Dice, the developers of the highly anticipated free-to-play title under the EA banner, Battlefield Heroes has recently announced that they’re putting the breaks on the official release date until 2009.

Dice Senior Producer James Salt posted to the games site (see below), citing backend issues as causing the snag.  The quick and dirty looks like this: While the frontend, the interface and gameplay that users experience is running quite well, beta tester feedback has been heard and applied, it’s all the backend features (up to 90% of the actual ‘game’) that aren’t quite up to par.  Rather than rush what could and should be a flagship model of the free-to-play industry to market, Dice/EA are making a wise decision by closing the doors and retooling the system.  The closed beta servers will have the plug pulled at 6pm CET, and will remain closed until further notice.

James Salts’ post:

Hello Heroes,

Been a looooong time since our last update. I want to apologise to you all for that.

So what have we been up to?

Well, the obvious answer is that we’ve been hard at work on the beta. To give you more detail, part of what makes Battlefield: Heroes unique is that it is equal parts game and website. On the game side, we’ve been listening to feedback from the lucky beta people, who have been a tremendous help to us in balancing the gameplay, squashing bugs and improving the overall quality of the game.

On to the other half of the Battlefield Heroes experience: the website.

We have also been working hard on the parts of the beta that aren’t the game. Sound weird? Let me try and explain: You know the old saying about icebergs being 10% above water, and 90% below? Heroes is a little like that. There’s the 10% game part you can see, and the hiding 90% is what we call the ‘backend’. The backend does a lot of things. From running the website’s features and looking after the items you have, to collecting the results from each Heroes game and matchmaking players into games.

We have received lots of great feedback from our beta testers. So much so that we are now ready to enter our next phase. On Friday evening (6pm CET) we will be closing down the current Closed Beta and moving our focus to polishing the backend. So for a while there will be no closed beta available to play. We expect to re-open the beta early next year.

A special thanks to all of our beta testers for your feedback on balance, polish and bug reports over the last few months. Your help has been invaluable to us.

The post has garnered over 800+ comments at the time of my writing this, with a majority of the feedback running towards the ‘Awww man…what’s up?  The game is great!” variety.  Naturally, there’s a smartass comment here and there, but meh…such is life.

This announcement is a bit of a double-edged sword for me personally.  Battlefield Heroes was the only title that I returned to play again on the second day at the Leipzig Games Convention, and I truly do enjoy the gameplay.  Tossing in the ‘it’s free’ factor only ups the ante.  On one hand I was planning on wasting a LOT of time over the upcoming holiday season with BH, but on the other…I’m a patient guy, I’d rather see DICE/EA close the doors, if only temporarily, to deliver something that’s truly going to blow the doors off the nay Sayers.

Here’s to you folks at Dice and EA.  A bold move that’s certainly not going to please all, but kudos to you for having the guts to hold fire until the product is just right.

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