Yesterday, the official Quake Wars site had news that they had begun distributing beta keys to those folks who aren’t paid subscribers. The distribution started yesterday at 11 AM, and the beta keys have already been taken. Now, there’s still a chance that you could get into the beta.

According to the beta promotions site, there’s an upcoming 5th key distribution set to start sometime today. Again, this one will be open to anyone with a FilePlanet account, paid or not. Keep your eyes on the Quake Wars site for the keys to start rolling out again.

This is easily the game that I am most excited about this fall. Hopefully, we’ll see it on store shelves in the very near future.

In order to off-set some of the maintenance costs associated with an online game, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, will make use of in-game advertisements. Don’t worry though, dear reader, Neil Postlethwaite, the game’s producer, explains that the ads will not inhibit your gameplay experience:

“The ads aren’t intrusive and you won’t have to interact with them; they’ll just be part of the normal environment. In fact, there are some places it’s quite odd not to have an advertisement – the sides of container trucks, for example. Great care is being taken to ensure that all our ads are appropriate for the game world and we have absolute approval rights in this area. If it’s not appropriate or it’s distracting, it won’t go in.”

The main reason for including these ads is to maintain a high level of quality without passing the costs on to players. I’ve also already heard from people who got in on the closed beta that the ads actually are put in spots that make sense, even for a world set 50 years in the future.

The Enemy Territory: Quake Wars community website has news that the public beta is coming very soon. While they don’t give any exact dates, they do mention that it will be limited to 60,000 slots, and they give a few details, such as:

“The Public Beta build will consist of a single map named “Sewer”, which is part of ETQW’s Pacific Campaign. Set in Japan, the map revolves around a Strogg base hidden in, well, a sewer. It’s an interesting mix of outdoor and indoor, vehicle and infantry combat, deployables and counter-deployables and good old-fashioned FPS combat.

If you’d like to help us finish ETQW, we’d really appreciate your participation. If you want to just play a game for free you may find it a frustrating experience. This Public Beta is not the Demo – it’s not the finished game, but an opportunity to get feedback from a large group of people while testing stability and performance on a wider range of hardware combinations. The Public Beta will also collect some information on your hardware configuration, so you shouldn’t apply unless you’re comfortable with that.”

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but ever since I gave up on BF 2 for abandoning everything they had right about infantry combat in BF:V, this is the game I’ve been waiting on. I can’t wait to get my hands on it. See you in the beta line!

You remember that Activision conference call we told you about on Friday? Well, there’s some pretty good news for ET: Quake Wars fans that dropped in there.

The multiplayer first-person shooter is expected to launch in the July-September 2007 time frame. Now, you should keep in mind that this is Activision talking, not id Software. As anyone familiar with id will tell you, it won’t be released until it’s ready. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it usually means that we get a well-polished product, rather than one that needs a dozen patches to get there.

If you haven’t checked out ET: QW yet, it’s Strogg vs. GDF in an online shootout on PC, PS3, and XBox 360. For all sorts of trailers, you check out the FileFront game page here.

The next installment in the Quake series, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, is now available for pre-order. If your do pre-order the game, you can get two collector’s cards and an exclusive poster as a bonus. You can choose from the regular version for $49.99 or the Collector’s Edition for $59.99, which includes concept art, developer videos, ringtones, and ten more collector’s cards. If you want pre-order the game, you can head here and choose a retailer.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Trailer
There’s a new trailer up for the upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, a squad-based shooter set in the Quake universe. In the video, several of the developers explain some of the innovations they’ve made with this game, such as a wide array of character classes, futuristic weapons, and vehicles. The single-player campaign looks impressive on its own, but I’m hoping more for online multiplayer. If it turns out how I think it could, I’m going to start referring to this game as “Battlefield Quake.”

If the U.S. were this hard core, ESPN might look totally different.

According to this article on qj.net, there was a line of two thousand people who waited outside the doors, but could not get in. The total attendance for the first-day matches was 25,000, which is more people than a lot of counties in Ohio.

Games for the event include World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, CounterStrike, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, Quake 4, Fight Night, and apparently Guitar Hero 2. With $50,000 up for grabs, it should be a good show.

The next World Series of Video Games is to be held in Louisville, Kentucky from June 21, 2007 – June 24, 2007. We’ll see how that goes, though I’m betting it won’t draw half the crowd. At some point I realized that, well, lots of people were better than me at video games. And they’re all from Asia.

The deadline for id Software’s Quake 4 mapping contest has come and gone and 34 maps have been accepted for judging. Id will be selecting 8-12 maps for inclusion in the next official Community Map Pak. Not the kind of folks to leave us with nothing to do however, they went ahead and zipped up all 34 submissions for your testing pleasure. You guys rock.