The Star Wars Battlefront Beta is already underway, letting players from around the world give the much-expanded Star Wars shooter a spin before release on November 17. People who pre-ordered the game have been able to play since yesterday but tomorrow, the floodgates open up. The open beta for Star Wars Battlefront 2 begins tomorrow, October 6, at 1 AM Pacific on Xbox One, PS4 or PC. all you've got to do is go to the store on your platform of choice (Origin on PC), download it and play.
Betas have become pretty par for the course for most AAA games with some sort of online component, and this is usually the schedule that they follow. Players who pre-ordered the game get early access by two days before everyone else gets to check it out, usually over a weekend. This serves a few functions: first, it rewards players who purchased early and gives them a bit of a reason to feel special. Second, it spaces out the server load for developers that are still seeing how a game will handle a large influx of players. This is a beta, after all: the primary function is to see how the game handles things when a massive wave of players start playing. It's possible we'll start to see longer wait times or connection errors once things open up, but the closed Beta has been pretty smooth so far.
The Star Wars Battlefront 2 beta, whether open or closed, lets players take part in four different modes. First, we've got Galactic Assault: a multi-stage, large-scale battle on Naboo that should be more than a little reminiscent of Walker Assault from Star Wars Battlefront. There's also Starfighter Assault, which lets players give the revamped ship controls a spin in a satisfying space battle. Strike provides a more traditional, small-scale objective-based experience without heroes to muddy things up. And finally, we've got Arcade, which pits one or two players against AI-controlled opponents.
I'll have full thoughts on this thing up for tomorrow, but so far it promises what it delivers: it feels a lot like Star Wars Battlefront, there's just a whole lot more of it. And while I never thought I'd actually be happy to see anything out of the prequel trilogy, there is something undeniably charming about the map on Naboo.
