Wednesday at 14:30 I was ready to depart in Brussels and after about an hour of flying in a small Airbus plane with too little leg space, a shiny Chrysler 300C (with driver of course) was waiting to bring me and Tosspot from Crossfire to our hotel where we would spend the night.

However, we wouldn’t be left alone for long. At 19:45 we were expected at the front desk at the hotel where we would be picked up by a couple of people from Splash Damage and Activision in order to go to a restaurant and enjoy a nice meal. Although I’m always a bit worried about hearing “nice meal” being said by someone from the UK, my concerns were dearly noted and we went to a “Belgian restaurant”.

Before I continue, I would like to state that “Belgian Restaurant” in the UK must mean something else than the same words in Belgium. The menus were in French (with English subtitles of course) and they served Belgian beers, but that’s about as far as the “Belgian” part went. I’ve lived all my life in Belgium but I’ve NEVER seen “bitterballen” filled with spinache!

Anyway, the meal was decent and we’ve had plenty of fun conversations with our colleagues (from Hexus.net and for the rest most being from ET: Quake Wars fan sites) and around midnight we returned to the hotel where I and four others decided to head for the bar in order to continue our pleasant evening for a little longer.

Little later, however, the bar closed down so we were forced to head to our bed (John from Activision also suggested in a very subtle way that we had an early morning the next day).

Back in my room for half an hour, my mobile rang. Paul Wedgwood from Splash Damage called GlobalWar of quake-wars.eu and wanted to know whether we were interested to come over to his house and have another drink. Of course, we never say “no” to another drink so five minutes later I and four colleagues from fan sites were ready in the lobby, waiting for the cab.

Paul had plenty of beer present (nothing else to drink) and after saying goodnight to his fiancé he sat down and we started talking. All night long every smallest detail of Quake Wars was discussed and since the colleagues from the fans sites had all been playing the closed beta test a lot that means there were TONS and TONS of details that could be talked about (and which they also did). With actually never having played the game, that was quite strange to follow for me at times as you can imagine. They would talk about pixels in certain maps, balance of certain weapons in certain situations and just about every change the game had gone through over the different builds.

Especially Polish guy RosOne from TheRedStuff managed to make quite an impression as he was unstoppable and fired one question after the other at Paul with the rest hardly being able to get in between. Quite funny to see! Only Tosspot from Crossfire and me managed to cut in now and then.

I won’t elaborate on the game itself too much (check our preview for that!) but Paul did inform us that the closed beta would be opened up a lot more pretty soon and that we would be in the opportunity to give plenty of registration keys to our visitors. Quite a good initiative for the fans as well as fan sites if you ask me!

Also a demo as well as a test version (pretty much like the Q3Test back in the days) are in the works although he couldn’t give much more info about that yet.

At 4AM we were too tired to continue (except for RosOne of course) so a taxi was called and we were back at the hotel with about 3 hours of sleep to go before we had to get up to go to the Splash Damage offices.

At Splash Damage we were greeted with a small breakfast and a short presentation of the game after which we got an introduction of the first of three maps we would get to play (Valley, Sewer and Desert).

Since the guys from Splash Damage had succeeded to blow the fuses of half the building the previous day (thanks to all their pc’s being equipped with nVidia’s latest 8800 cards), some changes had been made to the setup. Instead of everyone playing in the same room, two groups were made with the first being filled with beta-players while the second would comprise those that hadn’t played the game so much (or not at all).

One might think that would be a disadvantage, but in reality it wasn’t. I kept the Fragland honors high and managed to get quite a few awards even:
- Best Covert Ops
- Most Damage
- Most Upgrades
- Best Vehicles