Usually when one of the largest releases of the year enters a public testing phase anyone can get access to, we receive an e-mail. Or a tweet. Or at least some vague smoke signals we then spend a week translating, usually neatly matching up with embargos. For the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 beta we received, uh, nothing. Not a peep. So anyway, it’s now live on Steam. If you’ve pre-ordered the game or have copies of Advanced Warfare, Ghosts or Black Ops 2 in your account you should have access immediately. Hit up your games menu and search for Black Ops to find it.
I’ve got the download running but it’s eleven gigabytes and change so I can’t give you a quick hands on right now. However, here’s one of the tutorials released for the PS4 beta, which ended a couple of days ago.
So, good hunting. We’ll probably be back with some longer impressions soon. We’re two months out from release, but the beta will only be running until Sunday. Treyarch’s PC development team are very active on twitter listening to fan feedback and giving suggestions. They’ve also made a recent announcement as to the state of the beta, and why there are some optimization issues.
I’m still not sure if I was just being particularly blind when it came to the facts of this being live, they haven’t really spoken about it that much, or both. Normally this is the sort of thing I’d have received three e-mails a week about for the last six months. Particularly given how early it’s happening, versus what I was expecting of a fortnight pre-launch. Anyway, now we know.