Halo: Reach beta extended until May 20

Players of the Halo: Reach beta expecting to be booted from Bungie's servers today have received a reprieve. The Kirkland, Washington-based developer has announced via its Web site that the testing of the sci-fi shooter's multiplayer mode will continue through 10 a.m. PDT on Thursday, May 20. The beta is only accessible via the Halo 3: ODST game disc or a Bungie-approved access code.

Even before it was extended, the Halo: Reach beta was expected to attract over 3 million players. The the long-awaited multiplayer test will let the studio fine-tune its servers to support the full game when it ships out sometime this fall. The need for such preparations became clear when a record turnout of over 1 million players overwhelmed Bungie's servers on the first day of the beta.

First announced at the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, Halo: Reach will be Bungie's last Halo game for the foreseeable future, as the developer is working on an all-new new, multiplatform "game universe." In a deal announced last month, Activision will be the sole publisher of multiple titles based on the property through the year 2020, with analysts already projecting sales of the first installment as topping 10 million units sight unseen.

As for Halo: Reach, as outlined in GameSpot's recent hands-on preview, the game depicts some of the same events that took place in the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund. The book portrays both the siege of the titular fortress planet by the Covenant and the origins of the Spartan program, which developed dozens of supersoldiers like Halo series hero Master Chief. It will follow a squad of six Master Chief-like Spartan soldiers as they try to protect Reach's human inhabitants from a relentless onslaught by the Covenant's multispecies religious fanatic army.