In the world of business storage, there are so many options that it can make an IT admin's head spin. What you'll typically find though, if you're looking for rackmount business storage solutions, is that there's often a redundant amount of compute power when you scale out.

There are two primary components to a rackmount storage sever: the actual storage unit and the controller. They're more often than not grouped together into a single unit. When you scale out, another fully optioned unit is added, bringing with it an extra set of CPUs and RAM, since each unit is essentially a fully functional server on its own. The second option is bringing in expansion units, which have no real onboard server brains—just a box full of drives. Expansion units then daisy chain via serial-attached SCSI (SAS).

The primary unit then, is the master server or storage controller. All I/O duties go through it. To add redundancy, you'll want to add another primary unit and slave it. Slaving is done using Heartbeat between the primary and slave controller.

But what if you're a small enterprise just starting out? Going with the above solution adds extra overhead that you may not want to spare the extra expense for, but you also shouldn't spare having your data go down either. What to do?

Synology has a solution that addresses this situation for businesses that have grown beyond single-unit NASes, especially if hosting a redundant local intranet is important, or deploying a collocation setup. 

Aptly named the RackStation RC18015xs+, Synology's solution comes in three parts: dual RC18015xs+ controller units and a single or multiple RXD1215sas storage expansion unit. The idea is to break out primary functions into individual, replaceable, redundant components. The side effect to this, of course, is that each individual RXD1215sas unit you obtain has just the components required for drive control. The bare-bones setup looks like like this:

The setup is based entirely on redundancy: you have two RC18015xs+ units acting as pure controllers, and a RXD1215sas unit, but two RC18015xs+ units are required. Each one of the RC18015xs+ units contain two power supplies for redundancy. The RXD1215sas unit contains two power supplies and two controllers. Operating together, there's no single point of failure for the entire ring.

Inside the RC18015xs+

Synology won the Finalist award at VMWorld 2015 for its RackStation RC18015xs+ setup, and we can see why—everything about the setup is about redundancy. For this class of product, the organization that would see most benefit from the RC18015xs+ would have 15 employees or more, and as the organization scales, so too can the servers.

The following are the specs of the two controllers:

Note that the the RC18015xs+ controller has 4 DIMM slots utilizing ECC DDR3. Total capacity can be up to 32GB with four 8GB modules. Ours came with two modules, but this was more than enough for our purposes.

Internally, there's really not a lot to the controller. Each one of the power supplies deliver 150W of continuous power to the controller. 

Everything is designed with fault tolerance in mind, so you're able to withstand multiple PSU failures (3 in this case) without the system going completely offline. If both PSUs fail, the passive controller immediately switches over.

Taking a closer look, we see the 10GbE NIC is supplied by Intel. There's fault tolerance too, as you can set port monitoring in Synology's DSM management to switch to alternate ports if one should go down for any reason. If the 10GbE card fails entirely, the system will rely on the onboard 1GbE ports, provided you have those connected.

In the second photo above, there is a single Ethernet port above the two USB 3.0 ports that's used for fault tolerance. Utilizing Heartbeat, which is the main product name for Linux-HA (high availability), either controller can be set as active or passive. During a controller down-event, one will take over storage-controlling responsibilities as well as network addresses and user management. Technically, there's no limit to how many controllers Heartbeat can handle.

Inside the RXD1215sas

The RXD1215sas is where all the storage happens. The unit takes up a 2U rack space and allows you to install up to 12 drives, with each bay accepting up to 8TB in capacity.

As with the controllers, the RXD1215sas is designed for redundancy: two drive controller units and two power supplies ensure Synology's selling point of high-availability. Like all redundant rackmount servers, each component is easily removed and replaced in the event of a failure. You can see below that we've pulled out all the rear components.

Each controller module has a miniSAS in and miniSAS out, letting you expand your cluster with more RXD1215sas units. If you were to stack a column of RXD1215sas units on top of each other, one unit's output would be connected to the next unit's SAS input, per controller. The numeric LED indicators lets you know which part in the cluster the unit belongs to.

Below we've removed one of the rear SAS redundant backplane modules. There's really not much to it; most of the components are used primarily for controlling the drives in the array. Two fans and the primary controller chip reside at the rear.

Above you can see how both the controller modules are connected to the SAS backplane, right behind where the actual drives are.

Seagate supplied the drives for our test unit. The RXD1215sas was fully loaded with Seagate's enterprise 1200 SAS SSD 800GB drives. For a frame of reference, each drive costs roughly $2,400, giving us a total of $28,800 worth in just SSD drives alone.

What a High-Availability Setup Looks Like

In a business environment where up-time is paramount, typical NAS solutions accessible to consumers just won't cut the mustard. Server resiliency matters more than anything. Even home users will often feel the pain of a crash, and in business, this kind of down-time often leads to a big loss of money.

Synology's topography is simple but effective. Two controllers, and one or more storage units. One controller always acts as a backup, and the two controllers keep a constant check on each other to ensure the other one is still operating and "there."

In more basic HA clusters, the Heartbeat connection is the only mechanism being used to check status. Synology's setup for the RC18015xs+ uses Heartbeat, as well as the hardware components, and data connections within the whole cluster to prevent what's called a split-brain condition. In simple terms, a split-brain condition occurs when both controllers believes the other controller is dead. This causes both controllers to attempt a complete takeover of the cluster, resulting in data loss and errors.

For a truly resilient setup, you'll want to connect your clients via multiple paths to the cluster. This means more than one switch, more than one network port per client, all connected to the available network ports on the cluster. This setup provides more than just protection as you can utilize multiple links to enable load balancing.

In a NAS situation, which is a strength of the RC18015xs+, link-aggregation is highly recommend. You can read more about how to setup link-aggregation here.

In our tests, it took the passive RC18015xs+ controller anywhere between 3 to 5 seconds to completely switch into active mode. But this is due to our volume capacity sum being relatively small. The following is a table showing how long the controllers take to switchover or failover:

The amount of time is due to the controllers performing graceful shutdowns of services, and ensuring all data is written to disk. There is a risk of transactions failing during a failover however, but the hosts should be setup to perform a re-attempt in the event that acknowledgement of transaction fails.

It's worth noting that if the storage control module in the RXD1215sas that a controller is attached to fails, it will not be possible to failover to that controller.

TESTS

We've never had the chance to take something like the RC18015xs+ through our labs before. Because of this, we don't have a true reference point to test it against. There are several scenarios that customers will find appealing to use with Synology's RackStation. The first is support for straight scalable NAS storage with high-availability. The second is running VMs. However, with the two-controller setup of a RC18015xs+ cluster, it's more than likely that any VM deployment will be limited. You're going to need much more memory for running VMs at the hundreds or thousands of users level.

We therefore simplified our testing to what we think is the ideal scenario for the RC18015xs+, which would be scale-out NAS supporting a large volume of users. 

Our RXD1215sas was populated with the following drives:

Seagate 1200 SSD 800GB MLCe ST800FM0043 12Gb SASHGST He8 8TB HUH728080AL5200 12Gb SAS

We used a 10GbE dual-port NIC from Small Tree for our host.

Note that we used four Samsung 850 Pro 1TB in RAID 0 in order to further test the 10GbE performance of the RC18015xs+. We also used the Netgear ProSAFE XS708E switch and configured link aggregation to perform our tests over an aggregated link of 20GbE.

Tests were done with the following hardware:

Note: Thanks to CyberPower PC for supplying the Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSDs!

THE BENCHMARKS:

The above test was utilizing two 10GbE ports in aggregated mode. In RAID 0, we're essentially hitting a ceiling with copper 10GbE. Synology has compiled a detailed benchmark results page, allowing you to see IOPS, as well as other throughput tests such as 256-bit AES encryption. At the moment, even though our lab is 10GbE capable, we don't yet have enough of the necessary host setup to thoroughly run the RC18015xs+ through its paces. However, for a high-availability NAS, the RC18015xs+ does what it's suppose to do, and does it well.

About DSM

Synology is famous for its DSM management OS across its entire line of NAS products. The positive reputation extends through the company's entire lineup, from consumer systems all the way to enterprise products like the RC18015xs+

If you have experience with Synology NASes for the home, you pretty much can mange a Synology RackStation. The interface is the same as are most of the features and installable "apps." On the RC18015xs+ though, we get high-availability features that aren't available in a normal DSM configuration.

For those who want to see a thorough breakdown of Synology's DSM, check out our review of the company's DiskStation DS2415+.

Serious storage for serious businesses

Synology NASes are well respected in the industry. Now the company is making its mark in the enterprise in a very serious way. The RC18015xs+ is a well designed cluster that could save a business from headache inducing downtime and serious loss of money and data.

Of course, even with high-availability, the RC18015xs+ can't protect you from all events. Fore example, in the unlikely event that a controller A fails and the SAS module connected to controller B fails, the system won't be able to survive the switch. For the majority of scenarios though, the resiliency of the RC18015xs+ is exceptional. Others also agree. During VMWorld in San Francisco earlier this year, Synology won the VMWorld Finalist award for its RC18015xs+ cluster.

DSM also makes management and deployment duties simple to do. The company continually improves DSM on a regular basis, and folks from Synology even told us that the company considers itself firstly a software company before being a hardware company. We can see why they see it this way. After using NASes from several different brands, our favorite NAS management system has become Synology's DSM. The system is reliable and robust.

For all intents and purposes, the RC18015xs+ is a near perfect system.

Wargaming's browser-based online card game about tanks, World of Tanks Generals: Order of Battle, is now officially released after a long period of beta testing. It's a free to play tactical affair that has you "harnessing sudden strikes and tactical traps" to protect your HQ on the gridded playing area. You can sign up to play via the EU or US sites.

As you'd expect, there is plenty of deck building, and the game launches with "over 200 cards across three nations (U.S.A, Germany and U.S.S.R.)". There are bots to practice against before you move on to human opponents. The browser-based version launches alongside the iOS version, and cross-play works between the two editions.

We first saw this way back in 2012, when then-web ed Owen Hill concluded that "tactical, but small enough scale not to overwhelm." It launches with a pleasingly silly trailer. Don't you just hate it when cards catch fire in the middle of a game?

Here are some screenshots, too. Quite a tone shift from the king of card battlers, Hearthstone.

Spoilers for the entirety of Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain s story follow.

I really rated MGSV when it was released in September, and it already ranks as one of my favourite games of all time. It's a sandbox game that offers the sort of detailed stealth-action scenarios that Metal Gear has always been famous for, now on a gigantic scale. Sitting uneasily against that is Metal Gear's narrative baggage, over two decades of increasingly complicated lore that's woven into The Phantom Pain through brief, bland cutscenes and a ton of dull audiotapes you can listen to at your leisure. 

To a PC audience coming to Metal Gear for the first time, I imagine it was a case of brushing the story to one side and cracking on with destroying watchtowers with rocket launchers while listening to The Cure—the game does allow you to divorce story from game in a way its predecessors didn t. As someone who's followed the series very closely since the original Metal Gear Solid, though, I find so many of the creative decisions behind the story baffling in tone, approach and content. But there is still one key moment in this messy tale that lifts everything else about the game for me. The ending is amazing.

Months later I'm still dwelling on the biggest left turn in the story, which arrives at the end of the game s second chapter. The key twist in MGSV's epilogue was pre-empted by fans months before release: that you are not, in fact, playing as the Big Boss as seen in Ground Zeroes, but instead a largely anonymous stand-in for the player called 'Medic' (who is renamed and customised by you in the game's prologue). This Big Boss, a post-credits timeline tells us, is the one Solid Snake will someday face in the original Metal Gear as part of the series continuity.

Like a lot of observers I was onto this from the start of MGSV's story. In my review-in-progress piece in September, I called this version of Snake 'an anonymous action hero' and an empty vessel'. I was torn on whether this was the product of the story being deliberately light touch, as Kojima Productions response to criticism of Metal Gear s absurdly long cutscenes, or because it was just too damned expensive to have Kiefer Sutherland in the recording studio for longer than a few days. The fact it's hard to figure this out is one of the story's many weaknesses, but there are others: a mostly dry script, an intro/outro that has almost nothing to do with the rest of the game, and the complete reliance on boring audio tapes to fill in background info.

The reveal is by far the most interesting thing about it, however, and it s telegraphed throughout the game in many ways, some clever, some obvious. I reckon Ocelot's quote You're a legend in the eyes of those who live on the battlefield first heard all the way back in MGSV's E3 2013 trailer was a clear nod in that direction—that is, to anyone who looks at Venom Snake, he is Big Boss, even if it's just an artifice.

There are clear thematic connections between this character and MGS2's Raiden, who was deliberately manipulated through a sequence of events designed to mimic the circumstances of the original Metal Gear Solid. Raiden's path in Sons of Liberty was a smart comment on the player s role, but MGSV's twist is much more disturbing and effective for me. Raiden may be a substitute for the player, but he also has his own history as a child soldier, as well as a real girlfriend and some sense of identity—he is still a character. In MGSV you spend tens of hours playing as someone with none of that. You are an impostor. As the Medic , you re as anonymous as any of your loyal soldiers on Mother Base.

Its effect on my perception of the rest of the game has been huge. There are two levels on which you can enjoy this twist: the obvious one is that, like Raiden but more so, 'Medic' is the embodiment of the player, and this twist is designed to make you reflect on that. You were never Big Boss, of course. You're just pretending to be him.

Medic, then, is nothing more than whatever you've invested in him—and ultimately, my Big Boss has been through countless giant-scale battles, fought in the way that I wanted to, listened to Rebel Yell by Billy Idol because I like it and lived to tell the tale. The epilogue takes away the pillar of his identity as Big Boss, and all you're left with is every unscripted experience you've had in the battlefield, no backstory other than the one you ve just created. The ending is about what MGSV the game is. More than any other entry in the series, V is a freeform experience shaped by your intent—and such an ending is a perfect thematic match for this game Kojima Productions has created, a true military action sandbox where few situations ever play out the same way. In the epilogue s reveal cutscene, the real Big Boss explains on tape that you and him now share that title—your actions, as his phantom, as the player, have earned that status. You showed that becoming Big Boss requires nothing more than the commitment and self-conviction as the player to do so. Big Boss looks into the mirror, and you stare back.

There s also another, more literal angle to the reveal I ve been considering more and more. If you think of Medic not just as a symbol of the player, but as a character in that universe, his story is unusually tragic and unsettling. He s first seen in Ground Zeroes, extracting the bomb from Paz, and when the second explosive goes off, he jumps in front of Big Boss to take the shrapnel without hesitation. Having lost nine years of his life to a coma, he then gives up his own identity to assume that of his ally for his protection, through both hypnotherapy and plastic surgery, then builds an entire army and forges relationships on an entirely false premise.

It brings yet another level of weirdness to his affectionate interactions with Quiet, too—in retrospect, that s pretty much the only meaningful relationship he forges with any person in The Phantom Pain, and she thinks she s interacting with the real Big Boss. But she never was.

What else do we know about the Medic, too? He eventually becomes evil Big Boss in the original Metal Gear on MSX—so there s a period between The Phantom Pain where he goes from this relative hero character that you ve created to someone who is ultimately corrupted. And who in the series lore remembers the Medic? Only Big Boss, Miller and Ocelot know who Venom Snake actually is. He s a nobody, an unsung hero slotted into MGS lore.

I enjoyed so little about the story but find a lot of meaning in this one moment. I don t mind that the cutscenes in MGS5 fill in very few of the gaps in the series timeline—for Metal Gear fans, MGS4 s barrage of cutscenes were surely enough to convince them that any more of that fan service torment was unwelcome. But the story feels deliberately unfinished—Quiet, Huey and Eli (Liquid Snake) all just vanish in various ways throughout chapter two, stripping more and more of Metal Gear s lore away from The Phantom Pain. Hell, even the Metal Gear from the game is removed from the story when Eli steals Sahelanthropus in his final appearance in the story, all discussion about the cut mission 51 aside. There s no closure in a grand cutscene—I believe you re supposed to feel an emptiness as a player by the end of chapter two. In keeping with the twist, you look upon everything that s left after the story s played out—and it has little relation to Metal Gear as we knew it. What remains is what you ve created.

It s Mother Base, full of the men and women you ve recruited. D-Dog, who you discovered and raised on the battlefield yourself. It s your history with every mission and every Side Op. The Metal Gear-ness of it is all rendered largely irrelevant—it s a fascinating statement of finality and a curious parallel to Kojima s apparent departure from Konami. He s seemingly gone, Kojima Productions is no more, and you re only left with what you ve built in his game. That couldn t possibly have been deliberate—though the idea that it might be only adds to the myth behind its creation.

Don t take this as a wholesale endorsement of the story—I have a number of major problems with the execution of it. For one, it feels like I ve played through a non-canon entry in the series, without the same quality or style of voice acting I m used to from the series, and without any of the scripting flavour or much of the humour. MGS5 s story felt aimless, and the decision to recast some characters like Snake and Ocelot but not others like Huey Emmerich smacks of random decision making that passes on zero benefit to players. The game itself is pure Metal Gear, but the scripted narrative stitched into it, including the endless boring audiotapes, is almost worthless. As a story in and of itself, it s the worst in the series by far. This one reveal, however, which ties so deeply into the player s role in MGS5, saves it for me. It s a twist that s entirely about playing a systems-driven sandbox game.

In my review-in-progress of MGS5, I made a point that a lot of other people have made as well: Maybe the lack of a traditional narrative is the developers way of underlining that The Phantom Pain is about the stories generated by the players themselves. The connections you can make in the battlefield with D-Dog, for example, or arguably even Quiet, are player-generated and little to do with the cutscenes or audiotapes.

But that one scripted twist enhances every unscripted moment. It says that the player's choices are all that matter, because there is no real character here except the one you decided to be. Take the legend of Big Boss away and all you have is the legacy of the player. He was always the best man we had... says the real Big Boss in the 'Doublethink' tape that unlocks after the game's conclusion. This is just a detour in his journey to hell.

Special thanks to Metal Gear thinker Dan Dawkins, who originally made the stripping back observation to me, helped me articulate my thoughts on MGS5 in conversation and writes great Metal Gear pieces like this one.

A new post on the XCOM site shows some new suburban zones, so you can see exactly where your prize much-promoted sniper will be bleeding out in when XCOM 2 comes out on February 5. They're a shift away from the recently-released wilderness shots, showing shopping malls, gas stations, and other places that aliens shouldn't be. XCOM 2's levels will be procedurally generated, so we're really getting a look at the assets that the game will be using to build levels.

There were some urban environments in Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within, but the sequel's improved fidelity should better create the horror of uncanny events happening in familiar places. The only indications of the futuristic setting are some slick cars and a 10/10 evil train, quite different to the Advent shots that Firaxis released a couple of weeks ago.

These shots seem to be weekly releases. What will be next? Space station? Volcano lair?

System Shock: Enhanced Edition hit GOG in September and that was cool, but even cooler was the news earlier this month that Night Dive Studios is also working in a full-on remake. Today the studio provided the first look at what it's got cooking to Polygon, which posted a half-dozen then-and-now comparison shots illustrating how the game has changed, plus a few pieces of concept art.

The visual effects are obviously way beyond what was possible back in 1994, but the System Shock aesthetic (which is a swanky way of saying "blue") is intact. It's impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions from just a handful of images of a single location, but if this is representative of Night Dive's plans for the entire game, it doesn't appear as though it's going to stray too far from the original level designs. That's not entirely surprising, I suppose, given that Robb Waters, one of the artists and designers on the original System Shock, is helping develop the new one.

My one complaint about these pics is that they're just shots of a room, with a couple robots standing around doing nothing. As dynamic screen captures go, this stuff is pretty near the bottom of the barrel. On the other hand, this is System Shock we're talking about, and that's pretty hot stuff its own right.

The original Fallout is still immensely playable, but it does look old. Fallout: New Vegas looks pretty old too for that matter, but this modding project, which aims to bring the story of Fallout to the New Vegas engine, is likely to be seen as an improvement by some. 

Interestingly, the mod will stay true to the structure of the original Fallout, which featured a bunch of isolated areas rather than a sprawling sandbox. As the video below demonstrates, there's a grid-based overworld map allowing travel between each, though the modders intend to exercise creative license and create their own overworld eventually.

Full details on the work-in-progress mod can be seen over on NexusMods. Check out the video below, and thanks to VG247 for the heads up.

Among the big changes coming to League of Legends' 2016 season is a new "chest and key" loot system. Keys or key fragments will be ladled out at the end of every won match, which you'll use to unlock chests containing rented or permanent access to skins and champions. That'll be available some time in 2016, unless you're a player deemed toxic by League of Legends' community guidelines. If that's the case, you won't have access to the system at all.

Speaking to Polygon, lead game designer of social systems Jeffrey Lin said players hit with disciplinary measures will not have access to loot at all. "We really want the system to be a reward," he said. "It's a new carrot for playing with friends and for being a positive player in the game. 

"We've never been able to give skins for free before in League of Legends, so this is our way of saying, 'Hey, if you're a positive player in the game, here's your way of earning something just for playing the game and being awesome.'"

This is the first time Riot has locked out a whole system in the game to toxic players, with ranked play and voice chat bannings among the most common disciplinary measures. The company's efforts to curb the community's toxic elements are numerous and well documented. For more on what to expect of the 2016 season, Tom Marks has you sorted.

Killing Floor 2 is about cleaning up hordes of unruly test subjects with bullets, fire, swords, and anything else destructive enough to remove a mutant s head, and doing it all with friends. It s still hacking its way through Early Access, and since Tyler wrote about it in April, the team at Tripwire has continued working on the guns and gibs. Last week, I got to play Killing Floor 2 s next big update, which is coming to players in December and brings back an old friend: the Patriarch.

Killing Floor 1 fans will remember the Patriarch boss, who seems to have put on some weight and mutated a few more times since then, but is otherwise mostly unchanged. He s a huge bullet-sponge: fast, powerful, and with a tendency to run away and heal just when you ve almost got him.

He will come at you in those first couple of minutes with his basic attacks, Tripwire Interactive vice president Alan Wilson told PC Gamer. Once he s taken a bit of damage, so long as he can get away, he ll disappear, stab himself with a healing syringe in a quiet corner, and cover his retreat by throwing a bunch of lower-level monsters at you. We want it to be a mix of [fighting and] damn we ve lost him —because if you keep up with him and keep piling damage on, you can actually kill him there and then.

To test out the Patriarch, I joined Tripwire and smashed through KF2 s two new maps: the Black Forest and the Farmhouse. The Black Forest is heavily wooded and crossed with running streams and creeks. Railroad tracks and a lonely mountain cabin break up the woodlands and create chokepoints for mutants to swarm through. As time goes by and the bodies pile up, the woods get darker and darker until flashlights are a necessity.

Along the way, I admired the gun animations and behaviors—heavy and believable, fun to spray at mutant heads, or carefully aim and steady—and the work Tripwire has done to iterate on KF1. We re doing a sequel to a well-beloved game, so we can t depart from the core formula, said Wilson. Basically: mutant freaks; if you see anything that looks fucked up, shoot it, burn it, chop it to pieces; general mayhem; have fun, look cool while you re doing it. Going KF1 to [Red Orchestra 2] to KF2, we ve done a lot of work at the engine level with weapons, weapon feel, sound, all the rest of it.

The update s second map, Farmhouse, is straight out of every horror movie you ve ever seen. I was a little disappointed to see the map s similarity to the farm finale area in Left 4 Dead, but the genre cliches instantly set a familiarly creepy tone, and lend themselves to the design of a fun map—mutants come swarming out of the dense corn field, and the barn, hayloft, and farmhouse add vertical space. If it s an homage to anything, it s an homage to every single creepy horror movie that ends up in an old farmhouse, Wilson said. The sort of place that everyone jokes, when the man comes out with a chainsaw, you run away. Don t go and hide in a small cupboard.

When the Patriarch finally lands at the end of a game, he s a towering pile of flesh and circuitry. He absorbs a lot of damage, sure, but that s par for the course with Killing Floor bosses. Patriarch is in many ways the same character from KF1, but he s learned some new tricks. When he spots players hiding from his rocket launcher attacks, for example, he turns the launcher into a mortar and lobs rockets up and over players cover.

His invisibility power is back, too, but he uses it in more interesting ways. Rather than simply a tool for retreat, the Patriarch uses his invisibility to attack unpredictably. Now when players lose sight of Patriarch they can t be completely sure: did he run away to heal, or is he about to pounce on them from behind?

More importantly, however players beat Patriarch will be a very different approach from how they attack Hans, the current final boss in Killing Floor 2. Any map will have a 50/50 chance of spawning Hans or the Patriarch, and that uncertainty is part of Tripwire s strategy for giving players an ongoing tactical puzzle.

It s going to be interesting to see now, how players will form new teams, Wilson said. They ve worked out how they like to handle Hans. Now they have to work out how to handle the Patriarch, but they also have the challenge that they don t know which one is coming at them. If they gear up to fight Hans and the Patriarch comes at them, they could be up shit creek… How do you strategize for an end boss when you don t know who it is?

There was some, let's say consternation, earlier this year when Electronic Arts announced that FIFA 16 would include women's national teams from England, Germany, the US, France, Sweden, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, China, Italy and Mexico. It was also the first game in the history of the franchise to feature a woman on the cover, which had Alex Morgan of the US Women's National Team sharing equal space with Messi. Despite the predictable grousing from certain quarters, according to a report by ThePostGame the addition of women to one of the most popular games in the world has actually worked out pretty well.

"If you take the US Women as a singular team and you look at the 600 teams you can play with on a global basis, not just in the US, the US Women, they're actually the 23rd-most played team around the world in FIFA 16, which is a stunning statistic," EA Sports COO Peter Moore revealed at BlazerCon. A "better stat" is that Morgan, the cover athlete, has already scored more than one million in-game goals, even though FIFA 16 has only been out for two months.

Some of that success may arise from the fact that the popularity of soccer has taken off in recent years. Moore said the FIFA player base has doubled from 2013 to 2015, and that more people in the US play Real Madrid-Barcelona than in Spain. And he claims some credit for it, too, adding, "We believe we've been instrumental, the invisible hand in driving this love of the game."

It's clear that the addition of women players to the series has paid off, and there's no doubt that they'll be back for FIFA 17. But there may be a few changes made between now and then: Midfielder Heather O'Reilly, who was also at BlazerCon, said she's not happy with her overall player rating of 81. "I was disappointed in my speed, to be honest. I'm a lot faster than that."

Another closed alpha for DOOM is coming next week, but like the first one, those who secured beta access via Wolfenstein: The New Order preorders aren't guaranteed access. Kicking off December 3 and running until the end of December 6 (that's Eastern Time), participants will be chosen from those who redeemed DOOM beta codes included with The New Order, or those who have preordered the game digitally. 

So yeah, it'll likely be as hard to get into as last month's jaunt, but at least there's hope: check your email to see if you got in. It looks like the alpha will operate exactly as the last one did: it's 6v6 team deathmatch on the Heatwave map with a Revenant power-up, and seven weapons including the rocket launcher, super shotgun, plasma rifle and vortex rifle.

Closed alpha access is subject to an NDA so I'm not sure how well the last one went (I didn't get in, damn it), but Chris Livingston played the game at QuakeCon, and you can read his impressions here.