As many of you know, this year the ESWC Grand Final is going to held in North America for the first time. The event, which will take place in San Jose, California (August 25-27), will be featured as a major component of the NVISION 2008 spectacle, sponsored and hosted by NVIDIA. Having parted ways with the NVIDIA sponsorship last year, the ESWC team has jumped on the opportunity to realign themselves with the organization again.

NVISION is described as: “the first-ever visual computing mega-event. It is big and far-reaching enough to gather together top visual computing professionals, world-class gamers, innovative artists and designers, and cutting-edge researchers to share their ideas, experiences, and passions.”

Another component to this year’s NVISION is the GeForce LAN. This side event will host tournaments in: CoD4, TF2, World in Conflict, UT3, and GH: Aerosmith.

Similar to previous years, the ESWC has definitely called upon the best of the best in CS 1.6, WC3, Quake, DotA and TrackMania to compete. X3O will have quite a crew attending the event in San Jose next week, including the CS 1.6 team, the CoD4 team, and the website staff.

X3O Counter-Strike 1.6 Roster (ESWC Grand Finals):

Derek “impulsive” Truong
Matt “PaTyoJoN” Iantosca
Ediz “GoodForNothing” Basol
Ben “Benzo” Hui
Dan “mehLer” Mehler

X3O Call of Duty 4 (NVISION GeForce LAN):

Doug “tw|sta`” Benitez
Rob “griM_” Koster
Sean “apo$tle” McGrath
Rusty “in$ight” Kuperberg
Steve “Mav” Groat

X3O Gaming Staff (Live Coverage from ESWC/GeForce LAN):

Nick “NickFitz” Fitzsimmons
Chris “confire” Luong
Andrew “Conflict” Nguyen
Taylor “Hydrolis” McLinden

First off, here’s a breakdown of this years ESWC CS 1.6 tournament. The event will have eight groups of five teams, with the winner and the runner-up of each group qualifying for the second group stage. There are five groups with five teams each and three groups of four teams. Surprisingly, X3O.cs has received a “high seed” going into San Jose, due to the intense international competition that will be attending. Some of the “top seeds” include SK Gaming. Fnatic, MiBR & mTw – all teams which X3O may have to beat to win this event.

The maps that will be used for the tournament are the following: de_dust2, de_nuke, de_train, de_tuscan and de_inferno.

The seed’s were used to determine the groups. X3O ended up in Group H, along with eSTRO, n!faculty, and PUNTO.CL. Their current schedule is the following:

Monday, August 25th - Group Stage 1:

X3O vs. PUNTO.CL (10:00 AM PST)
X3O vs. n!faculty (11:30 AM PST)
X3O vs. eSTRO (14:30 PM PST)

As previously motioned, X3O must place top 2 in their group to advance to the second group stage. The second group stage consists of 4 groups, with 4 teams. The top 2 advance from these groups as well, into the double-elimination finals bracket.

EG and MoB, the other notable American teams, also have tough groups ahead of them. MoB is set to play against SK and wNv while EG has to take on the Finnish Team Roccat and emuLate. In case the match scores and such are not updated in a timely manor during the event, please refer to the official ESWC information page, linked at the bottom of this post for more consistent updates.

Lastly, and most importantly (for some people), the prize distribution for the Counter-Strike: 1.6 ESWC tournament.

1. $40,000 USD
2. $25,000 USD
3. $14,000 USD

Now, let’s talk about Call of Duty 4. Even though this game did not require any qualification and is not a part of the ESWC, it is still going to be an exciting tournament. The LAN will take place within the BYOC area, as a part of the GeForce LAN, but the official tournaments (such as the CoD4 event) will be played on sponsor-provided PCs.

Even though this is one of the better-supported CoD4 LAN’s this year (with X3O.cod4’s last appearance being at NERV LAN), many top North-American teams will not be attendance. Team Pandemic and Team EG are going to be sitting this one out, after having been on a LAN tour in Europe for an extended period of time. So far, there are 17 confirmed teams and 17 pending teams. Going off of those numbers, the prize break-down will most likely go like this:

1. $6000 + hardware
2. $3500 + hardware
3. $1500 + hardware

The game mode will be the typical search and destroy style. Also, the map pool is as follows: mp_citystreet, mp_crossfire, mp_crash, mp_backlot, mp_strike, mp_vacant. I also know that Django and Vansilli will be on hand shout-casting casting this event, so keep an eye out for that. More information of X3O.CoD4 and the event itself will be released in the coming days.

Please stay tuned to X3O-gaming.com over the duration of NVISION 2008 and the ESWC, as we will have a lot of X3O-exclusive coverage of the CS 1.6 and CoD4 teams being uploaded throughout the three days. Things you can expect are many pictures, blogs and video-footage.

**A pre-ESWC mini-interview with Matt “PaTyoJoN” Iantosca of X3O.cs will be posted shortly.

- ESWC Grand Final Page (groups, schedules, participants for all games, live stream)
- Call of Duty 4 Team List