Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set within the Quake universe in the year 2065. You can either play as the human GDF or alien Strogg in one of five character classes.

The shooter is also in development for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, but there’s still no release date announced for the console versions.

Tell me, do you really care if Quake Wars is coming out or not?

Quake Wars isn’t visually pleasing, its audio is terrible, and it will have in-game ads. Did I mention that its futuristic concept is rather generic?

I still need an awful lot of convincing to get this game because I can just stick with Quake 4, which by the way is also meh.

Post from: EveryJoe

Quake Wars is coming this October

Neil Postlethwaite, managing director at Splash Damage, explained that the developers want to keep supporting ETQW and not just “walk away” after releasing the game. Postlethwaite thinks in-game advertising would help maintain the persistent stat servers and the community site, in addition to the updates and improvements that they planned.

It all sounds great, but where will the ads be placed?

According to the Splash Damage executive, the ads won’t be intrusive and you won’t have to interact with them. The ads are planned to be part of the normal environment, and might actually add to the game’s immersion. Container trucks, for example, would have ads on its sides. Postlethwaite assures us that if the ad isn’t appropriate or it’s distracting, it won’t go in. No personal data that can be used to identify you will be stored. They said you’ll be tracked on how long you look at the ads, nothing more.

The problem with this is that the developer decides which ad is distracting, not the community.

Splash Damage could handle this aspect well, or they could ignore distracting ads and argue that it’s not—all for the sake of revenue.

It’s odd though that Counter-Strike: Source, one of the most popular multiplayer games, doesn’t use in-game ads, and Valve (and Turtle Rock Studios) has continued to support the game for the longest time. So far, Splash Damage has also been mum on the effect of in-game ads on the game’s retail price.

All these things considered, would you tolerate in-game advertising?

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Post from: EveryJoe

Quake Wars will have in-game advertising

The public beta test for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is coming, and boy, everybody’s itching for the details. According to the official community site, there will be 60,000 public beta slots available. Half of the slots will be given to FilePlanet subscribers, and the other half to people with free FilePlanet accounts.

If you guess I belong to the second half since I’m such a cheapskate, you’re correct.

The ETQW public beta client won’t work without a valid beta key. To get this beta key, you’ll have to log in a special ETQW mini-site that will go up in FilePlanet using your account. When the keys are already available, you’ll get a download link for the beta client—along with the valid beta key of course.

The most exciting part of this news: day 1 of the beta test’s key distribution is currently scheduled for the middle of this week. The mini-site will be live on that same day.

If you don’t want to miss a thing, do use the RSS feed to keep yourself updated.

ETQW is being developed by Splash Damage, and will be published by Activision. The game will be using a modified version of the Doom III engine. Based on the screenshots we’ve seen, ETQW won’t have the claustrophobic feel of the 2004 shooter’s Mars base.

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Post from: EveryJoe

Public beta keys for Quake Wars coming this week