Bethesda has today released a brand-new trailer for their highly stylised free-to-play multiplayer romp, Battlecry, and also revealed to us in an interview why its first beta foray will be exclusive to Australia and New Zealand.

Chatting with BattleCry Studios' Rich Vogel and Bethesda head-honcho Pete Hines, AusGamers learnt that Battlecry's first beta will be exclusive first to Australia and New Zealand for a variety of reasons.

"I feel very confident we’ll be able to hit [any] balance issues and that’s one of the reasons why we picked Australia and New Zealand," Vogel explained. "To work with a small, close and tight community to get [the game] tuned before we go large scale."

"The other thing that we [Bethesda] talked about is having an office here in this territory in Australia," adds Pete. "[It] gave it a big leg up over any number of other territories we looked at just in terms of having some expertise in the market and being able to cultivate and grow that, because it is going to be a process of getting feedback -- lots and lots of feedback, and doing lots of small things in the territory to reach out to folks directly.

"It’s an audience that is pretty savvy when it comes to free-to-play games," he continues. "That’s certainly a reason we’ve taken the favour of Australia and New Zealand in terms of being a territory that gets these kinds of games."

For the uninitiated, Battlecry is a free-to-play multiplayer game played in the third-person. Its unique and gorgeous art-style comes from the digital brush of Viktor Antonov who is best known for his ground-breaking work on Half-Life 2 and Dishonored. At this year's PAX in Melbourne, the game is fully playable and will feature a new objective-based mode.



"So the mode we have here [at PAX] is sort of like Domination," Pete explains. "It’s three points at a time and once you control them there’s a countdown timer and once it counts down [the point] vanishes and a new one pops up somewhere else. So it’s structured, but then it’s not just the same three points all the time."

"It’s not your basic kill everyone TDM, it’s actually objective-based which really shows off the classes well and their depth in the game really well," Rich enthuses. "That’s really the big difference, as well as more abilities; more capabilities [for each] character in the game versus what was at E3 so it’s a completely different experience to what [people] had at E3.”

The duo also revealed to us that they'll be tapping into the Amazon Cloud for server-side stuff, explaining that it will offer the capability to structure the game's networking globally, in a dynamic and responsive way.

"We are on the Amazon Cloud and they have a point of presence in Australia, so we’re going to be there," Rich explains. "Our game has the ability to work across all of Amazon, so wherever their servers are we can move them, so it’s not an issue. We can move servers in the US we can move servers in Australia -- anywhere they’re located at, we can be at.

"As far as what we’re [currently] testing, we had the Australian [Bethesda] office playtesting the game and it did okay, but we’re going to locate servers in Australia -- they’ll be in the Australian Amazon centre. It’s not that hard to spin up servers with our technology and backend wherever we go."

Anyone keen on participating in the exclusive beta can do so be signing up right here, and be sure to check out the brand-new trailer below. Currently there's no release date for the game and Pete was candid in revealing there's also new set date for the rest of the world to get their hands on the beta.

"Later!" he enthused with a chuckle. "When the Australians and New Zealanders like it enough, then everybody else can have it."

Stay tuned for updated impressions of the game from our team on the ground at PAX and more from Pete and Rich, but in the meantime check out our initial impressions from E3 and QuakeCon for more.