Bethesda Studios' latest offing, "Battlecry" is now available as a playable beta exclusively in Australia and New Zealand. "Battlecry" is a free to play team based action combat multiplayer game based in a post-war world where gunpowder has been outlawed.

The beta can be accessed by players in Australia and New Zealand where currently, there are three different classes- with their own unique style, available to play. With a unique design by Viktor Antonov (creator of the Half Life 2 universe), the game promises some amazing, breathtaking art work. Speaking at the PAX Australia conference, design director Lucas Davis says " It is heavily Animation driven with Visceral Combat. The Environments in the game provide stunning Verticality, Fluidity and Fast-paced Map Strategy."

Speaking further on the combat mechanics in the game, the team extrapolates on some of the finer points and differentiators from other games released so far. The game itself generally relies heavily on melee fighting between players- currently with three classes to choose from namely, The Enforcer, Tech Archer and Duelist (Brawler and Gadgeteer classes coming soon) . Each class has it's own skill improvements leading to deadlier attacks and more versatile options to deploy during combat.

In an interview with AusGamers, Bethesda leads Rich Vogel and Pete Hines explained features of the beta version of the game. "So the mode we have here [at PAX] is sort of like Domination," Pete explained. "It's three points at a time and once you control them there's a countdown timer and once it counts down [the point] vanishes and a new one pops up somewhere else. So it's structured, but then it's not just the same three points all the time." Rich said "It's not your basic kill everyone TDM, it's actually objective-based which really shows off the classes well and their depth in the game really well,"

Pete and Rich also explained the process of testing the game in their offices in Australia- along with plans to locate servers locally. On the choice of location for the early testing phase, Rich explained "I feel very confident we'll be able to hit [any] balance issues and that's one of the reasons why we picked Australia and New Zealand, To work with a small, close and tight community to get [the game] tuned before we go large scale."

"The other thing that we [Bethesda] talked about is having an office here in this territory in Australia, [It gave it a big leg up over any number of other territories we looked at just in terms of having some expertise in the market and being able to cultivate and grow that, because it is going to be a process of getting feedback -- lots and lots of feedback, and doing lots of small things in the territory to reach out to folks directly.

"Battlecry" currently does not have a release date. Check out it's action-filled gameplay trailer below.

(Credit: YouTube/Bethesda Softworks)