By: Mark "jESUIT" Cheben

On TSN, Saturday afternoon Angel Munoz, president of the CPL, announced some of the details for the 2006 world tour. Initially it was expected that Angel would be announcing the next world tour game on air, but due to ongoing talks this announcement has been delayed. However, the details released on the world tour were enough to whet even the most ravenous FPS gamer's appetite.

The WT will be moving to a two game format with a team game being the primary game and tentatively a one versus one game as a secondary game. Also plans for the World Tour events and the traditional CPLs include expanding the exhibition area to accommodate more booths and turn the CPL into an “E3 for gamers”. After Angel’s TsN interview I asked him if this meant holding promotional tournaments like they did for Alien versus Predator 2. Angel saw it more as a way to attract casual gamers.

I asked Angel a few questions about the world tour and its format. As a community, we have seen CPL Spain, and CPL Brazil hold very successful side 1.6 tournaments. Angel explained that his vision was much larger than the relatively small 16 and 32 team tournaments held at their stops.

“I do not think we will have less than 128 teams for our tour stops,” said Angel, “our world tour stop in Australia will attract players from not only Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc.”

The world tour will be five stops. A stop in Australia has been announced by Angel, as well as a stop in the US in July, along with tentative plans for a stop in Sweden and Germany. Another question I asked Angel was if he envisioned a qualifying process for the CPL WT in the same vein as professional golf.

“I do not like the idea of a qualifying process, said Angel, “I envision the world tour as a mixture of both professional teams and Amateur local teams. We say the tour stop is going to be held on these dates and then people plan for that event and then show up.”

I also asked if the CPL was planning on expanding to more games, to which Angel replied that six is manageable and probably the upper limit of the CPL’s tournament capacity. I also asked if plans were in the works to add the two new areas for the CPL, RTS games and console games, into the world tour. Angel said that for 2006 no, but for the 2007 world tour it is not just a possibility, but a definite tour addition. Also PK is done and will no longer be a CPL game, and no successor has yet been announced.