Blizzard has issued a call to arms ahead of the upcoming beta test for its squad-based shooter, Overwatch. Designed to put the multiplayer servers through their paces, the game’s first invitation-only beta will go live on Friday, November 20 at 9:00 a.m. PST.
From there, the weekend event will invite hoards of players via the company’s Battle.net client to dabble with Overwatch‘s cooperative gameplay, before wrapping up the beta on Monday, November 23.
“During this three-day event, we’ll be opening up Overwatch beta (for a limited time) to a lot more players from our Americas and Europe gameplay regions,” it said. “The objective [is to] help us stress test our server hardware and technology .. and make a few Plays of the Game in the process.”
As Blizzard points out via the official post on Battle.net, players will have full access to the entire character roster – 21 heroes in total – allowing them to pinpoint their favorite mascots across a limited selection of arenas: Hanamura, King’s Row, and Watchpoint: Gibraltar. You’ll also find a list of the minimum and recommended PC specifications to run the early build of Overwatch and we understand that, despite being announced for consoles at BlizzCon earlier this month, the oncoming weekend event will be limited to one platform.
“Since this is a stress test, we’re primarily interested in your technical feedback,” Blizzard continued. “Like how Overwatch runs on your system, your experience with the beta servers, critical bug reports, and other game-impacting problems. One of our goals is to push our hardware to the limit, so don’t be surprised if you experience performance issues or run into unexpected downtime–that’s all part of the process.”
Blizzard’s will put its Overwatch servers through their paces when the shooter’s beta kicks off on November 20, running for a total of three days. From there, the studio will add the final sheen of polish to the team-based title ahead of its launch across PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in Spring 2016.