Oh look, Overwatch is live.

Overwatch is finally live, after a stupidly long time of waiting.

Well, should be. This article will be released beforehand, because the release date for people playing in Europe is between midnight and 2am on the 24th.

Through closed and open betas and a scandal with Tracer that I’m pretty sure they made themselves to get themselves good publicity, the game is finally out and everyone can go be a hero or an edgelord. It’s been a pretty smooth ride, considering, as Blizzard have been plotting their revenge for Valve stealing Dota 2 for so damn long. If they really wanted to hurt Valve though, they’d create their own Counter-strike-like game or develop a large game purchasing platform. Oh well.

Their open beta, with apparently over 9 million players joining in, was a huge part of this success. According to their stats, as seen here, the top most picked heroes were Soldier: 76, Widowmaker, Reinhardt and Mercy. Which is what happens when you make healers overly sexy but also kinda bland and not insane in the slightest. Soldier: 76 and Widowmaker aren’t much of a surprise because they capture the imaginations of anyone who has ever played a standard first person shooter. Reinhardt only wins here because he’s by far the best tank in the category of sheer tankiness.

I’m pretty sure the game will be released with nerfs and buffs to a few heroes, and with its competitive mode, which wasn’t available at all during the Open Beta. Maybe there’ll be more bots as well, because all I ever saw was Zayra and Reaper.

While everyone else was talking about it, aabicus and I were desperate to get our hands on any of the closed betas and start writing about it, but we were held back every step of the way. Neither one of us got into the closed betas, and when we finally did get into the open beta, we had all sorts of technical problems, from aabicus’s mic not working to my OBS not recording anything past a single frame and sounds from gameplay. Not just physical headaches then.

I’ll be honest though, I’m thoroughly sick of Overwatch. I get it, it’s a really good game. And I do feel that Overwatch will hurry TF2 along to bed, not because it’s better (although it does build over many of the mistakes TF2 has made) but because Valve doesn’t give a shit. I’m just sick and tired of hearing about it. I experienced how fun Overwatch is in the beta, just like everyone else. Now that it’s released, go talk about it on the multitude of Overwatch boards and forums.

I won’t be joining you though. I decided that I shouldn’t spend €40 on a video game that hurts me physically. You all go have fun, I’ll be here, in my Steam Library, my cursor hovering over Play Team Fortress 2 but never actually clicking it. Instead, I spent my €40 on three Bionicle sets and a packet of paracetamol, with €5 change.

In the mean time, aabicus will be keeping up with Overwatch. And you are all free to contribute as well.