Battlefield Heroes developer EA DICE announced recently that their upcoming free to play online shooter has been delayed once again. They originally intended on releasing this for summer 2008, which obviously didn’t work out so it was moved to late 2008, which again clearly isn’t happening either. It doesn’t seem like there’s a solid date for the game at the moment but they aren’t planning to re-open the beta until early 2009.

Heroes is the franchise’s first jump into free to play territory. Similar to games like Maple Story, installing and playing the game is completely free of charge, though players are able to use real money to buy in-game bonus items such as new clothes or weapons.

Maple Story did a fairly good job with their items which were well balanced back when I used to play the game. They’d offer things like pets which would automatically pick up the loot monsters dropped, thus ensuring that the item you purchased was useful but not enough to give you an advantage over the cheap people.