- Subtitles section
- Battlefield will end with the current season, marking an end to one of the more tumultuous journeys for the franchise, as they shift more focus over to the new, or rather upcoming, Battlefield VII, which according to leaks will be a war between NATO and a massive private military.
- Let's talk about it.
- So firstly, there was a blog post announcing that Motive, the studio behind the recent Dead Space remaster and heavily involved in the Battlefront games and Star Wars squadrons, is creating a new team to work with the next Battlefield project, or universe, connected universe as they vaguely describe it.
- They also again mention involvement with the single player narrative experience on the next Battlefield game, and I do wonder if they're taking over some of the work
- that Ridgeline was doing on the single player experience before that studio was shut down earlier this year.
- Marcus Leto, one of the key members of the Halo narrative team who was heading that studio, said that he had nothing positive to say about EA regarding his entire team getting laid off shortly after the studio was formed.
- And the entire game industry is doing sweeping layoffs right now and it's been absolutely brutal to anyone in the tech sector.
- It's also generally been made a bit worse by the massive bonuses that many company executives continue to take each year, while still firing off huge portions of their company.
- But that's a whole nother conversation, let me bring it back to Battlefield.
- So, along with this announcement, they also revealed that season seven will be the last season for Battlefield of the year.
- And while that doesn't necessarily mean support for the game will end, it's seasonal content will.
- Which probably means no more things like new assets and maybe just a few game modes and events and stuff like that.
- Don't expect content packs or surprise maps.
- And personally, I have to say that I am actually surprised that DICE even delivered seven seasons.
- I was predicting each season to be the last one for the past several seasons.
- But by most measures, I would say that EA definitely righted the ship with the game and turned it into a competent game.
- Not something that I would call a great game or a truly epic example of the Battlefield franchise, but one that is still fun to play with friends nonetheless.
- And technically, the game is just about as popular as it's ever been right now.
- The daily concurrent players on Steam are topping out at over twenty thousand regularly, which is quite healthy for any game in the franchise, let alone the game.
- This game might have died off early, but the playerbase came back and is having an extremely strong tail end of players that I would say rivals just about any other game in the franchise.
- I remember Battlefield IV hanging around the seventeen K concurrent and stuff like that, and it was still a widely loved and played game.
- And the game's journey is very reminiscent of Battlefield V. Just as the game begins to get good again, DICE pivots to the next title.
- which unfortunately makes a lot of financial sense for the company, but it's always disappointing when the game feels like it just had a lot more life to give.
- Thus is the AAA game development life cycle, which is such a weird juxtaposition to indie games or even games as a service where they're just trying to make the games last as long as possible and add as much quality and content to them.
- Now, regarding Battlefield VII or whatever the next game is going to be called, we do have some more leaks thanks to our old buddy Tom Henderson.
- Allegedly, the game is going to be between NATO and a very large private military.
- So I would imagine that that means the tech and weapons will be somewhat within the same realm.
- And I wouldn't be surprised if the private military is similar to, say, the Wagner Group, but with just, say, a different name or aesthetics to avoid game politics.
- And honestly, that sounds fine to me.
- It doesn't really matter too much.
- EA is of course playing it safe.
- They sell games to many markets and want to maximize their sales and opportunities, so they do what they need to do to make sure that China and Russia aren't a faction in the war.
- It's silly, but it's also just what you get with AAA game development these days.
- I wonder if they'll have Kevin Spacey be the PMC boss.
- I'm of course making a COD joke, as that franchise has already dried up the well of potential creativity within the PMC wars.
- Honestly, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, I think it was called, was one of my favorite CODs, which is the unpopular opinion these days perhaps, but it was the one that felt the least like COD.
- The franchise took some major risks for it.
- They paid the price.
- And maybe that's the lesson of the AAA industry.
- You sway too far from your baseline, the base product that people like, and you get less sales and lots of backlash.
- Now back on Battlefield, this whole connected universe term seems to keep popping up from EA whenever they're talking about the new Battlefield projects.
- I'm not exactly sure what connected universe means.
- It could mean that they are having interconnected stories between characters, between titles, or that they're making hybrid games where the single players, the battle royales, and the classic multiplayers are all part of the same universe narratives, but come as separate packages perhaps.
- My guess is that they're going to be doing a little bit of both, which is basically copying what COD is doing.
- What will COD do is probably one of the more common boardroom meetings when it comes to deciding what to do with your major FPS project these days.
- Call of Duty has been connecting its stories and characters for years, so I'm sure someone at EA is like, wow, we need some of that.
- So perhaps that is what interconnected means.
- Then again, the more character like specialist from the year of the game created massive backlash, so hopefully Vince Zampella, one of the creators of Call of Duty, who is now heading the Battlefield project, has more sense than to just keep making Battlefield more like COD.
- We will just have to wait and see.
- I've personally found most of Battlefield's narrative characters to be pretty forgettable, with maybe Battlefield one having some of the more likable ones.
- But modern military characters usually replace any sort of personality with just macho military talk, and it's hard to get dimensionality when everyone is just barking orders or saying incoming fire, get down, that kind of stuff.
- They often get bogged down with cliches and more or less unrelatable aspects.
- And as much as the Bad Company games managed to get out of those stereotypes a bit, it doesn't sound like EA is rebooting the Bad Company franchise anytime soon.
- Now, assuming that this NATO versus a large PMC group is a modern military game, I do think that that would be a very smart move for the franchise.
- Considering we haven't had an authentically modern Battlefield game since...
- Well, Battlefield IV, which is basically forever ago at this point.
- I do hope they evolve things in interesting ways.
- A while back I made a video about some new ideas for how to make conquest more interesting and improve the game with some more modern integrations that people expect from reactive and dynamic games.
- Not that I was expecting EA to watch the video and take notes or anything, but I made it more as an exercise to show that you can keep an old classic formula while still improving and fixing things with it that make it feel more like a modern concept and less dated.
- I'd be curious to hear what you guys think about the next Battlefield game potentially being a BFIV sequel.
- Do you think we're in for another golden era of the Battlefield franchise, or is this a dangerous step for EA to be taking?
- Let me know in the comments, and if you enjoyed this video, leave me a like, subscribe for more content, like it, hit that notification bell to beat the YouTube algorithm with me, and up next, check out honestly one of the most impressive mods I've ever seen for a game, and that game is Minecraft.
- I think you'll enjoy this crazy video.
- As always guys, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.
- This is LevelCap, signing off.
