The matches in Heroes last around 8 to 10 minutes. One of our hopes for heroes is that people enjoy playing it in short blasts. For instance rather than playing the card game that comes with Windows over your lunch break, you could put 10 minutes into a round of Heroes. That said, we feel Heroes has a lot of depth with the new abilities gameplay, which makes it fun to play for longer periods of time. Basically, however much time you have spare to play, we hope you will find Heroes fun.

As you play matches you gather experience points, which will help advance your character in level. You will also earn Valor Points, which you can spend in the store on new customisation items and weapons. Higher level characters will have access to more items in the store.

In terms of community support what kinds of community features will Battlefield Heroes have?

Heroes is a long term project. It's something we will be constantly adding features and content to. One of the advantages of making a game this way is we have a much better opportunity to listen to community feedback, and actually make changes based on that. For instance if the consensus in the community seems to be "We want more vehicles", then we can put our efforts into doing that. If it looks like Clan Support would be interesting to enough people, we'd go ahead and build that.

The website for Heroes will be one big community feature which we'll also keep adding to over time. Right now we are working on social features for the site. So, for example, if one of your friends levels up a news item will appear on the website to let you know. Aside from the Heroes game, we have a lot of cool plans for the website too. To us the web is half the experience. Not just a marketing site you download the game from.

When can we expect the game to officially launch to the public and come out of its current beta state?

When Gmail first appeared, Google was cautious with adding new users. They built an invite system, which they used to slowly increase the number of people who could use the service.

We are taking a similar approach with Heroes. We want Heroes to be a great experience for the people that come visit us. To ensure that happens, we issue new batches of beta keys and then do tests on various parts of the system, to make sure it can cope with the added load. So, basically, Heroes is already out and we are adding new players every day. Once we are confident we can provide the level of performance we want, to the number of people we hope will play Heroes, we'll announce our next phase.

Finally, has the development team worked out their plans to offer new content to the game and how they will be pricing that new content?

We have a lot of content already made, but not in the beta. Ranging from clothing items to new maps, but as I was saying earlier, community opinion has a say in what we will be doing. We plan to add new content to Heroes every few weeks. Basically we want to keep it entertaining and surprising each time you play.

The majority of the new content will be free, or purchased using Valour Points (the currency you earn simply by playing the game). Some items will be sold for Battle Funds, which is our name for the currency you buy with real world cash. We are still working on the actual pricing for Battle Funds. Items priced in Battle Funds will be either visual customisations which will really make you stand on the battlefield. Or items which give you some form of convenient help, such as helping you level up more quickly. However I want to stress you wont be able to buy yourself a competitive advantage over other players.