Somebody set us up the bomb.
Woof, this is going to be a big one.
The Past
Right after our first closed release on July 14th, we took a few days off to relax and play Overwatch with our community. Then, it was back to work. Over the weekend, we put the finishing touches on our v1.0.1 release, and on Monday (July 19th), we posted our very first Development Report, providing insight into what the OW development team is actively working to add, improve and update in the game.
Thanks to a very successful, crash-free launch and the great feedback our community has provided us, our first update for Overwatch (v1.0.1) was only a small bug patch, fixing issues such as the never-ending turret noise and adding a few improvements like overtime (to prevent map changes if the round has not ended). 60 new invites were sent out and the update was released on Wednesday, July 21st.
The Present
Work is nearly done on a beefier update due for release next Wednesday (July 28th), and you can expect more improvements and even some new features in this one. We will be posting the details in Monday's Development Report, so be sure to subscribe to our Blog (in the meantime, a new screenshot has been added to the images section of our profile, giving you a sneak preview of one of the new features).
In other news, Overwatch now has its own IRC channel (#Overwatch on QuakeNET). If you want to meet the developers and chat with other community members, join it today!
IRC can be a bit confusing at first, so we have set up a very simple, easy to use web interface that will get you connected and in our channel in a matter of seconds. It can be found here, or by clicking on the big blue Chat button at the top of our community site.
Live Interview on Podcast17
The crew of Podcast17 will be interviewing us live on their 93rd episode! William will be on air starting at 1pm Eastern Time Saturday (find out when it starts in your time zone) and the interview should begin about an hour into the show.
We will be discussing the community's first impressions after playing Overwatch, our current development plans, upcoming features and surprises for the future.
Want to take part?
Have a question you want to ask us? Want to take part in the discussion? There are a few ways you can:
- On our forums: If you are a member of our growing community, you can head over to this thread and post your questions there.
- On IRC: As mentioned above, we now have an IRC channel. Click here to join. We will be accepting questions tomorrow during the show.
- Via Twitter: Just send a message to @OverwatchMod on Twitter!
- By Email: You can send us your questions directly to the following address: ihaveaquestion@overwatchmod.com
- Request a Call! Podcast17 now accepts requests from listeners who want to be called during the live show. Read this article to find out how it works.
Want to win some free stuff?
We have a contest planned with a small pile of goodies to give away. Details will be revealed during the show.
The Future
Over the past few weeks, we have received several requests for a gameplay video, and before we even had the chance to put one together, our community members beat us to it! We had to come up with a new idea..
As mentioned in our first Development Report, we have been testing quite a few new features internally, so instead of showing you what you have already seen on Youtube, we put together a short preview of what you can expect to see in the near future:
We will definitely have more to show you next week and, if all goes well with Wednesday's update, we should finally be able to give you a date for our open (public) release.
We thank you all for sticking around and hope to meet you on IRC!
Nice.
This looks really cool.
Wow that's freaking awesome!
Reminds me of zombie master, except faster. I like it.
I am SOOOOO freakin excited for this.
This is way over my expectations
Wow... that looks F*ckin amazing :D
looks seriously nice. best of luck to you
Good...But i don't like it!
This is quite efin awesome, cant wait for this.
I think this trailer made the rebel gameplay look a lot more more fun; in the last one it just looked like u ran (really fast) circles round some retarded soldier ai; however in this trailer it looked a lot more team based and a more tactical pace.
Showing off breach also reassured anyone doubting the map quality after watching the dev texture maps - Although citadel shows pretty good form in dev texture, you can easily imagine it finished to a high quality :)
lookin gooood!
Now this is starting to look really good.
I was quite skeptical when I first saw the mod announcement, but this gameplay footage was actually quite cool.
Looking pretty slick so far.
wow you guys did a realy good job but why didn't you texture the maps?
Really AWESOME! I loved how the game will work, reminding me of old times of Zombie Master and Warcraft III (the rts part), it seems to be really nice mapped, the things that the combines do are really cool, as in the normal hl2, cops kicking doors, cops coming out from the roof, and so.
What I didn't like that much is the shield, I hope that it's still a concept, and one question, the guy that will command the Combine will also command other things like headcrabs, zombies or those little rockets that come from the space to kill people and get headcrabs to earth?
Currently the Overwatch can command Combine assets only, the Xen race is neutral and cannot be controlled. But as you know from the HL2 universe, the Combine manipulate the Xen race by sending down headcrab canisters, which is why the Overwatch player can send them down to wreak havoc :) It's early days tho, any of this info could change!
that trailer is pretty damn epic :O