It seems that Fileplanet here is now offering a service for their subscribers where you can reserve your copy of a game demo and even download it sometimes days in advance. On the list of those upcomings demos to reserve is none other than Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Both the status and date to be released are unconfirmed, could this still mean that we can see a demo sooner than we expected?

We'll have to wait and see! If you would like to check it out for yourself, click Fileplanet here.

Multiple large game-shops announced today Quake Wars will hit the stores December 1st, 2006!

This is in direct conflict with the news from ID Software back in August. We will keep you up to date as soon as we know more.

• Predict the exact date and time (in hours) and you will win a 64 slot gameserver of the game of your choice for 12 months!
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Quakecon 2006 is over, but before the next one happens we'll very likely see the release of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, a new online shooter by the guys at id Software and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory creators Splash Damage. I got the chance to sit down with id's Kevin Cloud and Splash Damage's head guy, Paul Wedgwood, to find out more about this ambitious title.

Finger: DOOM 3 had per-pixel hit detection, and a lot of people liked that feature. Is that going to be in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars?

Paul: When you set the compression level on the megatexture, this is something you choose based on the quality versus [file]size, so we have a tool called Megagen and another tool called Makemega which actually makes the megatexture once you've set up all of the properties for it and how you want it to look. When you compile the megatexture, it goes through a series of DCT and DXT compression, and the DCT compression algorithms allow you to get it pretty much as small as you want. But obviously you start to get artifacts and things at a certain level.

So what level designers could do in the community is they could ship their maps with very [low-quality] megatextures for people to sample the gameplay, and then people could have an option of a download for a larger megatexture once they've been playing on a server, have enjoyed playing, and they know that it's a map they're going to keep.

IGN.com published new ingame screenshots of the map ARK.

Deep within the Arctic circle lies the Ark, a high-security private DNA bank and bioresearch facility built on the shores of an icy coastal inlet. The GDF have tasked the Ark facility with decoding the Strogg genome. The Ark has recently reported a success in reverse-engineering Strogg biotechnology which might even allow a reversal of the Stroggification process. The Strogg command Nexus have learned of the GDF's plans and tasked a Strogg strike team to immediately penetrate the Ark and destroy all research and intelligence materials therein. The GDF must deploy rapidly to protect the Ark from the Strogg raiders.
The vital research is in a Laboratory hidden deep within the Ark facility, behind massively armoured doors. The only way the Strogg can gain access to the lab interior is by destroying the doors with a Mining Laser, but they cannot deploy this massive excavation device until they disable the GDF Jamming Tower which is scrambling their deployment sensors.

Map overview:


Ingame screenshot:

Larger images on forum.i3d.nl