Splash Damage owner Paul "Locki" Wedgwood is one of the featured speakers at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and will be giving an hourlong talk titled From Amateur to Triple-A in Five Years. Intended for anyone looking to start or expand a game studio, the session will be an informative look at Splash Damage's history with a special focus on the lessons learned while growing the company from a mod team to a AAA game studio. GDC is set to take place February 18 - 22. Interested parties can sign up for the event here on the GDC website.

Not wanting to be left out of the Game of the Year fuss, HardGame2, one of the largest Spanish gaming sites out there, has published a list of what they thought were the most outstanding PC titles of 2007. Some 25 categories were there to be won and we're very happy to see that Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars managed to pick up top honors twice: Best Multiplayer Experience and Most Addicting Game! Rumor has it the Makron is having a few extra Strogg today to celebrate...

Now that 1.4 has been released, let me bring you up to speed on the issues we've found so far and what we're doing to address them.

Perhaps the most rampant problem was server crashing just a few minutes after going up. What happened there? Well, it turns out that the newly added Hot Servers feature is indirectly to blame: when more than 256 players queried the same server at the same time, it became unresponsive and disconnected everyone playing on it. The good news is that we've since isolated and fixed the underlying cause - a problem with server info requests - and have deployed a hotfix to our GSP partners. So far things are looking extremely good on that front and barring any further problems, the fix will very soon be released to the community at large.

The wait is over! The Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars 1.4 update is now available via the in-game updater and these download sites. 1.4 comes with a massive list of new features, improvements, and fixes - an overview of the major features can be found in this ETQW dev blog update, while you can read through the full changelog on this page.

So, where's 1.4? This has been a pretty hectic week in the Land of Updates. Our planned roll-out had to be stopped because internal testing turned up issues with the installers that could affect some players. The folks at Activision are trying to get these worked out as quickly as they can - they will let us know as soon as they have a solid estimate for getting the fixes in and tested. We'll pass that information on to you right away when we get it.

On a brighter note, we've also been hard at work on an updated version of the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars demo. This new demo incorporates all the improvements we've made to ETQW in the three months since its release, including the new training mode we’re introducing in 1.4. The training mode is a great introduction to the unique gameplay concepts and mechanics featured in Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, so this is a fantastic way for those still on the fence to experience the latest and greatest version of the game.

But that's not all!

We're very excited to see that Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars has won VoodooExtreme's PC First Person Shooter of the Year award! The VoodooExtreme Game of the Year awards are based on weeklong user voting conducted last week where ETQW managed to beat a number of other multiplayer heavyweights, including Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4. You can view the complete breakdown of VE's Game of the Year awards on this page.