Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 beta now on PC

The PC beta of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is now live, with a neat little bonus: you don’t necessarily have to pre-order to get access.

From what I can gather, if you own Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Call of Duty: Ghosts, or Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare on Steam, then you should already have access to the Black Ops 3 beta. At least, I think so. I’m not quite certain on which games give access to this beta, but all indications are it’s those three.

The beta weighs in at around 15GB, and is scheduled to run from now until 30 August. I’m assuming that means it’ll run through 30 August, but as ever, these things aren’t quite clear. It might end as the clock hits 12:01am on the 30th. I doubt it, though.

According to the previous trailer, you can expect over seven multiplayer modes with over three maps, and eight Specialists to use on said maps and modes.

Treyarch are eager to point out that this is still a beta, though, so you shouldn’t expect things to be perfect. According to their post on the Steam Community page for the beta, there’s still a lot of optimising to do and “final Advanced Graphics features” aren’t in yet. Likewise, optimised drivers from Nvidia and AMD obviously aren’t available just yet.

There are also a bunch of known issues, which you can read below.

• There are some issues that occur when using a gamepad while also using keyboard and mouse. Once in match we recommend using one control input device.
• During a match, changing your texture settings or shadow map quality can result in the game locking up. It is best to only make changes to these settings while not in a match to avoid these issues.
• There are some known issues with 4k resolution, we recommend playing in Fullscreen mode when playing on 4k monitors.
• Certain Sound Blaster cards set at 44000Hz or higher sample rating can cause the game to not run. Please lower this setting and try to run the game again if you experience issues.
• The Steam Overlay does not work if you are running Fraps.
• Scene Resolution Ratio is a great option for increasing the game’s performance. If the game isn’t running smooth, using this and lowering Max FPS can really help
• Mouse Filtering and Mouse Sensitivity can really help the mouse feel great. For high DPI mice, we recommend turning the DPI up outside of the game and using the in game Mouse Sensitivity and Mouse Filtering to get you mouse movement exactly how you like it.

Anyway! If you have one of the aforementioned games then you should check your Steam library. You might just have Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Beta tucked away in there.