DICE has come under the torrent of whiny internet complaints regarding the release date of the Battlefield 3 beta, September 29th, less than a month before the release of the actual game on October 25th.

In a recent interview with Gamerspawn, General Manager of DICE has talked openly about the issue, admitting that they had wanted the beta coming out sooner.

“I know that some people are saying it’s coming in a bit late, but we’re still happy to put it out there.”

He also provides some assurance that DICE will be taking care of customers post-sales, not so subtely hinting that we can also expect a ton of DLC content, “What’s also very important here is that when we launch Battlefield 3, that is just the start. We’re going to take care of this product for quite some time afterwards.”

Despite the beta being a bit late, it seems some of the coding in the beta may be somewhat outdated, which seems to negate the purpose of a beta. “it’s a couple of weeks behind. So, there might be problems in that that we’ve already fixed [since then].” It would appear that the beta is going to serve more as a marketing tool than a means to find bugs before release.

Troedsson also discusses the change from a closed beta to an open one, saying that in the end they just wanted numbers, and the logistics of handing out codes can be somewhat tedious.  “I think it’s important for us to get as many people in as possible, and it’s quite a bit of a hassle to actually to hand out codes, you know, if we want to get to a large number of people. So, at some point we just decided, let’s go with an open beta and have as many people as possible come in. For the people that have some special incentive etc. …we’ll give them early access to the beta instead.”

Finally, he comments on the thought process behind map selection, saying, “It felt very natural to us that when we did the first expansion pack, that we actually would, you know, use the most played maps of Battlefield 2, and that’s actually how we selected them. We just looked at the stats.”