Overwatch has been keenly watched since Blizzard announced it to the public.

Now dates have been announced for the beta and despite originally thinking otherwise, it seems that the closed beta for the game will be deployed at the same time for both the Americas and Europe while Asian players unfortunately will need to wait a little longer to gain access.

“We were able to complete setup and testing of our beta servers for Europe sooner than anticipated. As a result, we’re happy to report that we will be launching the Overwatch Closed Beta in both the Americas and Europe gameplay regions on October 27.” Blizzard blogged about the beta.

To better stress-test the servers, Blizzard will be gradually inviting more and more players to let the servers slowly fill up to give them enough information to see when problems with connections begin to occur. Asian servers are still undergoing set up and will be opened to players at a later date.

Anyone interested in joining in with closed Beta should go to the Overwatch site and sign up/ Then wait and keep your fingers crossed that you get chosen.

It seems that the people at inXile are keeping themselves busy right now. They’ve just filed a new trademark on top of all the other projects they’ve got going on right now.

Spotted by RPG Codex, the trademark is for ‘Autoduel’. Autoduel was also the name of an Origin Systems vehicular RPG that was released around 30 years ago, set in a dystopian future-America and had players battling through gang-infested highways. Just the sort of thing that’d appeal to an audience that was recently quite thrilling by a new Mad Max movie and its related game release.

inXile are currently known for being the ones behind the big Wasteland 2 update, called Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut as well as currently being in the middle of developing not one but two other RPGs funded by Kickstarter – Torment: Tides of Numenera and The Bard’s Tale.

Nothing has yet been announced, but RPG Codex’s tweet of the discovery was retweeted by Brian Fargo of inXile that suggests that something is in the works.

And so in today’s “didn’t see that coming” news, alcohol company Carlsberg have done a deal with game studio Bethesda to produce a type of beer associated with the upcoming Fallout 4 game. Unsurprisingly it’s called “Fallout Beer”.

Other than the label and the fact that it is officially endorsed by Bethesda, there doesn’t really seem to be any link to the Fallout series or any of its games, past or present. From what we’ve heard of Fallout 4 there doesn’t seem to be a connection either, but that game’s yet to be released so maybe it’s a hint of something to come? It’d be a pretty long shot though. More likely is that this is Carlsberg’s attempt to target the adult gaming audience.

“This is something of a world-first,” Carlsberg UK Corporate Affairs Director Bruce Ray said. “Adult participation in videogaming is a truly social activity, on a par with cinema and music. We’re proud to work with Bethesda to produce a beer Fallout fans can enjoy.”

Fallout Beer is available in packs of 12 for £30, and will only be available in the UK. In case you’re interested in a video game tie-in that has been described to taste “hoppy” with a “floral aroma”.

Whatever happened to the damn good guy? I liked the damn good guy, the damn good guy was a…Damn. Good. Guy.

You’re probably wondering what I mean by “the damn good guy”. What I mean is pieces of entertainment that aren’t huge, massive, world changing, innovative behemoths that somehow seem to fail living up to the expectations of the creator. The damn good guy refers to pieces of media that are just enjoyable because they’re well put together, well written and don’t try to cast a net so wide and cast that they can’t possibly hope to be considered a success.

Example, Tomb Raider 2013. That was a good game, really good in fact. Solid gameplay/mechanics, great voice acting, very good atmosphere and was a nice long length. Square Enix however deemed the game a failure despite it selling a whopping 3.4 million units worldwide. Seriously Square? How big were your expectations of the game that you needed to re-release it for Playstation 4 and Xbox One just to beef up the sales? How much was the budget for this endeavour?

According to an article from Eurogamer.net the budget for Tomb Raider was $60 Million…HO-LY FUCK!!

I think we can all agree that’s pretty tall order to fill, a really tall order to fill. And there’s my point, set the bar too high and the chances of you hauling your arse over it decreases, don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed Tom Raider, but to have it deemed a failure due to unreasonable expectations just seems rude (for the lack of a better word), I’m no game designer but even I can see effort when it’s right in front of me.

Square sadly seemed to act like EA is constantly acting with their Battlefield franchise which ends up with a game that makes a huge amount of money and sells an insane amount of copies but is deems a failure anyway. Instead EA just end up aping Call of Duty in order to try and win over their audience, which they seem to keep failing at. These developers can clearly dominate in their fields of work but they’re tunnel-visioning so hard that they forget that they’ve still made a metric fuckton anyway. There’s nothing wrong with 2nd place is what I’m saying and there’s also nothing wrong with not releasing a game every fucking year, yeah I’m looking at you Assassin’s Creed, I love you but slow the hell down, you make tons of money with what you have maybe you should take the time to enjoy it? You know make some use of that company yacht you undoubtedly have, maybe take it for a sail and unwind?

See, this is why I love the damn good guy. The damn good guy gets their budget and knows exactly what to do with it, the damn good guy thought process I imagine would be something akin to this:

“Ok, I’ve been given $25,000,000 to make a piece of entertainment”

“My piece of entertainment will be about this”

“I will spend the money accordingly in all the necessary areas in order to make this piece of entertainment as appealing to its target audience as possible”

“The product has been released, sales figures are strong and we’ve made the budget back plus a little extra, even the reviews are positive I’m going to spend some time with my kids as I’ve been coming home late recently” 

The damn good guy thought process probably does not resemble,

“OHDEARGOD, WE’VE BEEN GIVEN $70,000,000 TO MAKE A PIECE OF ENTERTAINMENT, WE MUST BE BETTER THEN EVERYONE ELSE IN ORDER TO BECOME ANY KIND OF SUCCESS”

“But sir we’re making a ton of money anyway…”

“DAMMIT HENDERSON NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOUR INSANE RAMBLINGS ABOUT THIS MYTHICAL MONEY NONSENSE, WE MUST BEAT THE COMPETITION OR BE BRANDED AS FAILURES AND BE CAST OUT FOR ALL ETERNITY BY THE HUMAN RACE”

“Sir we’ve been getting ratings up in the 90% range…”

“WE NEED TO TRY AGAIN AT BEATING THEM, WE’VE ONLY GOT A FEW MINUTES”

At this point Henderson has defected to a Studio that isn’t staffed by impatient tunnel-visioning weirdos who scream a lot.

This is why we need to support the damn good guy, the damn good guy takes their time, evaluates their options and sets themselves a reasonable goal and when all is said and done, the result is damn good. The result is

• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
• Solomon Kane
• Dishonoured
• Darkman
• Hellboy
• Dredd
• The A-Team (2010)
• The Grey,

Do you see what I’m driving at? Not to say that giant bits of game changing innovation are a bad thing, they can just get out of hand fast and end up bloated, fat and always hungry for more.

Bottom line, support the Damn Good Guy. Because he’s a damn good guy.

Windows 10 might have been provided free of charge to all who already had a licenced copy of Windows 7 or 8.1, but it seems that Microsoft might be looking at other ways to make money from the new OS.

The build 10565 of Windows 10 shows that Microsoft is beginning to experiment with placing advertisements for apps in the operation system. It’s somewhat discreet right now, being placed in the Start menu (even if in a prominent place under your most used apps list) and providing an option to turn it off but there’s no guarantee it will stay that way. To be fair, there’s also no guarantee that they won’t remove the adverts after a while either.

Given that Windows 10 tracks your data and interests as well, it’s probably likely that the suggestions will be somewhat related to what you already use. Although given past uses of ‘suggested’ content we’d be interested in… it could also just be a queue of things that we really are not interested in.

It remains to be seen whether or not this feature will stay in this form or if it will be expanded upon in some way. At least for now you can turn it off if you want to, but if you can stand it keep it on. After all, all companies need to make money somehow and one little ad won’t be too bad.