Though next year’s Battlefield: Hardline will introduce fans of the franchise to a cops-and-robbers scenario, EA has confirmed that Battlefield 5 will indeed return to a military setting.
That’s according to the publisher’s CFO Blake Jorgensen, who briefly touched upon the status of the next numerical entry in the series during the 2014 UBS Global Technology Conference — in fact, Jorgensen even went so far as to say that he’s seen an early build of the game, describing it as a “fun, new Battlefield.”
“That will be a return to a Battlefield military-style game; more to come on that,” he said.
Given that Battlefield 5 won’t grace shelves until late 2016, it’s an understandably vague quote. Still, it shows that Hardline has been built as a much-needed spin-off as opposed to a whole new direction. After all, EA has long made it clear that it doesn’t wish to annualize DICE’s series in the vein of Call of Duty, which positions Visceral Games’ Hardline — due for release in March, 2015 — as a means of preventing any onset of franchise fatigue.
As a matter of fact, in pushing the next blockbuster intallment to 2016, EA has carved out an opportune window of time for the release of Star Wars: Battlefront which, by arriving at the latter stages of 2015, will coincide with the debut of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Details are currently scare on the ground for Battlefield 5, but it should come as no surprise that EA have opted to return to the franchise’s military roots. It’s a milieu in which DICE thrives and if the success of these mainline titles warrants the creation of spin-offs like Hardline, then ardent fans of the monumental series may very well get the best of both worlds.