Earlier this month, many players tried out the new Star Wars: Battlefront in its beta stage. Before the open session, the game made appearances only at various trade shows like E3 and PAX Prime, all to increase the hype of the game before its November release. All of the anticipation seemed to work, as some 9.5 million players participated in the beta.
Even with only three available modes, players logged 1.6 billion minutes over the five-day period. For the large-scale battles in Walker Assault, players on the Rebel side destroyed over 780,000 AT-AT walkers. The same map also allowed players to summon Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, with both characters used nearly 6 million times each.
However, Darth Vader was slightly favored over his son. Vader’s popular Force Choke ability was used 1.3 million times (that’s a lot of people with a disturbing lack of faith). The game allowed players to progress only to level five, thus unlocking the jetpack. Of the 9.5 million players, nearly two-thirds of the group were able to reach the maximum level.
Initially, the beta was supposed to last for only four days, but the developers extended it by one day to test “extreme scenarios.” Still, the large number of players in a short window shows promise for network stability for multiplayer games of varying player sizes.
Obviously, there’s more work needed between the middle of October and the November 17 launch date, but the beta seemed to be a success for the team at DICE.
