Battlefield Is Going Back To A ‘Narrative Campaign’

The last time the main Battlefield series dabbled with a proper campaign was all the way back in 2013, when Battlefield 4’s single-player dropped and underwhelmed pretty much anyone who laid hands on it.

I know Battlefields 1 & 5 also had some single-player stuff, but they were more of a tutorial, and I don’t ever want to talk about Battlefield Hardline ever again. So news that EA wants to return to the idea of some kind of Battlefield campaign is—bear with me here—nevertheless a welcome one for fans, because as undercooked as many of Battlefield’s stories have been, they’ve also been weirdly memorable? Like, I think about this Battlefield 3 mission a lot:

This one too. Neither of them are particularly memorable from a gameplay perspective, but they were still wonderful technical showcases to blast through a couple of times:

There’s also fondness for the Bad Company spin-off games. Anyway, earlier today the Battlefield team tweeted that there’s a new studio at work on “a narrative campaign” experience for the series, before having to quickly clarify that this is an all-new thing, and not a part of Battlefield 2042:

https://twitter.com/embed/status/1567912429534810114

Ridgeline Games, this new studio, is being led by Marcus Lehto, one of the co-creators of Halo, and an accompanying blog post says:

Marcus will bring his long legacy of creating fascinating worlds and gripping narratives to Battlefield. Backed by a world-class team, he’ll be leading the charge to develop a narrative campaign set in the Battlefield universe that will engage fans in new and exciting ways while remaining true to the classic elements of the series.

It’s funny that, for all the shit the game has eaten, Battlefield 2042 was perhaps the most fertile ground for a single-player experience in series history. Its vision of a climate-ravaged world, and armies made up of refugees fleeing the devastation, set it apart from the usual “US military vs [bad guys]” premise of most other modern shooters. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with instead, then, especially since they’re being so weird about calling it a “campaign experience” and not just “a new video game.”