At 8am Eastern tomorrow morning the Halo 3 public beta will be available for download. There's been a special "Friends & Family" beta preview going on since Friday, which is why there's been so much coverage written on what the beta's actually like but we'll see the explosion of public opinion once all of us regular people get our hands on it. On the brink of this somewhat momentous occasion I've been left to wonder what we can actually expect tomorrow. Here's some of my thoughts:

The initial download will take FOREVER

Though it's "only" 916 MB I still think that people will be up early and salivating to get their hands on this thing. I'm counting on being up right at 8AM so I'll have my super preliminary impressions up as soon as I get a couple of games in and I'll update a few more times throughout the morning. Hopefully there will be a lot of people who are too lazy to get up early or will be at school to help ease the burden on the servers for the initial rush to download the beta.

I'm going to get PWNED mercilessly

I'm not a shitty Halo player, but there are an almost infinite number of people who are better than I am. This is something I'm reminded of every time I play Halo 2. I'm not sure how the ranking system's going to work but if everyone is starting out at level 1 but they're really a much higher level I will probably be lucky to get a single kill.

I'll realize this is really just Halo with a couple of new features

Granted those new features are really cool, but Bungie can't dramatically change the gameplay or they'd face the wrath of millions. When you get down to it, Halo 2 was just a prettier version of Halo with official online play and dual-wielding. One of the features of Halo 2 that I think is majorly underappreciated is the seamless integration of the stat tracking at Bungie.net. We'll have to wait and see if any of the new features make the same kind of impact with Bungie's accomplishments that Halo 2 did.

I hope I can have start a party to keep just me and my friends playing together

I could probably find out what will be possible in the beta for myself, but we're a little more that 15 hours out from actually playing it ourselves so I'll just wait it out. I really hope that I don't have to always play a random game with random people but if that's what it is than I'll just have to deal.

So, what's got your mind going in anticipation of tomorrow's big release?

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