Battlefield is going back to modern settings, ditching specialists, Vince Zampella confirms

We’ve known Battlefield has been cooking in the background for a while, and it seems players finally have something concrete to hope for. Vince Zampella, EA’s group GM, shared the first information regarding the upcoming Battlefield title, confirming it will have a modern setting and return to the franchise’s “core.”

He shared this and more in a Sept. 16 interview with IGN, and even threw in the first concept art for the game as a bonus. Zampella said the developers recognized the peak of Battlefield happened during the years of BF3 and 4, “where everything was modern.” Thus, he thinks the franchise should return to “the core of what Battlefield is.” Zampella also said making maps and player counts big for the sake of huge numbers “doesn’t make any sense,” and that the team is designing the upcoming game to be “more akin to previous Battlefields.”

“We’re testing everything around what’s the most fun,” Zampella said, later elaborating how he prefers “nice, dense, well-designed play spaces.

“Some of them are really good. I can’t wait for you to see some of them,” he added.

The biggest change from the previous entry is the removal of Specialists—one of the big culprits behind 2042‘s poor reception. Zampella believes the team at DICE “tried something new” with the Specialist formula that ultimately failed to deliver. “It didn’t work. It didn’t fit. Specialists will not be coming back. So classes are kind of at the core of Battlefield, and we’re going back to that,” he explained. The Specialist design turned Battlefield 2042 into a borderline hero shooter that played drastically different compared to its predecessors. It also took away from the immersion of all-out warfare, as seeing dozens of the same characters running around can be quite jarring.

Lastly, the Respawn founder said he doesn’t see 2042 as a failure, but that he’d like to have the upcoming title up, ready, and high-quality from the get-go, without the need to patch things up over time (though it will still be a “tremendous live-service“). “We want it to be good out of the gate,” he said.

So do we, Vince. So do we.