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The Battlefield 1 Incursions alpha is PC-only, and you won’t need to own the game to play

Battlefield 1 Incursions

The Battlefield 1 Incursions alpha will be exclusive to PC. In an interview we had at Gamescom with David Sirland, the game mode’s producer, we got confirmation that while Battlefield’s new competitive game mode is in its alpha testing stage, it won’t be available on consoles.

Check out our list of the best FPS games on PC.

While the Incursions alpha will only be available on PC, you won’t actually need to own Battlefield 1, or even play Battlefield games at all, if you want to have a go. It will be region-locked, but if you live in America or western and central Europe, and have access to the internet, you’ll be able to play.

Sirland tells us “the closed alpha isn’t for everyone, but we’re not locking it, you don’t have to own the base game. It’s free to play and test, if you get in, and we want more players to try this out. We want players who maybe don’t play Battlefield to have a go at it and give their feedback, good or bad.”

To help combat foreseen matchmaking problems, Sirland says that in the early stages of the alpha, “we’ll probably try to corral people in certain time zones, or time slots in each time zone, to ensure that we’ve got enough enough players to really get that going, because that’s our biggest problem initially.”

“The idea is obviously that we always have the matchmaker on, because players are always playing, but initially we’ll probably start controlling that. That is really what we want. We want to get all players involved, as soon as possible, so we can start discussing what works, what doesn’t work, what needs improvement, what could be deeper in terms of strategy, and so on. And also seeing how the players play this, because it’s only when we take it to scale that we really get all the information.”

There’s no release date set for Battlefield 1 Incursions yet, but you can sign up for the closed alpha now through Origin.