If you haven't heard the news about Infinity Ward dropping dedicated servers for CoD:MW2, you might have been living under a rock or you do not follow CoD news at all. Something closer to home however is that John Carmack, technical director at id Software, has expressed his desire to skip dedicated servers for Rage, id's upcoming post apocalyptic shooter to be released When It's Done. Dedicated servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming, according to Carmack, who was responsible for some of the greatest technology which has defined the shape of games as we know them today. His most well known work is probably the Quake 3 Arena engine, which powered a wide array of games including Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and the Call of Duty series.

Via Variety

Meanwhile, the game developer behind W:ET, Splash Damage, has announced they will continue to support dedicated servers on the PC for their upcoming fps game BRINK, to be released in Spring 2010.

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The curse that is Wolfenstein continues as Activision have today announced cuts between 30 and 56 jobs out of the original 160 headed staff at Raven Software, the developers of the Wolfenstein single player campaign.

Raven Software was founded in 1990 and was later acquired by Activision. The Middleton, Wisconsin based studio has had a close development relation with id Software, having worked on various games with id Software as producer and also by having used various iterations of id's game engines.

Wolfenstein was the most recent game released by Raven, with sources from Kotaku reporting that the game went over-budget and is under-performing is one of the main reasons behind the layoffs. The company is currently working on UE3 powered Singularity , which was recently pushed back to spring 2010 to avoid a clash with Activision's sixth entry into its number one shooter franchise Call of Duty.

Via Kotaku

Yesterday Quakecon has announced the official tournaments to take place at this year's event.

Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars PC & Xbox 360 Tournaments
Prizepool: $ 15.000 [PC], $ 10.000 [Xbox 360]
Sponsored by Activision
The ET:QW Tournaments will take place in a double elimination bracket featuring 16 teams, with team sizes being 6 man per team. The Xbox 360 version is the first console game featured in an official Quakecon competition.

QUAKE LIVE Duel & CTF Tournaments
Prizepool: $ 12.500 [Duel], $ 12.500 [CTF]
Sponsored by Intel
For the first time ever this soon to be released game is featured in a top notch competition, featuring two styles of play: one versus one duels, and capture the flag.

QUAKE LIVE Quick Draw event
Prizepool: $ 10.000
Sponsored by Alienware
In the Quick Draw event, random people will be chosen to compete in a match of QUAKE LIVE during Quakecon 2008.

Among the tournaments there will hopefully be interesting news published regarding id Software's upcoming games and game engine(s), making Quakecon an event to keep your eye on for any gaming enthusiast.

Quakecon website

To celebrate Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory's five years birthday Splash Damage and id Software have today released the source .map files for the six original maps of the game (Battery, Oasis, Fueldump, Goldrush, Radar, Railgun). With these source files map makers can now change these maps to their liking.

Quote by Splash Damage

We are happy to announce that we have received approval from Kevin Cloud over at id Software to release the source maps that we created during our development of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. This is a belated present to mark Wolf:ET's fifth birthday that we reported on last month. The package is a modest 6 Megabytes in size and includes source .map files for all six of the officially released maps.

This is great news for the competitive community as map makers can now freely make changes to the stock maps in order to make them more competition friendly.

News article on the Splash Damage website
Download link of the map source files

After a teaser trailer earlier this morning, Activision has released a full length official trailer for the latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise: Call of Duty: World at War. The game will feature a pacific and a Russian campaign and takes place during the second world war.

Gametrailers High Definition
Gametrailers Standard Definition

CoD: World at War is being developed by Treyarch and uses an enhanced version of the highly praised Call of Duty 4 engine. The game is set to be released on various consoles and the PC in Activision's current fiscal year which ends in March 2009.

Last weekend the Dutch Electronic Sports World Cup qualifiers took place, featuring various talented players from the Kingdom of The Netherlands battling it out to qualify for the ESWC Grand Finals held at the NVISION event in San Jose later this year.

In a close and exciting final the experienced and extremely talented Quake 3 Arena player Lemmy "if-22" de Groot defeated Painkiller champion and Dutch gaming celebrity Sander "Vo0" Kaasjager, securing an ESWC invite for if-22, as well as a fully financed trip to San Jose.

Today Wsquared Media, the company organizing the Dutch ESWC qualifiers has however announced a second invite for a Quake 3 Arena player to be available, which has been given to Vo0 who ended second at the qualifying event. This invite does not include travel expenses, however this should not be an issue for the highly decorated Dutch player.

Other games featured at the ESWC Grand Finals are Trackmana Nations, Warcraft III, Defense of the Ancients and Counter-Strike 1.6.

Gamelux news article (in Dutch)

Starting from today to Sunday the 22nd of June teams can sign up for the ClanBase Hosted Summer Cups 2008.

This year there will be two Summer Cups hosted at ClanBase, organized by the ET:QW EuroCup supervisor Vitez:

ET:QW StopWatch 6on6 (Sign up!)
ET:QW StopWatch 4on4 Infantry (Sign up!)

The schedule for both cups look looks as following:
• Signups open - 9th of June (Today)
• Signups close - 22nd of June
• Creating groups - 22nd until the 29th of June
• First matchweek - 30st of June
• Season ending - 31st of August or earlier (depending on number of signups)

In related news, ClanBase is still searching for a Co-Supervisor for this season, for more information visit the cup pages.

After the earlier release this week in North America of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 ports of id Software's latest installment in the Quake franchise, Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, today the European and Australian players can get their hands on the game. The Xbox 360 port of the class and objective based shooter was handled by Nerve Software, the company behind the popular RTCW multiplayer part, and games such as RTCW: Tides of War and the Xbox 360 version of Doom 3, while Activision Underground took care of the PS3 port.

The official press release can be found in the "read more".

Today the Gamestar Liga has announced the prizes for their upcoming season, the games featured as "main games" are Unreal Tournament 3, Guild Wars, Live for Speed and Starcraft: Broodwar - next to that the league will host Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars and Tactical Ops: Crossfire with supported competitions.

The tournament will feature 16 teams from all over Europe in a one group competition - the four top teams will then play each other in the finals to win a part of the prize money.

The prize money for the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars league is 1175 € in total;

500 EUR prize money
350 EUR prize money
200 EUR prize money
4th 125 EUR prize money

For a full list of competitions and prizes visit the Gamestar Liga website (in german).

After the recent departure of the H2k.Qpad Call of Duty 4 team the Dutch organization Hard2kill Gaming already found a replacement team. The well known French team oXmoze will be joining H2k as new Call of Duty 4 team.

oXmoze has been a strong contender in both the Call of Duty 2 and now the Call of Duty 4 scene, they were able to gain great results at events such as the CoD-Gamer LAN (3rd) and the Crossfire Devotii Challenge 4 (4th).

The new H2k.Qpad team looks as following:
Anubiis
gus
RaigeKi
rukkae
vazy
xandeR

Statement given by the team

Quote

Today, Thursday 13th march 2008 is a great day for my team mates and me. We have 2 big announcements to make.

First of all, I officially announce our departure, not without any regrets, from the French multigaming team oXmoze. We took this decision together because of some facts I’ll try to explain here. However, I would first like to thank everyone in oXmoze for everything they’ve done for us during the 5 months we were part of them. All the staff members are really friendly and they did everything they can to help us the most. Nevertheless, as oXmoze is a young organization, it wasn’t able to provide us everything we need in order to improve and reach the top of the Europe. I know some of you were astonished when we said we paid everything ourselves to go to cdc4 and other lans. That has been a crucial point that made us take this decision. Our main objective is to get better and better and to do great achievements in online and offline events and this couldn’t be possible if aren’t supported by a big powerhouse.

The second thing I wanted to announce is that we’re joining today a new multigaming, which we know will be fully able to provide us everything we need to achieve what I mentioned. We were contacted few days ago by this organization, because they really wanted us to be part of them and we were in need of such an organization. They would be happy to provide us with everything we need in order to become and stay one of Europe’s finest teams .

Edit: H2k has now officially announced the team on their website and would like people to read their side of the story on the previous teams departure.