Star Wars Battlefront Beta Is Now Live

Electronic Arts and DICE have officially let the open beta for Star Wars: Battlefront out into the wild. The beta was set to go live at 1pm PST and DICE have stuck to that date. If you have a capable PC, a PlayStation 4 or an Xbox One, you can start downloading the beta and playing... right now.

The news was made public over on the official Star Wars: Battlefront blog, where they not only announced that the beta is live and ready for consumption but they also offered a few tips for getting started so gamers can hit the ground running. They link to a YouTube channel featuring the game modes, the playable characters and the weapons.

The Battlefront beta features multiple game modes, playable classes, weapons and vehicles. From October 8th to October 12th gamers will be able to check out the Walker Assault mode on Hoth, where the Rebels will attempt to take down the AT-ATs before they destroy the communications array. There will be a Drop Zone mode available on the new planet Sullust, where two teams will battle to control drop pods that fall in various areas of the map. And there will be a Survival Mission available on Tatooine, where Rebel forces will attempt to thwart increasingly difficult waves of Empire forces.

That's a sizable chunk of content for people to consume over the course of four days. Unfortunately character customization will not be present, but various weapons and both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will also be present and playable throughout the beta.

YouTubers were given special access to the beta back in September, where they were allowed to publish special video content promoting the game and its features. Everyone else will now be able to partake in the same beta and experience for themselves what DICE has in store with Star Wars: Battlefront.

The beta is actually kind of small, despite the PC requirements being exorbitantly high. The initial download is only 7GB so it's not quite as big as some people may have been expecting.

There's been a real discussion over the quality of the game versus the PC requirements. Some people believe that the quality on the console version is lower for beta testing purposes and that the quality on the PC version scales higher for beta testing purposes. In a way it would make sense to test the lowest and highest settings of the PC version so DICE knows how to optimize the game properly for release, as opposed to the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game simply needing to work right out of the box and have decent matchmaking.

It's hard to gauge what the general consensus is of the game, but so far some people are satisfied with what they've played while others feel as if the game is a far cry from the original Star Wars: Battlefront games and that it lacks a lot of the core features that made the older title so beloved. There's also the reality of comparing DICE's version of the game with Free Radical's vision for Star Wars: Battlefront 3 where ground-to-air battles was made possible and the game had a heavy focus on very large scale battles with massive maps.

Anyway, if you have a PS4, Xbox One or a gaming rig, you can download the Star Wars: Battlefront beta right now.