Battlefield 3 beta coming "soon," to feature "hundreds" of changes from alpha

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.