey Brown, The Ghoul Next Door's Cat Farris The Red Hook's Dean Haspiel, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl's Erica Henderson, The Legend of Auntie Po's Shin Ying Khor, cartoonist Liniers, The Muppets' Roger Langridge, The Humans’ creator Tom Neely, Masterpiece Comics' R. Sikoryak, The Incredible Hercules' Jeff Parker, The Greatest Thing's Sarah Winifred Searle, The Simpsons Comics' Scott Shaw! and Usagi Yojimbo creator Stan Sakai.

"I loved watching Popeye cartoons when I was a kid, but I didn't discover how great the comics were until I was older (it also took me that long to discover I liked spinach, except not from a can)," Brown tells IGN. "As much as I enjoyed all of the slapstick physical comedy of Popeye, I always come back to thinking about the relationship...are Popeye and Olive Oyl a couple? A former couple? Is it unrequited love? I like to think it's a more complex relationship, something without a label, kind of ahead of its time. Although for my comic, I thought about how each of them sees their relationship differently, and the humor that comes from that."

Popeye Variations is now live for preorder on Kickstarter. In addition to the standard hardcover, higher pledge tiers will offer art prints of some of the Popeye covers included in the book.

Fans of Brown's hilarious take on th Star Wars movies should also be keeping a eye out for Thor and Loki: Midgard Family Mayhem, a comedic, all-ages spin on the Thor comics due out in April 2023.

In other comic book news, Comixology is bringing its popular trading card series back to NYCC, and Audible just dropped the third installment of its Sandman audio adaptation.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

CD Projekt Red has announced the codenames and brief descriptions for five new games, including 3 Witcher games, a new Cyberpunk, and a brand new IP.

Revealed on Twitter, it marks a major next step for the developer in multiple respects – from developing its own IP from scratch, to developing multiple 'full-size' games at one time. In a separate release, the company says it is also "adding multiplayer to the majority of future projects." This also marks the first time that we've learned the new Witcher trilogy will not be the only new games set in that universe.

The five games are:

• Orion - "A codename for our next Cyberpunk game, which will take the Cyberpunk franchise further and continue harnessing the potential of this dark future universe." Orion will be developed by a brand new CD Projekt studio set up in the US.
• Polaris - "A codename for the next installment in The Witcher series of games, which we recently announced was in pre-production. It is the beginning of a new saga: we aim to release two more Witcher games after Polaris, creating a new AAA RPG trilogy." The full trilogy is intended to be released "in a six-year period".
• Canis Majoris - "A full-fledged Witcher game, separate to the new Witcher saga starting with Polaris. It will be developed by an external studio headed by experienced developers who have worked on past Witcher games." It's not currently clear which developer is working on this project.
• Sirius - "A codename for the game developed by [The Molasses Flood], set in The Witcher universe and created with support from CDPR. It will differ from our past productions, offering multiplayer gameplay on top of a single-player experience including a campaign with quests and a story."
• Hadar - "A codename for a third, entirely distinct IP, created from scratch within CDPR. The project is in the earliest stages of the creative process, which means we are not developing any game yet, but working exclusively on the foundation for this new setting."

Orion is a codename for our next Cyberpunk game, which will take the Cyberpunk franchise further and continue harnessing the potential of this dark future universe. pic.twitter.com/JoVbCf6jYZ

— CD PROJEKT RED (@CDPROJEKTRED) October 4, 2022

Canis Majoris is perhaps the most intriguingly different project for CD Projekt among the list. Developed externally by a currently unknown developer, the strategy announcement explains, "This is the first such product being developed outside of the Group. However, this does not imply that its quality will lag behind our in-house productions. From the technological standpoint it will be based on Unreal Engine 5, along with the toolset created for Polaris. Expect additional announcements soon."

Canis Majoris marks what seems to be a newly open CD Projekt, which is willing to work with partners on both games and other media after the success of Netflix's Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. "Our goal is to work with experienced partners who can meet our quality requirements and deliver worthwhile experiences for our fans," said CFO Michał Nowakowski. "We are doing this to create new, exciting ways of interacting with our brands, and also to enable our internal teams to focus on what drives us as a company: developing revolutionary role-playing games."

Details on the new IP, Hadar, are understandably scant but Nowakowski added, "We started toying with the idea several years ago. Early-stage conceptual work commenced in 2021, and – for the first time in our history – the IP is being incubated entirely within CD Projekt Red. It is important to understand that right now we are still working on basic concepts and laying the groundwork for this new franchise."

The news comes after CD Projekt announced it would begin developing Witcher and Cyberpunk games simultaneously, while also purchasing The Molasses Flood to work on games in its universes. Its new North American studio will incorporate the Vancouver studio it already bought.

As part of the glut of announcements, we also learned that co-CEO Adam Kiciński would be leaving his role to apply to be Chairman of the company.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.