etqw public beta in the near future

so, finally some good news from spash damage. after being told that the release was postponed to july/september (read more...) there has been very little news from the developers. however, badman from splash damage just confirmed that et:qw public beta is now on the verge of being released.

ETQW Public Beta: Yes, It's Coming
What I can confirm at this point is that the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Public Beta is definitely coming. I do not have a final date at the moment, but the groundwork is obviously being laid for the thing to roll out soon-ish.

We will have much more on the ETQW public beta in the near future, laying out our plans for the beta and how you can participate.

Stay tuned...

some more info has now been released.

At long last, we are delighted to confirm the impending Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Public Beta. The ETQW Closed Beta has been going extremely well and yielding excellent results. We want to give more people the opportunity to give us feedback on the game so we’re going to open a Public Beta with 60,000 slots available. This way we’ll be able to test many more combinations of hardware, RAM, CPU, graphics card, drivers etc. than we’ve been able to ourselves, and also get a better idea of how the game plays for the general gaming public.

The Public Beta build will consist of a single map named “Sewer”, which is part of ETQW’s Pacific Campaign. Set in Japan, the map revolves around a Strogg base hidden in, well, a sewer. It’s an interesting mix of outdoor and indoor, vehicle and infantry combat, deployables and counter-deployables and good old-fashioned FPS combat.

If you’d like to help us finish ETQW, we’d really appreciate your participation. If you want to just play a game for free you may find it a frustrating experience. This Public Beta is not the Demo - it’s not the finished game, but an opportunity to get feedback from a large group of people while testing stability and performance on a wider range of hardware combinations. The Public Beta will also collect some information on your hardware configuration, so you shouldn’t apply unless you’re comfortable with that.

When the Public Beta opens, participants will be sent their unique license code that is required for play. As we don’t have the infrastructure necessary to download tens of thousands of clients, we’ve asked FilePlanet to help us distribute these license codes along with the beta clients.

A fixed number of beta slots are being set aside for Fileplanet subscribers, so if you already have a FilePlanet subscription, you’re in the front of the queue. The rest of the slots will then go to those with free FilePlanet accounts. To be clear: You don’t have to pay anyone anything to participate in the ETQW Public Beta. It’s up to you if you want to pay FilePlanet for use of the improved download services they provide.

We will reveal more details on the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Public Beta, including the official start date, in the near future. Hope to see you all online very soon!

and this seems to be the system requirments for the beta. i reckon it'll change for the final version of the game.

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 3.2 Ghz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) XP 3200+ processor
RAM: 1GB RAM
VIDEO CARD: 128MB NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600GT or ATI(R) Radeon(R) X800 (full list of supported chipsets below)
SOUND CARD: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
HDD SPACE: 950MB of free hard drive space, plus 700MB for Windows swap file
INTERNET: Broadband connection and service required for full gameplay and downloads. Features may change without notice.

the beta, ETQuakeWarsBetaSetup.exe weighs 846.9 MB. it seems like it can't be downloaded yet, well not from any "official link" atleast. if you click the link on fileplanet you'll just return to their main page. however, since there was some people who was able to d/l the beta in the very beginning, various links are spreading and with some luck you may find it. a tip would perhaps be to visit the overclockers uk forums, that's atleast what i did (not giving u any link but search for it on google or smth) ;) anyways, you cannot play the beta without a key though and the keys are yet to be released, so the client itself it pretty useless.

links:
more about etqw
source
official site
fileplanet d/l