EA announced today that Star Wars Battlefront will be getting a beta in "early October" of this year. No mention of preordering, paying extra, or jumping through hoops to enter into the beta, so it's sounding like an open beta to boot! Woo!

"Ever since we revealed Star Wars™ Battlefront™ in April ... you've been asking us if there would be a Beta. Today, we are thrilled to finally be able to answer that question, and the answer is yes!"

That's the good news, now for the more...worrisome news.

Along with the beta, the Battlefront "Companion" experience, a "strategic card game," will be releasing too. That's not so bad, but it's played on the Battlefront website to earn credits which you use to buy weapons, cards, "and more." Battlefront is a great game and all, but I smell micro-transactions in the air here.

The Battlefront Companion also lets players record their stats, customize their loadouts, and change their appearance, as well as see their friend's info on consoles, PC, and even on iOS and Android.

The other piece of worrying news came with a tweet from EAStarWars today.

There won't be a server browser, meaning that it'll be nearly impossible to track down a lobby that friends set up and play just with them. Instead, EA is putting into place a "skill based matchmaking system," so...yay?

Besides that open beta news, the Battlefront Companion news and the server news are kinda mixed. So far people have been very anti-microtransactions and have been berating EA for discarding the more traditional server based matchmaking, but who knows, Star Wars Battlefront still has two whole months before release, and a lot can still change in that time.