There is a Battleforge beta, and I am in it.

That’s all I can say about my first evening in the beta without breaking NDA. But I can talk about what the game is, given that you could read about it in previews or on their website. Prior to a few days ago I hadn’t even heard of the game, that I can remember, but Fileplanet was giving away beta keys so I signed up. Figured the game could use some exposure.

Turns out that Battleforge is a mashup of MMO, RTS and CCG. Acronym soup! Mostly, the game is an RTS game, but what units you can create is determined by the cards in your deck. You create a deck in the same way you would in Magic or any other CCG. The MMO aspect comes in via a persistent meta-world (anyone remember Cavedog’s Boneyard…this seems similar). Within this meta-world you can choose from solo, co-op and pvp missions. By doing missions you earn more cards (I think??) which allows you to tweak your deck more.

It seems like a fun and interesting premise. I’m not sure what the cost is going to be, and in all honestly all I played last night was the solo tutorial mission, so I couldn’t significantly break the NDA even if I wanted to.

I’d like to say I’ll be playing a lot more of the beta, but with Moria and Shadow Odyssey both out today (and Amazon pulled through and the latter is expected to arrive today), Wizard 101 still begging for some attention, and Fable 2 still drawing me in regularly…I’m not sure WHEN I’ll play this one.

I’d say if you enjoy RTS games, it’d be worth signing up for the beta, though.