Battlefield 3 beta is live! Tell us your thoughts

Battlefield 3 - desert warfare

The Battlefield 3 beta is go! A post on the Battlefield blog has details on how to jump in. It's pretty straightforward. You'll need to set up an Origin account, and then download the Origin client. You can then download the beta from the Free Games section of the store. Iif you're struggling to get it to run, NVidia have put out some beta drivers that improve performance and fix a load of crashes. Get links and instructions from our quick Battlefield 3 beta guide . The beta is free, of course, and gives you access to the Operation Metro multiplayer map in both Rush and Conquest modes.

There's a small and exclusive cluster of servers running the huge 64 player Caspian Border map. They're all passworded at the moment, and access details are being dished out to a select few, though commenter MaimBot points out that the password has been posted officially on the Battlefield 3 forums. The password seems to have changed since then, but keep an eye out for announcements from DICE. It seems likely that they'll need to stress test their larger maps as well as Operation Metro, so we could see the Caspian Border open up later on in beta testing.

We're enjoying the beta a lot. Find out exactly how much in our Battlefield 3 impressions . But what do you think? Is it a significant step forward from Bad Company 2? Do you find being blinded by flash lights annoying? Have you fallen through the world yet? communicate your thoughts with words in the comments below.

Tom Senior

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.