Battlefield 3 Open Beta Gets Caspian Border Map Today

DICE and Electronic Arts, the two companies behind the upcoming Battlefield 3 first-person shooter, have confirmed that a brand new map for the game's current open beta stage, Caspian Border, will go live this weekend, right before the end of the testing phase.

Battlefield 3 is awaited by many shooter players, so EA and DICE wanted to give them a taste of the experience that will arrive later this month by organizing a special open beta stage of the game's multiplayer mode.

This beta kicked off last week on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and impressed quite a lot of people, with DICE saying that a massive amount of feedback has been gathered and is used to polish up the final game before its release.

Now, just before the last weekend of the beta, which ends officially on October 10, DICE has confirmed that a new map, Caspian Border, will be available for players, who, up until now, only had the Operation Metro map available.

There's one pretty big catch, however, as the Caspian Border map will be used to stress test servers, so the 64-player version will be rolled out, playable only on the PC version of the beta.

"After analysing the data from our first round of closed Caspian Border tests, we have great news for participants in the Battlefield 3 PC Open Beta: the DICE team has decided to bring back Caspian Border for the beta's final weekend and conduct an open large scale test of the 64-player Caspian Border map," wrote Battlefield 3 Community Manager Ian Tornay, on the Battlelog forum, via Eurogamer.

"Please keep in mind that as this is beta we will be stress testing our servers. As such, users may experience crashes, network instability and outages as we roll out and configure servers and network utilities. "

Such issues, according to Tornay, aren't reflective of the final game, which is set to be much better than the beta experience, fact highlighted by DICE General Manager Karl Magnus Troedsson earlier this week.

"As we are again specifically testing 64-player server configurations, this test will be for PC only. The Caspian Border servers will be available for all PC players to join. Caspian Border will be available starting Friday, October 7th, in the afternoon (CET)."

DICE also mentioned that over 10 servers will be set up all over the world, so there shouldn't be any problem finding reliable matches for players of the Battlefield 3 PC beta. Do remember that it can only be downloaded through EA's Origin digital download service.