In Red Alert 3, the desperate leadership of a doomed Soviet Union travels back in time to change history and restore the glory of Mother Russia. The time travel mission goes awry, creating an alternate timeline where technology has followed an entirely different evolution, a new superpower has been thrust on to the world stage, and World War III is raging. The Empire of the Rising Sun has risen in the East, making World War III a three-way struggle between the Soviets, the Allies, and the Empire with armies fielding wacky and wonderful weapons and technologies like Tesla coils, heavily armed War Blimps, teleportation, armored bears, intelligent dolphins, floating island fortresses, and transforming tanks.

Red Alert 3 asks the question "What If?" What if every bizarre research project and technology experiment for the last 70 years had actually borne fruit? What if the Philadelphia Experiment, time travel theory, teleportation, invisibility, Tesla technology, and a hundred other intriguing research projects had all paid off and gone mainstream? What if the Soviet Union survived and thrived; what would it look like 10 years in the future? What if the Japanese Empire had never fallen and instead became the ultimate high-tech military superpower? The end result is an imaginative and playful vision of an alternate future filled with possibility.

EA announced that the public beta test will commence soon :

Comrades, The Command & Conquer 3 Red Alert 3 Mutliplayer Beta Test is set to launch publicly very soon. Get ready to wage a crazy war with the Soviets, Allies, and the Empire of the Rising Sun in our online-only multiplayer Beta Test. And remember, the only way to get in to the Beta Test is by purchasing a copy of Command & Conquer Kane's Wrath. If you are one of the thousands who already purchased Kane's Wrath and registered your Beta Key, then you are in our public queue and awaiting activation status!

As mentioned on our official website, we will be rolling out the Beta Test activation keys based on the time in which you registered on our beta test website (http: //www.ea.com/redalert3beta/) with the serial key from the insert contained in your copy of Kane's Wrath. We may also consider the country in which you reside as a component for when you will be activated in the public queue as we are aiming to get global feedback in as much as possible for our beta test. When we activate your key you will be sent an e-mail with your Red Alert 3 Beta Test key with instructions on downloading and installing the beta. If you registered for the beta test within the first couple of weeks, it is very likely you will be activated close to our first public launch. We will then continue to ramp up and activate registrations weekly, and potentially even multiple times a week. We will activate registrations primarily based around the status of our software. Certainly if we are experiencing any critical issues, we will halt activations until they are resolved. It is our intent to start the beta test small, and make every effort to quickly ramp up to thousands of players in a matter of days and weeks throughout late-July and August.

We're committed to collecting your feedback and improving Red Alert 3 before we ship later this year and wanted to give you a general update that the Red Alert 3 Multiplayer Beta Test is slated to go officially public very soon!

You may have heard that we have actually already started an internal-only testing period this week called "EA Friends and Family" where we are using a few hundred people to work out any potential technical issues with connectivity and the state of the game. It is our intent to collect constructive feedback from you during the Beta Test, however, we're spending a few days doing an internal-only trial run with friends and family of our development team, and around our company as well. If you've heard rumors about our Beta Test launching today or even this week, they are referring to the process noted above.

We have also opened up our official Red Alert 3 Beta Test forums where you will be encouraged to post your constructive feedback to help us improve the game. Since the beta test is starting to trickle out, we chose to open up this forum section early. We will make sure to keep it updated with sticky threads and updates and certainly the moment we start to activate people in our public queue, you will hear about it on our boards, official website, and via e-mail communications.

The Red Alert 3 Beta Test will be activated soon, and it will be a most glorious day for Command & Conquer gamers all around the world, until the final game ships of course!

-The Red Alert 3 Development Team

Command & Conquer fans eager to experience Red Alert 3 before anyone else can get early access to the beta (PC only) by picking up a copy of C&C 3: Kane's Wrath or the Command & Conquer 3 Limited Collection later this year. By ordering C&C 3: Kane’s Wrath and registering with the Beta Key before September 15th, 2008, you are guaranteed a chance to play the multiplayer Beta before Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 releases.

Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 is currently scheduled for October 2008.

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