Third Time Is Hopefully A Charm For Embattled 'Battlefield' Franchise
Image Source: Screen Rant
One would be hard-pressed to call the last two installments of the Battlefield series successes: Fan's reactions to Battlefield V (2018) were mediocre at best, and things got only worse when Battlefield 2042 was released in 2021: the game quickly earned more than 30,000 negative reviews on Steam, for bugs, missing features, and changes to the gameplay. No wonder concurrent players dropped from more than 100,000 shortly after the release to only a few thousand within months.
But Electronic Arts and DICE promise to have learned from their past mistakes: Battlefield 6, set to be released by the end of next year, is said to return to the more successful roots of the series, with the gameplay taking place between 2027 and 2030, a class system with up to 64 players, 45 different weapon systems, ten multiplayer maps, and all-out-destruction with various calibers.
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Additionally - and probably even more importantly - EA, DICE, and the other three studios working on Battlefield 6, Motive, Criterion Games, and Ripple Effect are focused on finally putting "players first" again.
Tests with external players are said to be happening much more frequently than with the previous two games, and the number of data obtained from these tests far exceeds that of Battlefield V and Battlefield 2042. These tests range from small sessions with only a few people to large-scale player tests, and they are said to continue until at least the beginning of next year.
Furthermore, EA is at least considering bringing back the so-called CTE—Community Test Environment—which was used quite extensively for Battlefield 4. However, it remains to be seen at which scale it will be used for Battlefield 6.
The game has the biggest budget of all Battlefield games, and EA's marketing material includes the usual terms of "groundbreaking" and "innovative", but all parties involved seem to understand that another failure is no option this time around if the franchise shall be sustainable in the long term.
When Battlefield 6 is released in roughly one year, what matters most are not the reviews of the critics but the reaction of the gamers, who expect a ready-for-release game without major bugs and fun and grabbing gameplay.
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Source: Insider Gaming
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