Will the next Battlefield save the series and bring it back as a major player in the shooter space? Is that something that it could even do? EA would certainly like the answer to both of those questions to be ‘yes’, and the publisher has been working to secure every possible advantage to help get it there.
Those ambitions could easily crash at the shore of a terrible launch, leaving it to only be appreciated by the few who’ve stuck with Battlefield all those years. As a longtime fan, I really want this next Battlefield to not only deliver, I also want a new staple shooter to go back to regularly.
We know very little – almost nothing – about the next Battlefield game. EA hasn’t even officially said whether it’ll be coming out in 2025, but the timeline and all recent developments at the publisher’s various studios make me think that 2025 is the year that makes the most sense.
EA wants to recreate the Call of Duty: Warzone setup with the next Battlefield, so it could be that the core, premium game comes out in late-2025, only for the free-to-play battle royale mode to follow early in 2026.
We know that some form of testing will begin early in 2025, but it’s likely to be limited and heavily NDA’d, so it may not end up informing us about the nature of the game in a satisfying way. All indications tell us that the next Battlefield will have a modern day setting, and that it will be a return to the series’ longstanding classes format.
None of that guarantees that we’re going to get a “good” game, of course – it just shows that EA’s head, at least when it comes to identifying what players want, is in the right place. This is what has me excited to actually see and play it.
The thing about Battlefield is that many of its core elements can be found elsewhere. Combined arms combat, asymmetrical classes, slower gameplay, large maps – and even destruction in some cases – they all exist in other games. But no single shooter combines them in quite the same way. Even the recently released Delta Force only serves as a reminder of why that formula is not easy to recreate, as perplexing as that might be.
The more failures Battlefield produces, however, the more that perception fades. We all know many former Battlefield players that now spend their time in other games, and I’m willing to bet that none of them would tell you that any of those games can scratch the same itch – they only offer enough to keep you hooked, but not so much that you can truly call them of them “the next Battlefield.”