So do to some less than fortunate circumstances I have been up since 3:00 AM local time and got to put a couple hours into the Beta this morning.

Initial impressions are pretty positive. Right now there is only one map for each of the three game types playable but I think that is expanding as the Beta progresses in length.

Shooting feels better to me as a whole with the class system. Heat from guns doesn't dissipate automatically anymore but if you run through an entire cycle you still get a chance for an active reload. I found it a bit hard to tell droids from the environment due to their skinniness. As I played it became much easier though.

I really enjoyed the class system. Assaults feel like a front line unit with being able to scan area locations and having a shotgun star card that uses no heat and lasts for about 10 seconds. Heavy's is my favorite class and with their big ability being the equivalent of Jesse Ventura's gatling gun in Predator that has explosive shots. Officers/support is a mix of Medic and Engineer from Battlefield but was my least favorite class. I say engineer only because of the ability to deploy a turret but its cool to be able to detonate their grenades and turrets on demand after being deployed. Specialist/Sniper has a lot of utility to get around the fields undetected and assist. I just naturally suck at these style of classes.

The galactic assault map is pretty good and is a mix of attack/defend mixed with a bit of limited reinforcements. It's not difficult to build up enough points to get a hero character or one of the upgraded troopers/droids if you know what you are doing. I was able to play as Rey once and single-handedly cleared out an objective zone from 10 droids before they won. On objective based modes they now have an Overtime counter similar to Overwatch in which if an objective is being contested and time runs out the game just doesn't instantly end. Was one of the most infuriating things about the first Battlefront and glad to see the change.

Put a small bit of time into the Arcade mode and it seems fun but there are only two modes to play and are extremely easy. I liked they were challenge based so it felt refreshing to just crush the AI.

Again it was a small window of time and I'll be putting more time into it. I wish I would have captured some footage and screenshots but wasn't able to give it the fullest of attentions. I'm more optimistic about it now that I had some actual hands on time with it.

And just so people don't hav eto go looking for everything here are the important questions from this Forbes Article.

What content will be available during the beta?

There will be four different modes spanning multiple eras of Star Wars available during the beta. Here's each one and its official description from EA.

• Galactic Assault on Naboo

Galactic Assault is Star Wars Battlefront II's 20 vs. 20 multi-stage mode. In the Beta, you'll be sampling the Naboo: Theed map, playing as a Clone trooper or Separatist droid in a desperate battle for control of the royal palace. You'll earn Battle Points as you defeat foes and redeem them to summon vehicles, upgrade to reinforcements like the B2 Super Battle Droid, and become a hero like Rey... or a villain like Darth Maul.

• Starfighter Assault on Fondor

In Starfighter Assault, you'll join squadrons of teammates in a battle to defend an Imperial Star Destroyer in the space over Fondor... or destroy it. You'll get your first chance to try out Star Wars Battlefront II's three new starfighter classes and pilot Hero Ships from the Prequel Trilogy, Original Trilogy, and the New Trilogy.

• Strike on Takodana

You'll also get your hands on Strike mode in the new Takodana map, where the Resistance and First Order battle around Maz Kanata's castle. Strike is a class-based mode – no heroes allowed. Instead, players rely the unique skills of the Assault, Heavy, Specialist, and Officer, utilizing teamwork to seize objectives.

• Arcade on Naboo

Finally, you'll get a chance to sample Arcade Mode on Naboo, where one or two players take on groups of AI opponents. You'll be able to try out two Arcade options: a team battle with AI allies and enemies, and a one-vs. many scenario pitting the player against a tide of foes. There's even couch co-op for players on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Will there be special challenges and rewards?

Players who play the beta will get a Founder's Crate which includes a Darth Maul emote, credits, and a rare Star Card. There will be special challenges for various modes throughout the beta as well:

• October 4: Assault Trooper Challenges

Play as all 4 assault trooper classes and defeat 150 enemies in any mode.

• October 5: Battle Points and Hero Challenges

Become a Hero using Battle Points, play as Light and Dark side Hero, defeat 20 enemies as Hero.

• October 6: Arcade Challenges

Complete three Arcade scenarios, defeat 30 enemies.

• October 7: Galactic Assault Challenges

Play one round of Galactic Assault, defeat 20 enemies while playing as Reinforcement, play as an defeat a reinforcement, Hero, villain and trooper.

• October 8-9: Starfighter Assault Challenges

Become a Hero ship, destroy 5 turrets, destroy 5 objects, and get a Saviour Kill Assist 25 times.

What about a single-player portion?

Nope. Like many modern betas, this is largely a stress-test for the multiplayer servers and a chance to demo a small slice of the game. The single-player campaign (there is one this time around) will be saved for release.

Hey thanks for the detailed report! I’m like a lot of people in that I loved the old Battlefronts and was fairly disappointed by the reboot. Looking forward to getting my hands on the beta when it goes publc in a couple days.

@theflamingo352: I have an extra beta code for xbox if you're interested.

Oh good, a mode that disables heroes.

It was a fun novelty in Old Battlefront 2 but didn't beat playing strictly as a trooper in Old Battlefront 1, especially when an NPC hero did show up and you either got the fuck outta there (they'd immediately wreck you) or used a well thrown grenade to knock em off the map (which was the only way to kill them IIRC). Ahhh good times. Wish there was some way to easily get Old Battlefront 1 again, and not just 2. Might have to rummage about to find my old discs.

The heroes here don't look particularly clunky or anything--they actually seem kinda fun--but Strike mode is still a plus for me.

Heroes seem to be strong but don't feel nearly as unkillable as they did in the first game. I too like the addition of a non-hero mode as sometimes it was just frustrating to get into games where one side had 4 heroes and the other side was heroless.

Are vehicles still powerups? I didn't like that very much in the last game.

@quadgamer25: PS4, thanks for the offer though.

They are but they aren't a pick-up item. You use points earned in game to unlock them the same as heroes and other specialty units. Usually much cheaper than a hero though.

That's much better then people just camping the card drop locations I think.

Yep I agree. Forces you to actually participate in the battles to get the better unlocks. And if you are good with a vehicle you can easily get back the points you spent purchasing the vehicle. Some vehicles are you just manning the turret while it flies around and some are actually vehicles you traverse the battlefield with. I quite like the system because as long as you are contributing to the match you are earning your way to a hero/vehicle power.

I wish Starfighter Squadron had a tutorial as the controls are just different enough that it took me two or three matches before I started contributing again. I do think it's a massive improvement over the first games and combat is less reliant upon locking on.

Does anyone else think the game looks kinda shitty graphically (on PS4)? I'm not sure if it's just because they didn't include high-res assets to keep the beta file size down, but on my PS4 I'm pretty disappointed with how it looks. Game looks grainy, textures look muddy and the colours are pretty muted. Might be the HDR implementation but I'm not sure...

I've only played solo so far but I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped. Teetering on the pre order now, but I'll wait till I can play it with my other friends on Friday.

I refuse to spend any money as no server browser means it'll be dead in Australia after a few months but I will happily get a few free hours out of the beta. There's no preload is there?

@bollard:That's a bummer. I plan on picking it up for PC as long as nothing heinous happens between now and launch. DICE has always been a PC dev for me, so it wouldn't shock me if their workflow didn't translate well to console, though you would think they would have plenty of experience with that by now.

@hayt: Reasonable. My poor brothers from down under. I'm one of the weirdos who actually really liked the web server client they used for BF3 and 4.

My biggest issues are the things that previous DICE shooters got right but this didn't. I'm not saying it should be a reaskinned Battlefield, but the evolving nature of the level scape and building deformation makes it an incredibly fresh experience every time compared to the flat streets and corridors of BattleFront. This along with the linearity of the level design making for less changing front lines (or should I say battle fronts) and the same meat grinder gameplay from the last game where it feels impossible to have a long, meaningful spawn is leaving me very lukewarm. I'm getting it day one, unfortunately, because I'm blinded by my love of Star Wars and the game's AAA graphics.

Yeah, I can imagine it looking incredible on PC! Would prefer to get it there too, but the people I play shooters with are primarily console users, sadly.

@bollard: i thought the first looked good on console so it must be a file size thing for the beta.

As someone who has never played BF, I don't like it. I was getting killed a lot, and the map was kind of boring. The third person view isn't very good. The flight controls were weird. Why couldn't they just copy Rogue Squadron's?

It also has chromatic abberation. Because every AAA game needs to have it now. Noticed it right away. Ew. As usual, there is no option to disable it.

For people who played this last Battlefront game and are playing this, does the flight still feel bad? I really want to enjoy that space battle mode, but it was baffling to me how not fun it was to actually fly around and shoot stuff in the last one.

@ezekiel: You can switch between 3rd and First person by holding down the Down button on the D-pad if you are playing on controllers. I don't like playing in first person in these games but I see the advantage of it if it isn't your cup of tea.

Fighter Squadron is has improved exponentially! It takes some getting used to since the controls are a lot more tight and responsive. I almost wish there was a small tutorial on it.

They've removed the "quick maneuvers" from the dpad. Shooting feels more responsive and the abilities for each ships feel vastly different. A-Wings and Interceptors feel much faster compared to X-Wings and Tie Fighters and the inclusion of Y-Wings and Tie Bombers are awesome. Hero ships feel easier to take down but have much stronger abilities.

@zirilius: I know how to switch to first person. I was just hoping the third person view would be pretty good, since it's my preferred perspective.

They're gonna keep the clean looking UI right??

Good to hear, duder! I guess some of those Criterion guys are still doing good work.

Overall I think they have improved in a number of areas. I am just not sure how much I want to play these lootbox based games. Lootboxes aren't just cosmetic, you get better weapons than other players. To me that incentives players out of the gate to spend money for an advantage over players who gain boxes at a slower rate.

I get the concern but I find the difference between a normal ability and an epic ability to be about the same as it was in the first Battlefront. It's not game breaking but it is noticeable. I don't feel it's fully a pay-to-win path but you might see some people go there. After a few games I could easily buy 3-4 crates depending on how well I played on top of the daily crate I've been receiving. That was only playing an hour to hour and a half.

Do I trust EA to get this right? No but I still think it makes more sense for this then something like Shadow of War.

Do I feel there is a better solution? Yes because I thought the Hutt Contracts of the first game were a great of way of unlocking gear even if some of them forced me to play in ways that don't suit my playstyle.

Do I hate it? No but ultimately because I feel the differences are minor in within the sets.

They seemed to have stripped the charm out of it by trying to make it like every other shooter with crates. Also, cargo mode seems to be gone...which is bumming me out. Actually, it seems like there’s even fewer modes in this one. I know the last Battlefront seemed bland initially, but the smaller modes were really fun and picking up different abilities was a blast. Now it’s all crates and class based. For some reason it just feels even more flat to me. I’ll keep playing and see if it grows on me.

Smaller modes? Such as smaller maps? I think that's part of the reason I find this so boring. I don't get it.

@ezekiel: I really enjoyed the droid run and cargo (capture the flag) modes, yeah on small maps. I just found the game design for those modes fun, not that capture the flag is new. I see what you’re saying, the one ‘big’ map they have in the beta doesn’t feel all that big compared to what they had in the first game. I just never got much out of the large scale maps/modes in the first reboot game anyway.

I just played an hour of it and I had a decent enough time with it. The feel of the guns took a couple matches to get used to, but I was fine after that. The space battles were definitely the highlight for me, flying through the sky in a X-Wing will never get old, although the decision to not invert the vehicle controls by default is weird. It seems really easy to die in this mode, but that might just be me not being that good at the game yet. The quality of the single-player will determine if I buy this game this year or not (shout out to Janina). I really hope it's good. There should be more good Star Wars games.

First impression Battlefront 2 heavy use of film grain and chromatic aberration not only makes look alot worse than it really is but often much harder seeing enemies at a distance, not helped by the Naboo map littered with head glitching hedgerows.

Gunplay with quicker overheating and added recoil it feels more Battlefield and less Star Wars especially lacking in spectacle with lasers blasting all over the place it would have been better doubling the amount of shots and reducing the damage as much, also help the spotting issue as droids are harder to see on Naboo compared to clones and with the easier job in attacking.

The worse part of Battlefront 2 is the grindy star cards which has been carried over lock and stock from the previous game with all the same problems but compounded by loot crates. Progressing is incredibly slow after completing the assault challenges 250 kills about 4 hours play I had enough credits to only open one box outside of the daily login box through normal play unlocking is going to be pain again, especially completing challenges in game types or playstyles you don't want play. The worst aspect is the randomness so I've gotten 4 boxes that's 12 items all but 2 I'll never use and only got those 2 from the beginner box for that class.

I have a hard time believing the campaign will be anything other than 4-6 hours blink and you miss it type of affair, but after MP alot would be resting on it.

After seeing all the bad first impressions of the space battle controls I was expecting to be disappointed by them. Turns out it wasn't much of a issue after I got in a few matches. As for the Naboo ground map it is rather straightforward. Not much strategy other than to march forward blindly and hope you shoot em more than they shoot you. Maybe it was bad luck but the match I played on Takodana felt stacked in the Rebels favor. My team wasn't able to push the relic slightly out the compound it was in. Still I enjoyed the few hours I put into this beta. I even used third person a lot more than the first game for some reason. Maybe the way they tweaked how the guns fire fits better for me in the third person viewpoint.

Played a couple matches and it seems pretty good. On Pc it has an always on hdr thing that ended up fucking up my hdr in windows after i turned the game off requiring me to restart my system, could be i need the latest drivers but the game ran fine otherwise. Played at 4k but it may have been dynamically scaling stuff, the built in fps reader seemed to be giving me other info in this game but it felt smooth with only a couple hickups here and there. HDR didn't seem great either btw, not sure why there is no on/off option?

Gameplay wise it felt a bit better than the last game from what i could tell, weapons felt better as well as movement. Space ship stuff felt cool, but all ships need a boost i felt like flying in molasses lol. I had a hard time telling what to do though, and there also wasn't any fov option for me(it was greyed out)

Another thing to note about the visuals on PC is dynamic resolution scaling is forced. I’d be curious to see performance when it is able to be turned off. On top of the effects people don’t always like (grain, chromatic aberration) it seemed a bit blurry sometimes unecessarily.

Man. I am TERRIBlE at FPS games, specially on PC. I dont feel like I am any better weather I am using mouse and keyboard or a controller. Do the controls feel terrible on console as well? Can you not change sprint to a toggle on consoles either? That might be my biggest gripe with the game right now. It takes so long to get back to the action and having to keep the stick clicked down while trying to move at the same time is terrible.

You can change sprint to toggle on pc, first thing i did. There is no individual sensitivity slider for controller though so you go to character sensitivity and that adjusts your aim speed. I did alright with a pad considering i had no clue wtf i was doing lol.

Sprint is toggle by default on the PS4 from what I know. I don't think I changed it, but it was an option (as well as for aiming 'down the sight').

Pay-To-Win Pay-To-Win Pay-To-Win.

Expect to get completely wrecked by people with deep pockets when this actually comes out. Some of the star card/weapons you get give you a significant advantage in a 1v1 scenario. I've gotten the drop on people and put 5 shots into them and still lost.

You only get 150-200 credits(the in game currency) per game. Each loot box is at least a 1000. Prepare to spend an hour or two grinding for credits and get absolute trash from the slot machine. Have they slowed down game progression to make you spend more money? Of course they have.

The only hope is that fan backlash makes them tweak things to be more player friendly.

Played a several matches solo and then a several with a group and on PC it seems like forming a group is a little busted. Took a few matches to get a feel for shooting, but even then it felt like even when I got the drop on someone and knocked off half their health that hey would just whip around and drop me in half a second. It's also just super hard to pick out anyone at a medium distance. Seems like the cards are going to determine a lot of the success in a match. From memory of the beta for the first one I at least felt like the game played well but this one just feels wildly different in both control and general flow of a match. Lots of hard swings from match to match/ phase to phase and wasn't really easy to judge what caused that.

I played a few matches on PC and feel just as uninterested as I was with the first one.

I just feel disconnected from the combat in a weird way and it doesn't hold my interest for very long.

I actually HATE, HATE HATE HATE HATE Naboo.

The first part of it sucks, the road in the middle is too wide, making basically two separate, linear areas to progress through. Then the end is horrific, its just a chokepoint simulator where explosives are incredible.

when you play battlefront 2 and see the chromatic aberration

I'm considering buying this purely for the single player and space battles. The ground combat I played (Naboo and that forest from episode 8, I forget its name) didn't click with me at all.

Fondor was something else though, almost like they should have a whole game based on that alone.

Naboo feels really bad. There's no point in using any vehicles and there's no reason why you should even go down the middle. It just feels really empty and boring. The other game mode and map is okay. I like that there's a lot of different routes for attackers, but on the defending side it feels like you can lose control of the situation in way too short of a time span. If the attackers wipe your team and grab the artifact, the game is pretty much done at that point even with the spawn point change for defenders.

Space battles feel really great. The time to kill feels just right, the addition of AI was a really great choice and the timing for the objectives/spawn numbers feels good. I have no idea why the ground combat feels so bad this time around. I pretty much dislike everything about except for the class system.

The campaign isn't selling me either. It's either going to be an awkward effort in trying to humanize the Empire or it ends up in a generic bad guys turn good story. Even more worrisome... all we've seen are cutscenes of the campaign and zero gameplay, which sounds uncomfortably familiar with Battlefield 1.

Yeah the structure of the game modes in general leaves a lot to be desired. I think both the shooting and the space combat themselves feel fine, and the space combat as you mentioned has the added benefit of AI so it feels like more is going on more frequently. But the balance of getting battle points and spending it on vehicles/hero characters feels just completely out of whack to almost irrelevant. The number of games I saved up enough the long way to get a hero character were plenty, and by the time you do the game mode is usually almost over. In the Naboo level in particular as you mentioned it's even more confusing. You have no idea if you should be saving up to get Vehicles in the first stage, saving for heroes for later, or what. I'd say the Naboo level in particular and that mode in general would probably also benefit from some straight on ai on each side to give the battle not only something for casual players to shoot at, but a proper sense of scale. Generally battle droids don't all flank around opposition while bunny hopping and jump rolling all over the place in a chaotic blur too. Just felt like a SW skins over BF really...

And while I do think that the space combat feels a lot better, that mode to me still fell rather flat. I really don't like how the modes are if you are a defender, all you need to do is wipe the other teams number of supply and if you are an attacker you destroy a bunch of predefined objectives. The objectives aren't unique in any way either, it's just shoot this. Destroy this. There is no tactics at all. And it doesn't even feel like a step in the right direction. I think people forget part of the pining for the old old Battlefront was that back then it was doing crazy things. Even now it has more going on for it from a tactical perspective in regards to game modes than what we saw in this beta. I'm specifically talking about how you could land your ships into the enemies star destroyers and capital ships and disable systems and have one on one fighting whilst dog fighting was going on.

Like seriously right now from what I've played of the beta in general, the game modes just feel so disconnected from the universe they are portraying. Yeah the graphics and the visuals are all there, but to what effect? With the exception of a few shafts and ins and outs designed on enemy ships and objectives, it's all just window dressing. Even the hero units don't feel as big as they should. The fact that they only have 3 abilities (obviously with modifiers depending on star cards) when all the other classes have 3 abilities as well. It just feels so samey. I think the fact that it feels as good as an old dog fighting game might be a plus, but when it's only offering me the same type of things to engage with, and do, as an old dog fighting game, that is a problem.

It's a shame too because I think with the license they have there is tons of room for them to experiment a bit with some of these modes. The "objective based" approach isn't even that wrong, but all the objectives can't just be go here and shoot this. Especially since both starfighter and the ground stuff ultimately felt it didn't matter if you were playing objectives anyways. Generally speaking the team that won was the team that killed others better, since it seemed to be all people were doing.