Battlefield 3 Beta Coming A Little Too Late?

With the release of Battlefield 3 arriving so closely on our heels, is EA making a mistake just now releasing their beta? The whole purpose of a beta is to allow actual gamers to play the game before the release so that they can test out any major problems with the game and fix them prior to release. Battlefield 3 will be released on October 25th, 2011 in North America on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. Yesterday, on September 29th, the open beta was released on all 3 platforms with one map, Operation Metro, available to play in a game mode called Rush where you are either attacking or defending certain objectives and bases. I was quickly signed up and playing on the 360 version, hoping that the problems would be minimal considering the close release date. In my opinion the game should have actually been called more of a demo than a beta because of the close proximity to the release date. Getting into the screen, there was only an option to play multiplayer which didn't surprise me. When I pressed it, I got a nice little message that I was unable to connect to the EA servers. This is not surprising however considering how many people were playing the beta at once. Once I got into a quick match after several minutes of waiting to get in, I was greeted by my new squad and the decision to choose which class to play as. Out of the options of Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon I chose the Support class but later chose to stick with the Assault class. Luckily, I had joined a game that hadn't started yet and once I spawned on the map, I saw a major improvement on the graphics from Battlefield Bad Company 2. The frostbite 2 engine looked great on the 360. There were the usual glitches like dead bodies having spaz attacks and a little bit of lighting problems but nothing too serious. Overall (minus the waiting time to get in) I had an enjoyable time leveling up and beating up the other team. The map itself is fairly large with two above ground sections and a large underground section. It is a very good thing that the game doesn't have too many problems that hinder the gameplay because I don't think EA would be able to fix any major problems in time for the launch. But this isn't the case for Battlefield 3. So I highly suggest anyone that has a PS3, 360, or PC to join the fun now and buy the game when it comes out on October 25th.