The next Battlefield promises a return to the Call of Duty competitor’s “core” after 2021's futuristic sequel drove many longtime fans away. The man in charge, longtime Respawn head Vince Zampella, cites Battlefield 3 and 4 as the peak of the series that the currently untitled Battlefield 6 will be chasing.
“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,” he said in a new interview with IGN. “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.”
Zampella, who was the head of Infinity Ward back when Call of Duty: Modern War 1 and 2 exploded, listed a few features players can expect from the next game, and most of them sound like reactions to what people didn’t like about Battlefield 2042. In addition to being set in the current day, the next Battlefield will ditch 128-player maps for 64 player ones, and move back to standard class loadouts rather than custom specialists that have more of a hero shooter feel about them with their unique perks.
“So I wasn’t there for 2042,” he told IGN. “I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new. You have to applaud that effort. Not everybody liked it, but you got to try things. It didn’t work. It didn’t fit. Specialist will not be coming back. So classes are kind of at the core of Battlefield, and we’re going back to that.”
There’s still no set release date for the next Battlefield, which I’m going to keep calling Battlefield 6 until EA announces otherwise. Zampella hinted at a community testing program coming in 2025 for the game, but it’s still not clear exactly what will return the series to the juggernaut it once was. Earlier this year, EA announced a Battlefield universe that sounded a lot like the sequel-spanning microtransaction machine that is Call of Duty: Warzone.
Battlefields used to come out roughly every two years. No Battlefield in 2025 would put the next game on the series’ longest development timeline in over a decade. “The core Battlefield players know what they want,” Zampella said. “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.”