The future of Battlefield is up in the air at the moment. For years, the popular shooter series has played second fiddle to Call of Duty, but recently, it has seemed unable to hold even that position in the charts. Following the launch of Battlefield 2042 in 2021, it seemed like the franchise’s end was set in stone, but efforts from EA’s studios gave fans of the series a fresh burst of hope. Recently, some troubling circumstances have unfolded within Electronic Arts that may be putting Battlefield back on its deathbed.
It’s widely considered that Battlefield’s heyday was between 2011 and 2016, with the likes of Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, and Battlefield 1 (yes, that’s the order) storming the charts and ticking all the boxes. Since then, the series has collapsed somewhat, but there were recent assurances passed around by Electronic Arts that a ‘reimagining’ of the series will bring it back to its prior form. That was before studios were closed, high-ranking employees left, and updates ran dry.
Is Battlefield Doomed to Fail?
There’s an overwhelming amount of competition in the shooter space, that much is for sure. Battlefield has long struggled against its closest opponents, such as Call of Duty, and nothing Electronic Arts and its associated studios have done has combated that fact. There are plenty of games that now boast the size and grandeur of a Battlefield title, so that unique card that was plastered with ‘big maps’ and ‘vehicular combat’ is no longer viable for the two-decades-old series.
In recent weeks, Electronic Arts closed Ridgeline Studios, a company that was working on the ‘next Battlefield’ game. That was just days after Marcus Lehto, a Creative Director working on Battlefield, left the company after years under the EA umbrella. He was joined shortly after by Craig Morrison, another Creative Director who’d been at EA since 2021. From high-level departures to the closure of a key studio and an ever-dwindling player base, things aren’t looking good for Battlefield.
What Can Save Battlefield?
There are claims that the next Battlefield game will feature a free-to-play battle royale mode. It worked well enough for Call of Duty, so why not Battlefield? Well, in March 2019 – one year before Warzone was released – Battlefield’s battle royale mode, Firestorm, was made available in Battlefield 5. It wasn’t an overwhelming success and quickly succumbed, falling into irrelevance and being all but forgotten by the community.
Perhaps a free-to-play alternative would work better, but that too is a drenched market bursting at the seams with games that are much more well-established.
Fans of the series are begging for Battlefield to ‘return’ to a modern-day setting. That’s when the series flourished, with Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 (and Battlefield 1) representing realistic, grounded theatres of war that were authentic and believable. There were no fancy specialists, there were intense destructive elements, and they were a wonder to play. Even Battlefield 5, which was released before 2042 and didn’t receive the best reviews, was appreciated by fans because it was so gritty and innovative.
Battlefield 2042 did away with all of that, dropped any kind of campaign, and generally launched in a broken state.
Doing the polar opposite of that might help Battlefield recover somewhat, but is it too little, too late? Has Battlefield already died a grisly death, despite the best efforts of EA’s DICE?
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