Quake Wars

[Miasma]

At the evil file planet, subcribers only.

[Yegolev]

Tease.

[MrHat]

Son of a whore.  I really want to play this too.  Also, the timing couldn't be better.

[Miasma]

According to this post there are 60,000 beta keys total, half will be for paid fileplanet and the other half for free fileplanet subscribers.  I don't subscribe to FP anymore either, ever since they sent me some nasty email about them changing their privacy rules and that my choice was either accept it or fuck right off.  So we'll just have to keep an eye on the site and try to get one of the free keys when they come out sometime soon.

There will also be a demo stage before retail.

[croaker69]

Haha!  First I steal your glory in the Politics forum now I use your knowledge to get into the Beta.  Download in progress!

[NiX]

Yay! You're king of the nerds! WHOO!

[Azazel]

Also, Ingame Ads!

Also sadly, Splash Damage have also announced that Quake Wars will have in-game ads:

To help cover this level of on-going support without passing the costs on to the gamer, ETQW will feature appropriate advertisements in select locations of our levels. 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.

Now, my memory is a little fuzzy from years of hardcore game playing and not enough natural light, but I don't recall previous games that had massive levels of post-purchase support requiring ads to survive - especially id titles, where the philosophy has always seemed to always be "sell once and build on the community". While I appreciate that PC games are not the massive revenue drivers that console games are, I must confess my disappointment.

[MrHat]

It's about damn time.  I hope this is in all our future games.

[Sky]

I've come up with an innovative new death penalty. Every three deaths, you have to put a quarter into the slot in your computer.

[Tairnyn]

Punch the monkey to reduce your respawn time!

[Merusk]

Bah.. it's begun too soon.  I'm going to have to take up a real hobby soon.

[Nonentity]

They just fired up another round of keys on Fileplanet. I snagged two for my two fileplanet accounts earlier.

[MrHat]

They just fired up another round of keys on Fileplanet. I snagged two for my two fileplanet accounts earlier.

Still says only for Subscribers.

[Miasma]

I've been reading about it and I guess they removed in game voice for the PC because "there are other methods available".  If true that would really suck, the game seems to be based on teamwork and forcing people to use Vent/TS means only organized clans will be able to work together.

[MrHat]

I've been reading about it and I guess they removed in game voice for the PC because "there are other methods available".  If true that would really suck, the game seems to be based on teamwork and forcing people to use Vent/TS means only organized clans will be able to work together.

That's pretty shitty.  Even CS 1.6 had voice chat.

[Chenghiz]

I enjoyed ET so much and was looking forward to this and now they put ads ingame. Oh well, Orange Box will last me quite some time, I suspect.

[Miasma]

Some of the open beta keys are going to be coming out today, they released the last two batches at 9:00 AM PST so it they stick with that we've got about twenty minutes.  They will probably go pretty damn fast though.

[Strazos]

I had an invite, but my PC hardware didn't qualify....something about not having my old AMD Athlon XP 2700+ as a selection. Oh well.


As, count me in the camp of people not caring about in-game ads splashed over buildings or whatever. I mean, seriously, what difference does it make? I just play the game.

[Miasma]

Hurry!

Edit: Wow, all of fileplanet went down for a while there.

And you only get one shot at that minimum specs page so when in doubt, lie.

[MrHat]

So, I played a bit.  It's all very confusing.

[KyanMehwulfe]

Visually underwhelming and it took a little to get used to since I've been playing a lot of sim-esque FPS since I last heavily played ET:Wolfenstein last year. I've grown fairly hungry for it now, though. I like the item and objective design, and specifically the potential for it on even better maps combined with Splash Damage's track record of great design. Throw in light RPG-esque stats and I get the sense that it could sustain casual play from me for a long time.

The ads... Such news makes me bitter at first, but I suppose it depends on how it's done. At first, I didn't mind the Alienware ads in Anarchy Online since they were a little subtle and well themed to fit the setting. Years later though, seeing massive ads of Dentyne gum, European rave parties, and The Ring movie, unrelenting rows of them in towns and instanced dungeons, was ridiculous.

[Azazel]

On a related note, the newish, free map for BF2/BF2142 also has ads for Intel chips scattered throughout, on the sand-battered billboards and also there's a pallet or two of intel chips in (one?/some?) of the flag cap areas.
In the middle of a sunbaked desert.

[Miasma]

I found a nice empty server to learn all the roles on.  Well, begin to learn that is, they are somewhat overwhelming in their varied abilities, not to mention the Strogg and GDF play very differently so you have to learn the classes twice.  Then you have to learn the objectives which are also quite interesting.  It has a lot of potential but once people know how to play the organized clans (or even a single group with voicechat) will just decimate the opposition.  Feels like I would have to go and join a clan or suffer constant frustration, screw that.

If you like clan on clan this game is going to be robot-jesus though.

Also, I really suck at flying.

Edit: This is an extremely good site to learn what you need to know.

[Wolf]

Played for about an hour. Fucking loved it. But like someone said everything is so very confusing. At least the map is not that difficult, I'm starting to get the hang of it. The GDF seem a bit easier to play as they decimated our strogg ass, we lost 5 times and won only once. I'll definitely will look into this game a lot more, I've been waiting for a good FPS for a long, long time. Guess it's time to ring up my old quake buddies and see who's playing :)

Thanks for the link Miasma, I think that'll speed me up a bit :)

[MrHat]

Managed to get it to load up a few more times (having problems loading maps) and did enjoy myself.  However, I have to file this in the 'games I can't play because they make me want a new computer' file.  I HATE lagging while sniping.

[FatuousTwat]

Bleh. Someone told me that they were giving away keys for non subscribers, but he said the next one was today. Yeah, last one was Sunday. Weak.

Guess I should have read this thread a few days ago... Shrug, there will be a demo.

[Wolf]

Argh I played with the weirdest Strogg team EVER. We could hold the shield disruptor thingie for up to 12-13 minutes and the moment it fell they had the access shafts blown up and the sewer controls hacked within 3-4 minutes. What the hell is that. It's no that hard - pick a gun, shoot down the corridor, I'll throw medkits at you, we win. God that's so frustrating...

btw the game is too awesome, but you need a more than decent machine to run it. I'm considering a slight upgrade here and there just to be able to play better :)

Oh and I forgot - the release dates are all but set - 10th of July for US and 14th for EU. I guess they're releasing a demo before that, so it's going to be an awful short beta :)

[MrHat]

btw the game is too awesome, but you need a more than decent machine to run it. I'm considering a slight upgrade here and there just to be able to play better :)

Ya, I thought it was latency at first.  But after I tried a few other servers, I realized it was me.

[Sky]

Aww...now I kinda want to play it while I bask in my moment of decent gpu-ness.

[Miasma]

They do some odd things like lock the framerate at 30FPS for some reason so before you go out and buy a new computer make sure that isn't your problem.

[MrHat]

They do some odd things like lock the framerate at 30FPS for some reason so before you go out and buy a new computer make sure that isn't your problem.

Can you unlock it?  Also, keycommand for frame rate?

[Miasma]

I haven't done it but you bring up a console (ctrl+shift+~) and start entering stuff from here.

So I imagine:
ctrl+shift+~
seta com_unlockFPS 1
seta com_unlock_timingMethod 0
seta com_unlock_maxFPS 90

[Chimpy]

Well, q3 the physics were calculated on your machine  based on what your maxfps was set to. So maybe this one is the same and they wanted most people to be playing on the same "baseline" level?

[Miasma]

Here's a random question:  If I have a flat screen monitor (which are typically locked at 60Hertz) having 150FPS is going to do me jack squat is it?  I mean, the most I could possibly see is 60FPS right?

[Yoru]

Here's a random question:  If I have a flat screen monitor (which are typically locked at 60Hertz) having 150FPS is going to do me jack squat is it?  I mean, the most I could possibly see is 60FPS right?

On any given screen, the maximum FPS that will do anything for you is equal to the refresh rate of your monitor. I think that's 60 for LCDs. CRTs can go up at least to 75, if you set them to that.