RALLY POINT

Why EA is razing Battlefield to its foundations in order to build something new

BY ALEX SPENCER

The singleplayer campaign follows a single Marine unit, Dagger 1-3

Game Battlefield 6

Developer/publisher EA (Battlefield Studios)

Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series

Release October 10

A/B 40°07'XX.X″N 73°09'XX.X" H

Each class comes with one predefined gadget plus two slots, and a perk on a ‘signature’ weapon. The Engineer, for example, has better hip-fire accuracy with SMGs.

Vehicles can become a mobile focal point for battles, not least since dead teammates can respawn on them.

Rebecka Coutaz joined DICE in November 2021, just two weeks after the launch of Battlefield 2042. “It’s crazy, when you come in like that, as the new GM of a studio, and you haven’t been on the journey of the previous game,” she says. “It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my career, for sure – but a joy as well.” Such a situation would be challenging no matter what the studio, no matter what the game. But by 2021, 2042’s journey had been anything but smooth.

At launch, the game was greeted by the worst reviews in series history, a precipitous dropoff from its immediate predecessors. It was a sentiment echoed by the players: at one point 2042’s Steam user reviews were among the ten worst on the entire platform, and within two months of release its player numbers had dropped below that of the already three-year-old Battlefield V.

“It was a difficult time,” Coutaz says. “We had a lot of expectations from the community and the players who have been with us for decades. So we owed some things to them – and, of course, to our teams as well.” Why the teams? “They were disappointed on Battlefield 2042, too. And, across all the studios, they did not want to allow this to happen again.”

One of the challenges that faced Coutaz was rescuing the game’s reputation. After seven seasons of DLC, and much tweaking, “the game is in a completely different state than when we released it,” she says proudly. “We still have a lot of players playing.” (The game has also clawed back its Steam rating to 48 per cent positive, while its average player count remains just behind that of BFV.) The importance of the mission to save 2042, though, was soon eclipsed by the question of where Battlefield would go next.

It’s not entirely clear at what point the development of Battlefield 6 began – “we never share the length [of time] that we have been working on a game,” Coutaz says when we ask. “But what I can say is, I was not the only one who came on board at that time.” She’s talking about Vince Zampella, the COD co-creator and Respawn chief who was appointed as the overall head of Battlefield weeks after 2042’s launch, and SVP Byron Beede, a former Destiny and COD exec at Activision who moved over earlier that year. It’s worth noting that, around the same time, EA hired Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto to lead Ridgeline, a new studio working on Battlefield’s singleplayer campaign; he departed early in 2024 and the studio was closed shortly afterwards – a development Coutaz is not willing to comment on.

These personnel changes are indicative of just how much EA is putting behind the new Battlefield. On a recent earnings call, CEO Andrew Wilson said EA was going “all-in as a company” on the game, and that more had been invested in it “than any Battlefield product before it”. In July, Ars Technica reported that the projected budget was “well north of” $400 million, which would put it among the most expensive game productions of all time.

Rebecka Coutaz, general manager, DICE & Criterion

Naturally, when we ask Coutaz about the scale of the project, she is tight-lipped: “I cannot share any numbers except the fact that we are four studios. You can imagine.” These four are Battlefield creator DICE, in Stockholm; its LA sibling, now rebranded as Ripple Effect Studios; veteran UK studio Criterion; and Motive, which before its remake of Dead Space collaborated with the other teams on Star Wars Battlefront II.