Battlefield has a complicated relationship with single-player campaigns. When Bad Company launched in 2008 for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, it felt like the series was blazing a bold new path for the genre alongside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Both embraced a modern setting: one revolves around scripted spectacle and rugged realism, the other opts for ironic personality and procedural destruction. We look back on them as shooter classics and it’s fascinating to see how EA’s flagship shooter has lost its way since then.
DICE has announced that Marcus Lehto – known for helping create Master Chief and the failed Disintegration – has been recruited to create a new single-player adventure in the Battlefield universe. We have no idea if this will be a new game, expansion or something completely different, all we know is that EA is back in the saddle and willing to take a few risks.
The mystery surrounding this new outing is exactly what makes it so exciting. Battlefield hasn’t had a traditional campaign since Battlefield 4, nor a decent one since the original Bad Company. The third and fourth entries were hopelessly harrowing images of modern conflict that did their utmost to mimic Call of Duty’s linear approach to spectacle, but only felt dry, predictable, and lifeless when it came down to it.
All of these campaigns were visually spectacular and pushed the boundaries of graphics technology at the time, with Battlefield 4 primarily a showcase for new consoles thanks to its lavish water effects and tailored approach to environmental destruction.
Still, all the extravagant explosions and scripted set pieces in the world couldn’t distract from predictable characters and storytelling, at the pace of a mediocre action blockbuster that no one bothered to see. That and the majority of players came to Battlefield for the multiplayer, so it was only a matter of time before EA dumped them completely.
War Stories was supposed to debut in Battlefield 1 and reappear in Battlefield 5, but this felt more like glorified tutorials disguised as short campaign missions than a true single-player experience. EA marketed them with a deeper focus on emotional connection, despite a lack of development and tragedy that were used to make us see tragic events in the real world in a new light. It could have worked, but in so many ways it felt like an afterthought. The real flesh was clearly in the multiplayer, so much so that Battlefield 2042 would abandon a campaign altogether. Prior to launch, there was a hope that this would result in a more polished online section with a lot more depth, but it was arguably more broken and unfinished than anything that came before it. So much so that it nearly killed the series in the eyes of the public, who would love a solo campaign right now to distract them from the obvious mediocrity of 2042. Oops.
That leaves us where we are now, and it looks like EA wants to revive what Battlefield was, rather than move forward with an existing vision that clearly isn’t working. As players, we care about live service progression and shooters to master with friends, but we also care about characters, stories, and worlds to potentially get lost in. 2042’s vision of the near future certainly has potential for story expansion, even more so if EA dares to explore the politics of a world brought on by a climate crisis and the global military powers that are emerging as a result. If not, just give us an action-packed epic that takes advantage of the series’ scope and scale. You’d find it hard to make us care about gruff soldiers and their murderous shennanigans, but you’d also be breaking new ground in the genre if you did.
Linear campaigns in blockbuster titles are not what they used to be. Everything must have a long tail or be connected to a live service, thus delivering a complete experience at launch that we can satisfy ourselves with are few. Not even Halo Infinite could handle this, as it paved the way for something much grander that we haven’t glimpsed yet. Is this the plan for Battlefield, or is EA going back to old times in response to the recent mistakes of 2042? There’s no way of knowing, but that unease makes it all the more intriguing.
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