Star Wars: Battlefront Beta Broke EA Record

As far as beta tests go, Star Wars: Battlefront is easily one of the biggest betas that took place in the world of gaming. In fact, the beta was so big that it broke EA's previous record of hosting a beta test and is now the largest beta test that the company has ever held. So how big was it? Try 9.5 million players big.

The data was rolled out in an infographic over on the Star Wars: Battlefront website. They reveal that nearly 10 million players across the PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One all downloaded the beta to participate in the test over the course of the October 8th weekend, which then was extended into the middle of the week, ending on October 14th.

Gamers spent a cumulative of 1.6 billion minutes playing the Battlefront beta, and that was enough time to have watched the original trilogy 4.2 million times.

They also detail how often players donned the roles of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, with the latter being played 5.93 million times and the former being played 5.9 million times. It's a difficult stat to gauge considering that Hero characters in Star Wars: Battlefront are power-ups and not necessarily earned like the old Pandemic games, where players who were doing well would be prompted to play as their favorite hero or villain for a short while. In the case of Luke and Vader, it's tough to tell if people randomly came across more Vader power-ups than people ran across Luke power-ups, or if they purposefully sought out the power-ups to play as Vader?

Anyway, playing as Vader resulted in 1.3 million kills via Force Choke... assuming that means anything to people who participated in the Battlefront beta.

One very interesting stat is that despite Storm Troopers being known for not being able to hit the broad side of a red-colored barn on a bright sunny day, gamers are apparently much better shots because they managed to use the iconic Storm Trooper E-11 blaster rifle to rack up more than 293 million kills.

Another interesting stat is that there were three quarter of a million AT-ATs that were destroyed. To be exact, 783,392 of the walkers went down during the Walker Assault mode. What makes that stat interesting is that it's not juxtaposed with how often the Rebel shield generator was destroyed, which would have revealed how often the Empire won against the Rebels. There were plenty of complaints about the Empire side having a greater advantage over the Rebel side and that stat would have helped at least put into perspective what the ratio was between the Rebels killing AT-AT units and the Empire taking out the shield generator.

There's also a brief roll out of the stats for the top Star Cards. The Star Cards are the ones used to activate special weapons such as the sniper rifle or equipment like the thermal denator, ion cannon or the jetpack. The sniper rifle, dubbed a Cycler Rifle in DICE's Battlefront, came out on top with nearly a billion uses. It's not surprising given that if you want to be a sniper (and since they removed the sniper class the only way to do so is to use the Cycler Rifle) it makes since that it would be the top Star Card since that would compensate for how players would play as a certain class.

The thermal detonator was used more than 574 million times and the jetpack was used 570 million times. The infographic ends with the revelation that 6 million players unlocked the jump pack Star Card.

Star Wars: Battlefront is due for release on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC starting November 17th.