Battlefield 3 beta coming "soon," to feature "hundreds" of changes from alpha
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
In a roundtable in Sweden last week, DICE revealed more about their plans for the Battlefield 3 beta to Eurogamer , RPS and VG247 . The beta should hopefully arrive “Sometime between now and the end of September” according to one of the DICE staff members involved in the interview. The development team have been taking feedback from the recent alpha tests, and say they're planning hundreds of changes for the beta, including some major map alterations.
Development head, Patrick Bach described some of the changes DICE are making from alpha feedback. “Everything from gun-balancing to the placement of the objectives on the Rush map; we actually moved them around based on [the fact] that the first base was quite hard to take. We are still moving things around on that map to utilise feedback from the alpha."
“That's why we're doing it. It's not to market the game, it's actually to test it in a proper way. There are hundreds of things that we've changed since the alpha," he adds.
If the beta arrives at the end of September, DICE will have less than a month to make any final changes based on player feedback. Bach says that the team will be making changes right up to release day.
"We are releasing the beta before the game and we are actually changing stuff based on that before we ship the game, even though you could argue that that's very late close to the ship of the game, we will still have time to do, for instance, day one patches and changes to the Battlelog that will actually be game-changing," he says.
Battlefield 3 is out on October 25 in the US, October 27 in Australia, and October 28 in Europe.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.


