Earlier this year, Battlefield 2 developers DICE mentioned that the long-awaited update 1.50 was "still in development", with an expected release date "by Winter of this year". Well, it's Winter now (in the Northern hemisphere, at least), so where's the update?

...coming soon, we're told, with a DICE representative stating that the patch is planned for release "before Christmas".

From a post on the Electronic Arts UK Forums, we learn that not only should there be an update soon, but they're planning to test it out with a public Beta beforehand - to give everyone a glimpse of what they've been working on (and - obviously - to hopefully ward off some glitches that cause more problems than they fix!).

Says Bazajaytee:

The beta would be for everyone that wants to install it, the more people that do the better feedback we get and we don't have an update 1.30 again. That update alone set us on the road of public beta to stop it from happening in another update.

The plan is to get it out before Christmas yes :)

So... there you go.


To refresh your collective memories, here's the news we were given back in September:

Update 1.50 is still in development, we have held back on releasing the update as we have become aware of and are taking preventative measures against 3rd party tools which have been severely affecting everyone’s playing experience recently by crashing dedicated servers, clients as well as allowing account spoofing. We hope you understand our decision to delay the release to resolve these issues rather than releasing early with a need to update again.

...learning from their mistakes? Anybody who's into the Battlefield scene will remember the drama that surrounded the ill-fated v1.30 patch - so it's good to see them apparently going out of their way to prevent a repeat performance. Time will tell, I guess.

Remember, as soon as the patch is out, you'll be able to grab it here - on Games On Net!