It appears as though the Overwatch team has taken the first steps toward adjusting the hero formerly known as McCree’s voice lines as the scandal and lawsuit at Blizzard continues to unfold.
The real-life namesake for Jesse McCree, who worked at Blizzard on the Diablo team at the time, was outed earlier this year as a member of the “Cosby Suite” BlizzCon group chat, a notorious group chat between male Blizzard staff members. As the allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination toward women at Blizzard grew and the state of California filed a lawsuit earlier this year, McCree left the company and the Overwatch team announced its intent to rename the in-game McCree character.
A month later, it seems as though the renaming process has started. As pointed out by Reddit user DoctorDeadeye, almost all voice lines that include the name “Jesse McCree” have been removed from the most recent Overwatch build. McCree’s other personal voice lines and interactions remain, but he (and other characters) will simply no longer say his name.
There are only three name-dropping lines left, two of which are McCree’s spawn lines and Echo’s line that references her duplication of McCree. DoctorDeadeye points out that these two lines are necessary for gameplay and provide important information to players.
The final line is a seemingly innocuous interaction between Torbjörn and McCree where Torbjörn asks McCree what happened to his arm. DoctorDeadeye speculates that this might mean that in the upcoming McCree lore arc, players may finally find out what event resulted in McCree gaining a mechanical arm. While this is only speculation, the developers have confirmed that McCree was supposed to receive a lore arc before the scandal broke, but it was replaced with the launch of the Malevento map to give the development team more time to figure out a new name for the hero.
