Now that the press release has gone out for the public and retailers so they can be confident ETQW will actually be on store shelves those dates we announced at QuakeCon at the first of the month, I wanted to address the folks who have been waiting for the game for a year or more with great anticipation, people who have been plugging away for hours at the beta or anyone who came out for QuakeCon and watched the *whole* ETQW tournament finale. In short, I wanted to say something for the hardcore fans: The game is hella fun! But most of you probably already knew that ;-)

Back in 2003, we started exchanging design ideas with id Software for what started out as a fairly modest attempt to evolve the team-play in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Now, four years later, Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars has officially gone GOLD! For those of you not familiar with the development term, going gold means that the retail game is complete, and that master DVDs have gone to manufacturing, and will then head to stores. This makes us especially proud, not just because of the incredible passion and effort that the development teams have invested these past four years, but especially because of the amazing support the community has given us.

Games Convention 2007, one of the largest public game shows in the world, just opened its doors in Leipzig, Germany, and this blog is coming to you live from the show floor. Some 150,000 people are expected to roam the Messe halls this year, which makes the show perhaps the most important pre-holiday event for the entire industry. Activision is, of course, present here at the show and with Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars going on sale just a month after GC 2007, the game has a sizeable presence here.

A multiplayer combat game like Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars requires a significant amount of backend infrastructure that has to be running at all times, including account registration and verification, user management, statistics collection, server registration and listings, and many more. One of the goals of the Public Beta is to test as many of these systems as possible and with the beta client update out of the way, we’re now ready to conduct a few stress-tests. We’ll be running two major tests in the coming days that will affect your account, so please take the time and read this blog update in its entirety.

In between appending the finishing touches to Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, we've also been working on a small client update for the Public Beta. This update will be downloadable through the in-game updater, so all you have to do when it comes out is start up the game and watch the digital magic unfold.

What's changed? Let's go straight to the changelog, shall we?