Quake Wars Public Beta - 60,000 Slots Available

We should thank Larry "2112" Akins and Tweakguides for this marvelous piece of information up on FilePlanet, saying that there's a Quake Wars beta download available, while the beta itself is possibly opening up as soon as next week. The game's official site was the give-away, and although they've removed the download link (for whatever reason), here's the official post (via VoodooExtreme):

The official site reads: "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."

60,000 keys isn't enough, but they'll most likely give you some clue as to how you may get your hands on one. So until then, stick some duct tape on that F5, you never know when they make that download link available again. Hey, did it even work while it was available? Does anyone have it?