Update, Early Access, Music and a Spooky Surprise! news - Overwatch mod for Half-Life 2

Welcome to City 17. It's safer here.
..Or is it?

Music

The following piece of music is an ambience style test for the Resistance team in our Breach level (ow_breach). Please enjoy it while you read the rest of today's news:

Public Release

If you have missed our previous news post (as well as our Tweet, Facebook page update, Community site announcement and all the screaming from my bedroom window), you will be happy to know that we have finally set a date for our public release: August 20th, 2010, which is only two weeks away!

Our closed releases have been going so well that we simply do not have an excuse to keep restricting access to Overwatch, which is why our v1.1.0 update will mark the first open, public release of our game.

Updater Utility & Early Access

Releasing frequent updates for Overwatch can quickly turn into a disaster if both players and servers are not running the same version, which is why we have designed an updater utility which will help keep both sides up-to-date. We are currently putting the finishing touches on the utility and will be posting some details about it in next week's news.

One aspect worth mentioning today is its ability to send updates to different people at different times. We will be using this feature to grant some of our community members early access to our releases (48 hours) to help us track down any remaining issues that need to be ironed out before the weekend. Smooth, crash and bug-free releases will always be our top priority.

If you are interested in taking part in these early releases, register an account on our Community site and come chat with us in our IRC channel.

Friday the 13th

Friggatriskaidekaphobics beware: next Friday will be the thirteenth day of the month! *GASP*

If you are a fan of zombies, brains, Zombie Master or simply love watching random videos that serve no real purpose, you absolutely need to check out next week's news post. We will have a wondrous surprise waiting for you.

Development Report III & Update (v1.0.3)

Development Report III was posted this past Monday. It includes a list of improvements in v1.0.3 (which was released two days ago) as well as a few hints to what you can expect to see in the upcoming v1.1.0 release.

This third update introduced a new sprite-based system for buttons used by the Overwatch (to spawn units and activate traps), faster capturing of objectives when more than one player is in the capture area, as well as a few other game and map-specific improvements.

Finally, in preparation for the next major update and our first public release, Development Report IV will be posted on August 16th instead of the 9th.

Whispers...

One final, insignificant piece of information to share with you today: as a special surprise to our community members and followers, and for a limited time only, anyone registered on our forums can now download and play the mod! Don't tell anyone.

Until next! Stay safe.