The next Battlefield is modern day, ditches specialists, and some of us may get to play it early

EA has finally started talking about the next Battlefield in no uncertain terms. The project, which is aiming for release sometime in 2025, will bring the series back to its modern day roots. Apart from the setting, the next game will ditch the Specialists/hero characters, which debuted with Battlefield 2042.

EA also released the first piece of concept art for the game, showing clear Battlefield 4 inspirations.

The art, which EA revealed to IGN, doesn’t tell us much. You can see attack helicopters in the distance, and a city - seemingly somewhere in Europe - being ravaged by wildfires on one side and combat on the other.

Vince Zampella, who took over franchise leadership in 2021, following a restructuring that took place after the disappointing launch of Battlefield 2042, told IGN that the next Battlefield will be going back to basics, pointing out its Battlefield 3 and 4 inspirations.

“I mean, if you look back to the peak or the pinnacle of Battlefield, it's that Battlefield 3... Battlefield 4 era where everything was modern,” said Zampella. “And I think we have to get back to the core of what Battlefield is and do that amazingly well, and then we'll see where it goes from there. But I think for me, it's that peak of Battlefield-ness is in that Battlefield 3 and 4 days. So I think it's nostalgic for players, for me, for the teams even.”

Another element Battlefield 2042 tried experimenting with was expanding the maps and increasing player counts to 128 players, something that developer DICE eventually shifted away from and went back to the series’ well-established 64-player counts. While Zampella didn’t definitively say the next Battlefield will stick to 64, he strongly suggested that play spaces will be “more akin to previous Battlefields.”

The lessons DICE learned in bringing Battlefield 2042 back from the brink will be going into the development of the next game, too. Zampella stressed that it does not want a repeat of the 2042 launch. “We want it to be good out of the gate,” he said.

In pursuit of that goal, the developer plans to involve the community much earlier in the process and win the trust of the core fanbase back. Zampella said that we can expect opportunities to playtest the game next year; perhaps a revival of the Battlefield Community Test Environment, which served a key role in the development of Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1.

Interestingly, while the veteran executive and developer didn’t confirm rumours of a free-to-play, Warzone-like mode in the next Battlefield, he did say that one of the key goals of the next title is offering more than a single experience under the same banner.

“It's going in and expanding what Battlefield is,” he told IGN.

“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.”

We expect the next Battlefield to be revealed next year.