The Dark Souls 2 community manager for Namco Bandai took to Reddit today to reveal that the game will be going into beta in a few days, and players expecting to get into the beta can anticipate receiving their beta codes at 11AM Pacific today.
Players selected for the first round of testing will be notified ahead of their entry into the beta, and receive their codes through PSN.
According to the community manager, the purpose of the beta test is to stress-test the servers rather than serve as a beta for the full game, so players who participate are encouraged to have a lot of background knowledge of Dark Souls as they'll be dropped into the game without so much as an instruction on what to do in the game.
Players will be admitted into the beta on a first-come, first-serve basis, and once 5,000 players have redeemed their codes, there will be no more available.
Namco Bandai expects to run a second round of beta testing for a wider group of players on Oct. 22.
Dark Souls 2 is planned for release on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC on March 11, 2014.