Electronic Arts is already prepping for the next Battlefield game even though Star Wars: Battlefront hasn't released yet. The next game in the popular modern military series is set to arrive in 2016, although EA didn't specify a window or a date for the arrival of the next first-person shooter.
IGN picked up the news from Electronic Arts' latest quarterly financials, where the company rolled out the stats and details on their financial performance for the year so far. In an investor call, CFO, Blake Jorgensen, stated that the next Battlefield game was inbound for 2016, saying...
What we've said is that our intention over the next couple of years is to have a first-person shooter as one of the core titles. This year, obviously, it's Star Wars Battlefront. Next year, it's another Battlefield title.
This comes off the very shaky release of Battlefield: Hardline, which originally came onto the scene in 2014 to a lot of negative feedback from gamers. EA and Visceral Games took time to refine the title after a less-than-enthusiastic response to the summer beta test, and they proceeded to modify the pace of the game and fix up the play mechanics to better represent a faster, more dynamic Battlefield experience.
When the second beta test for the game came around the feedback was a lot more positive, even though there were still gamers not quite convinced that Battlefield: Hardline was a proper entry to the Battlefield series.
Interestingly enough, after the game launched there were some stats rolled out to show that despite Visceral Games and EA attempting to rectify the game's poor public perception, more players still flocked to DICE's Battlefield 4 over Hardline, as reported by Battlefield 4 Central.
The general gist was that Battlefield: Hardline was a cash-in game – a game that was built on the foundation of DLC but was hiked up in price to match a full retail release. Others felt that the game was taking advantage of the 2014 militarized police propaganda that flooded the news. It was kind of a mixing pot of bad vibes for Hardline, but it was still respected enough not to get completely dogpiled by gamers and critics alike.
EA and DICE are focusing on Star Wars: Battlefront at the moment aiming to get the game up and out by this fall. There are a lot of people excited for the game just the same as they are reluctant that it might be laden with microtransactions and DLC. There are also worries about the quality of the game's modes and the richness of the content. Some fear that DICE didn't have enough time to fully flesh the game out after EA got a hold of the license.
Of course, this instantly puts the most obvious question on the table: if DICE is working on Star Wars: Battlefront and Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, then who is working on this newest Battlefield game?
Hopefully EA doesn't have DICE stretched too thin and hopefully next year's Battlefield title isn't rushed to the market, but I know both of those are long shots.
