Phantasy Star Online 2 Closed Beta Announcement: Following up in 2020

We’re fast approaching Spring 2020. You know what that means, right? The official Western launch of not only Phantasy Star Online 2, but also Amazon’s New World.
Yup, every single day we inch ever closer to our goal of an official English localized version of one of Japan’s most popular MMOs.
So I did a video on PSO2 back in December, since the official PSO2 Twitter made a Tweet stating that the game would be entering Closed Beta testing in the very near future. Well, Beta testing for the Xbox One anyway.
The PC Beta will be later on in the year after the Xbox One version has had sufficient time to – I dunno, boost Xbox One sales? Or whatever the reasoning behind the game being an Xbox One exclusive for most the year is.

But here we are, the end of January, and the PSO2 Twitter made another Tweet regarding the Closed Beta.
I mean they seem pretty active in terms of keeping players in the loop, but this is the first actual announcement made since their last one in the middle of December.
The Tweet reads:
“Greetings Arks, we know you are excited to find out more about the Closed Beta Test.
We are working hard to ensure you have a great experience and we will have more information to share with you when everything is 100% ready (to do otherwise wouldn’t be fair to you!) #Soon
We are beyond excited to see Phantasy Star Online 2 finally arriving in North America, and we believe 2020 will be an amazing year to #JoinARKS”
I know this isn’t necessarily the update in specific you guys were looking for, but it’s good to know they’re not only still hard at work, but making sure to communicate with their playerbase.
After scrolling through the Tweet a little bit, I saw someone actually went ahead and asked the tough question.. “Is it at least still on track for the Spring 2020 release?” To which they responded with “Yes! Everything is still on track.”

So yes, Phantasy Star Online 2 is still on-track for a Spring 2020 release. Whether that’s scheduled for March or June remains to be seen, but at the very least, they’re doing their best to work through making the beta publicly available.
Since Closed Beta keys have yet to be sent out, that means that the Closed Beta is still open for new registrations. They’ve been open since the middle of December, and look to be open for a little while longer.

As mentioned earlier, the Closed Beta will only be available to Xbox One players, and will be done through the Xbox Insider Program.
To register, you are required to have the Xbox Insider Hub installed on either your Xbox One or Windows 10 device – unfortunately there’s no way of getting around that.

While there’s no confirmed, definitive date for the PC Beta, it’s likely it’ll be towards the end of the year, with the Xbox One Beta being “Sometime during February” if everything is going according to plan.
For those of you that missed the E3 announcement in 2019, Microsoft announced that they were officially bringing Phantasy Star Online 2 to North America during Spring 2020.
Yes, the announcement was for North America, but they never mentioned there were going to be IP Blocks in place, however it’s safe to assume that it likely means there will only be North American servers as opposed to European, Oceanic or Asian servers.
Their plan is to release on to Xbox One initially, sometime during the beginning of the year and remain exclusively on the Xbox One until later in the year when they’ll release the game onto PC.
There will be full cross-play compatibility between the two platforms, with Phil Spencer, Xbox’s boss revealing that PSO2 will actually “end up on all platforms.”
I actually did an entire video dedicated to this announcement last year, so if you’re interested in specifics you should go ahead and check that out, but it’s pretty exciting that the game will be full cross-platform compatible.

And that’s about it right now. Phantasy Star Online 2 is one of Japan’e biggest Action MMOs. It has a plethora of crossovers with Anime series and various video games which, admittedly probably won’t carry over to the English version.
But nevertheless, with the enormous success the game has had over the years, it’s going to be a fun ride. At least when it finally launches onto PC.
I know some of you own an Xbox One, but let’s be honest.. the number of PC MMO comparative to Xbox One MMO players is such a substantial difference that I still don’t fully grasp Microsoft’s plan to release exclusively onto Xbox One first.
PSO2 though is going to be a huge hit regardless, and I’m gonna be there when it launches at the end of this year. I’ve played the Japanese version and had a lotta fun with it.
It’s probably one of the only Anime MMOs that are going to be capable of surviving in the future.
Or, then again, maybe it won’t. Maybe players are already tired of it. Maybe players will stick to the Japanese version where they’ve invested years of their life already. Who knows. Only time will tell.