Great news: The Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars 1.5 game update is currently headed straight for the tubes of the internet! We're planning to push the Windows and Linux versions along with the upated SDK this evening London time, while the folks at Aspyr are currently putting the finishing touches on the Mac version. If you want to read up on the changes and improvements included in 1.5, you can do so by way of this blog update. To round out the impending file assault, we'll also have the final version of the Official Competition Mod available within the coming days.

As soon as the 1.5 update is ready for download, we'll publish a list of mirrors here on the ETQW Community Site, so keep checking back!

Just a quick update on where things are at with the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars 1.5 game update. We're currently doing some last minute testing with id Software to track down a few issues that have turned up, but we don't anticipate this to take too much time. We really just want to make sure that all the issues we're aware of are actually addressed rather than pushing out an update with a big asterisk and a list of It'll-break-if-you do-this-ers attached to it.

Distribution is being sorted out at the moment as well and if there are no further complications, we anticipate having the update out next week. We'll try and keep you as updated as possible from here on out, so as soon as we've got a definite release date, you'll read it here first.

Work on the 1.5 game update for Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars is steaming ahead at full knots and we're now testing the latest version of it internally to see if there are any glaring issues left to fix. Even more exciting, we've put together the final changelog for the update, which you can find concealed somewhere within this blog update. In a smallish nutshell, 1.5 brings a number of new features and customization options to ETQW and fixes all of the issues left over from 1.4. Let's have a look:

The marketing machine for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars is starting to spin up - if you missed it, don't forget to check out the first round of previews. More are sure to come within the next few weeks along with a few other cool announcements related to the console versions. In more PC-centric news, there have been quite a few questions about the status of the ETQW 1.5 game update on the forums, so here's what's currently happening with it.

Good news: There's light at the end of the license tunnel! We've at last received the proper license files for both the Competition Mod and the 1.5 game update. With that in mind, we're now prepping them for release and hope to get them out as soon as possible (for real!).

Since we want to make sure that both releases are as solid as can be, we've decided to run public beta phases for them - this will allow us to iron out any remaining stability issues and also make sure that the backend infrastructure is working properly. Both of these are the most difficult things to test for and since we've had a few issues crop up in 1.4 that didn't surface during our testing, we feel that a public beta phase is in the best interest of the game and the players.

Read on for more information on the two upcoming Beta releases and for the preliminary 1.5 changelog.

We've been testing the ETQW Competition Mod Beta all week and the thing is in pretty good shape, though there are a few last minute issues that we're having to resolve before it can go out. Bizarrely enough, the main hold-up at the moment is that we're still waiting to get the correct license files for it – legal experts from around the globe are telling us that it can't go out without them, so there's unfortunately very little we can do there.

We do expect to get them within the next few working days, so hopefully it won't be too much longer until we're able to release the Competition Mod Beta.

The 1.4 update was all about making it easier for new players to find their way into Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars and we've seen some great feedback regarding the spanking new training mode in particular. If you haven't tried the new demo yet, now's the time!

With 1.4 out of the way, we are currently working on the next game update, and breaking with all known naming and moral conventions, we were thinking of code-naming it "1.5". This is going to be a smaller release and fix the remaining issues that cropped up in 1.4, such as ranks not being displayed correctly and Personal Bests being tracked on a per-campaign basis rather than globally (those two issues are actually related).

More immediately - and perhaps a bit more exciting - we are also wrapping up work on our competition mod. If you're not familiar with it, the main purpose of the mod is allow tournament organizers to easily implement and enforce specific rulesets. To that extent, we've stuffed quite a lot of cvar customization options in there and creating a new ruleset is as simple as putting the values you'd like to adjust in a config file on your server.

Now that 1.4 has been released, let me bring you up to speed on the issues we've found so far and what we're doing to address them.

Perhaps the most rampant problem was server crashing just a few minutes after going up. What happened there? Well, it turns out that the newly added Hot Servers feature is indirectly to blame: when more than 256 players queried the same server at the same time, it became unresponsive and disconnected everyone playing on it. The good news is that we've since isolated and fixed the underlying cause - a problem with server info requests - and have deployed a hotfix to our GSP partners. So far things are looking extremely good on that front and barring any further problems, the fix will very soon be released to the community at large.

We're also aware that ranks are not being displayed and are currently testing a fix for this. Both that as well as any other necessary fixes will make it into a smaller update that we're hoping to release in the coming weeks. We'll continue to monitor the forums closely, so if you come across any other issues, please let us know there.

So, where's 1.4? This has been a pretty hectic week in the Land of Updates. Our planned roll-out had to be stopped because internal testing turned up issues with the installers that could affect some players. The folks at Activision are trying to get these worked out as quickly as they can - they will let us know as soon as they have a solid estimate for getting the fixes in and tested. We'll pass that information on to you right away when we get it.

On a brighter note, we've also been hard at work on an updated version of the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars demo. This new demo incorporates all the improvements we've made to ETQW in the three months since its release, including the new training mode we’re introducing in 1.4. The training mode is a great introduction to the unique gameplay concepts and mechanics featured in Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, so this is a fantastic way for those still on the fence to experience the latest and greatest version of the game.

But that's not all!

We know you're all waiting eagerly for the 1.4 update to be released and I've got a brief status update for you. Quality Assurance testing has turned up a few issues with 1.4 that need to be addressed before it can go out the public. One of them is specific to ATI cards, so we're working closely with the guys over at AMD / ATi to get this resolved as quickly as possible, while also making sure that the rest of the update is as solid as can be. We don't expect this to be resolved before the new year, so we're now aiming to release 1.4 in early January 2008.

Despite the update not being out in time, we here at Splash Damage and id Software would like to wish all of you fantastic holidays and we hope you have a great 2008!