Battlefield Heroes pushed back to 09 News

EA and DICE's free-to-play PC online shooter Battlefield Heroes has opted to close its beta test and delay itself into next year.

Producer James Salt said in a post on the game's site that the game's closed beta would shut down at 6pm central European time - that's 5pm UK time - today, and not return until "early next year".

"We have received lots of great feedback from our beta testers. So much so that we are now ready to enter our next phase," Salt said.

"On Friday evening (6pm CET) we will be closing down the current Closed Beta and moving our focus to polishing the backend. So for a while there will be no closed beta available to play. We expect to re-open the beta early next year."

Earlier this year, EA had already delayed Battlefield Heroes from a summer launch to Christmas.

According to Salt, the time off from beta testing will be used to work on the game's backend, and the website it will launch from.

Following our ownexperiences on the beta a couple of months ago, we're not surprised at the delay. The game was good fun, but many of its key features - levelling and matchmaking systems, social features and website support - were underdeveloped or missing.

We'll take another look at Battlefied Heroes when it returns in the new year.