The Battlefield Bad Company 2 PC beta was released at 5pm, which will officially be known as the day the internet almost died. The combined might of Fileplay and FilePlanet ground to a halt as thousands upon thousands of pre-orderers attempted to download a single 1.5GB file. Perhaps somebody should tell EA about a little thing called preloading.

Gameplay wise, the game is classic Battlefield (minus the planes, woo), which shouldn’t need explaining. It is very apparent that this is a beta, with high levels of lag on almost all servers, countless people complaining about crashes, and a friend system that just plain doesn’t work. Console origins show through, the game falls short of my expectations for aesthetics and it runs choppier than one might wish for, even on my GTX280. Bloated interfaces that ask you to login, chose your soldier (profile), and then proceeds to spend minutes retrieving your online statistics from EA’s master servers every time you launch the game.

But that’s what betas are for right? Here are my first 10 minutes.

UPDATE! If you want to increase your performance in the beta, put level of detail on low. It reduces the distance you see some objects (noticeably trees), but can REALLY reduce stuttering, at least it did for me.