A new Battlefield game is now in development at EA. The publisher is expected to kick off its Investor Day later today and the company has confirmed the Battlefield project as part of the lead-up.
At the moment, this new Battlefield game is unnamed but EA has confirmed that it is set in the modern day. This is a shift away from the previous titles that included World War I, World War II and the distant future in 2042.
Along with the announcement, EA released the first concept art for this new Battlefield game. The publisher didn’t share the location where the artwork has been set but it looks like some European country. Perhaps Italy or France.
The concept art includes a few gameplay hints. We can see helicopters and ships hinting towards naval and air combat. There’s also destruction, which is a given for a Battlefield game. The wildfire, however, is hinting that perhaps the game will feature some sort of natural disaster focus. Perhaps this wildfire confirms adaptive map design that changes as the match goes on.
EA says the new Battlefield game will “get back to the core” of the Battlefield experience. The project is inspired by Battlefield 3 and 4, which are often seen as the peak of the series. 64-player maps have been confirmed to return in the game. It will also return to the class-based system and drop the current specialists.
Head of Respawn & Group GM for EA Studios Organization Vince Zampella is at the helm of the project. He comments on a number of gameplay features in the new game which has either been dropped or reintroduced as a result of Battlefield 2042.
“Yeah, the 128 player, did it make it more fun? Like…doing the number for the sake of the number doesn’t make any sense. We’re testing everything around what’s the most fun. So like you said, the maps, once they get to a certain scale, become different. It’s a different play space, and I think you have to design around that. So we are designing something that is more akin to previous Battlefields”.
Zampella doesn’t look at Battlefield 2042 as a failure of a game. Instead, he says it is seen as a learning step for the development of the new game.
“Yeah, it’s definitely betting bigger on Battlefield. It’s going in and expanding what Battlefield is. We have to have the core. The core Battlefield players know what they want. They’ve been with us forever, they’ve been amazing supporters. We need to earn their trust back and get them back on our side. And then it’s expanding out and getting more players into the universe and seeing what we can do, so when you want a different experience, you don’t have to leave Battlefield. You can experience more things within the Battlefield universe. So we’re expanding the offerings that we’re giving.”
It is going to be a while before we see or play this new Battlefield game. The project only recently went into production earlier this year. It will take EA a few years to conjure it up. However, Zampella says EA wants to directly involve the community in the development of the game. So we are going to see community programs introduced in 2025.
Source: IGN
