Halo 2: Anniversary public beta tests begin today

The Master Chief Collection is rolling right along. Now that Halo Reach and Combat Evolved have both been released, Halo 2 Anniversary is on the flight deck. Beta tests for the next remake begin today for registered Halo Insiders—a program you can still freely chuck your name into if you want to get into tests for either Halo 2 or the rest of the Master Chief Collection.

343 Industries shared yesterday that "All Ring 3 blockers have been resolved at this time for Halo 2 and Halo 2: Anniversary flighting to begin on Friday, 4/17." If that sounds like a whole lot of jargon, well, it is. The long and short is that 343 are now allowing players to test Halo 2: Anniversary.

343 refer to tests for the Master Chief Collection as "flights," and the "rings" are different groups of folks who are invited to participate. It's a visual thing. Anyway, Ring 3 is made up of a subset of folks chosen from all registered Halo Insiders. "This audience could be hardware based, experience based, locale, or any specific metric the team is looking to validate or stress at any given point," 343 have previously explained. Getting out to Ring 3 for testing means that Halo 2: Anniversary has cleared the other groups of testers without "without bugs that are deemed blocking issues."

We don't have a release date for the new Halo 2: Anniversary yet but, as a point of reference, Halo: Combat Evolved's public test flights began in mid February and the game was released shortly after on March 3rd. Halo: Reach went about a month between Ring 3 flight and release. Halo 2 could be pretty close at hand.

If you're into becoming a Halo Insider to get an invite to future flights, you can sign up on 343's site.

You can find Halo 2: Anniversary over on Steam along with the rest of the (current and future) Master Chief Collection.