EA Speaks on Next Battlefield Game

It’s been over two years since the release of the latest Battlefield installment, and fans are eager to learn more about what’s coming next. The Battlefield series has been almost synonymous with destruction since Battlefield: Bad Company. However, Battlefield 2042 focused much more on map-specific extreme weather events like sandstorms and tornadoes. Now, it seems the next installment will focus on destruction more than ever before.

A New Focus on Destruction

Internet sleuths have discovered new information from a job listing for a VFX Director at Ripple Effect. Ripple Effect, formerly known as DICE LA, rebranded back in July 2021. It is one of the main developers of the franchise alongside DICE itself. According to the job listing, the VFX Director will help develop the 'most realistic and exciting destruction effects in the industry’. This suggests that the next installment will focus on destruction more than ever before.

A Challenge to the Industry

Some Battlefield fans have taken this to be a sort of challenge to the former colleagues who left DICE and founded Embark Studios to build The Finals. The popular free-to-play competitive multiplayer first-person shooter features excellent destruction. This destruction has the added benefit of being server-based so that it can be exactly the same for everyone.

Embark Studios has said about their technology: “Server-side movement & destruction has been a holy grail in game development for a long time and we’re really proud to have made it a reality in The Finals.” This implies there’s a single truth for physics, for all players at the same time. It allows for physics-driven movement on indeterministic surfaces. It means that players can move at the same time on moving platforms, in a multiplayer setting. Or that you and your friends can experience being in the same collapsing house together, in sync.

The Challenge of Scale

Of course, The Finals has a significant advantage over Battlefield: it is very small-scale, featuring only four squads of three players each. That’s a total of twelve players in the same match, whereas Battlefield games have long allowed 64 or even 128 players to duke it out in the same session. Needless to say, having synchronized destruction for ten times as many players would be difficult. But perhaps that’s just what they are working on at DICE.

Looking to the Future

It’s probably a bit early still to expect any news. After all, franchise director Vince Zampella hinted future entries would be given more time to cook in the oven. It’s also going to be a multi-studio collaboration between DICE, Ripple Effect, Criterion, and Ridgeline Games.

The next Battlefield game, currently in the making at Electronic Arts, has the largest development team in the longstanding series. This suggests that the team is pulling out all the stops to make the next Battlefield game a truly memorable experience.

Stay tuned for more updates on the next Battlefield game. The future of the franchise looks promising, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store.