My first 4 hours with the Beta...

Naturally, we saw a few who's Beta crashed. One wasn't able to start it at all. Another crashed at the kill cams. The graphics seemed smooth on my SLI GTX 780s (3GB) i5-4670K 16GB aside from an occasional 1 sec lag that randomly appeared.

I particularly liked the underwater and wall running gunfighting. The thrust movement mechanics feels distinctly more grounded and sensible than Advanced Warfare. I suspect many will COD purists will appreciate that futuristic movement doesn't provide any particular advantage in an engagement.

The text chat is improved and now available in lobby as well as in game although each conversation still gets cut off and lost when switching in and out. Titanfall handled that better. We haven't taken time to try the in-game voice communications, but we do know the default Master Volume must be lowered in order to hear others. In general, it's far too loud by default.

Most of the keybinding and controls seemed well laid out for keyboard and mouse, although I customize them entirely for my Logitech G13 keypad. All my friends found the default mouse sensitivity was far too low by default. Also, I was frustrated that I could not power slide by holding Sprint and then also hitting Crouch as I was accustomed in AW, Ghosts, etc. Others said this worked for them. I had to use the Change Stance key instead of Crouch (though I found I liked it better anyhow).

Our party did lose a player on a few occasions joining games but generally worked well.

I have a lot to learn still, but overall I'm enjoying the Beta. My K/D seems comparable to AW (still not impressive) and I see several things that might help us restore the skill gap some. The coming Ban / Protect system for Ranked matches should be particularly helpful ...plus those are supposed to be 100% dedicated servers!

See you all tomorrow. :)

i really like the fast finding of games, text chat in lobby and the swimming but apart from that i hate it, its like going backwards... i think ill stick to advanced warefare.