EA/DICE has announced that they have posted the “1.4 Final Candidate Beta” for download by Battlefield 2142 users. In their release text on the Web site they admit that it has been a long road to get to this point, but they have been compiling feedback in order to make fixes and changes to make sure that the 1.4 patch is fully up to snuff.

The focus on 1.4 Final Candidate Beta, or what many 2142 players are just calling Beta 3, is on server stability. Unlike the previous Betas, they are going to limit the number of servers that are running 1.4 Final Candidate Beta in order to make sure that the servers are packed full. If the testing goes as planned, this will be the version that is rolled out to ranked server providers.

It seems that the 1.4 patch has taken a long road to get to this point. Many 2142 players have simply lost interest in playing this game because of all of the cheating and exploits by gamers. Even if the 1.4 patch corrects most of these issues, it could be too little, too late to get players back into the 2142 fold due to all of the other games that are coming on the scene. We welcome the extra care that EA/DICE seem to be putting into the 1.4 release in order to address the multiple problems with the game, but it just seems that they did not respond quickly enough to the needs of the 2142 community, and as a result many players have already abandoned the game.

While EA/DICE did not indicate when players could expect the 1.4 patch, it is obvious that they are targeting a release before the end of the year for sure, with a more likely date to be near the second week of November, assuming that the test goes as well as expected.