Battlefield 1

Battlefield developer DICE is currently testing a battle royale mode for this year's Battlefield V.

2018's Battlefield game will be set in World War 2, a new Venturebeat report states.

DICE, it's easy to forget in all the kerfuffle that's surrounded the developer in recent months following the Star Wars Battlefront 2 debacle, can still craft a damn fine shooter. When the parts align - when you're sprinting between falling masonry on Battlefield 1's depiction of the western front, as a Sopwith Camel buzzes overhead and a Saint Chamond tank churns over the hills on the far horizon - it's still capable of making some of the most dramatic and spectacular shooters around.

BioWare's Anthem will now launch in spring 2019, EA has said, confirming recent reports of a delay.

Except it's not a delay, EA boss Andrew Wilson explained to company investors in a call last night (transcribed by Seeking Alpha). The game was progressing "well", but was being given "some free air".

"The first thing about Anthem is regardless of kind of how it's being portrayed, we are not looking at that as a delay in the game," Wilson said. "We've chosen to launch Anthem in Q4 and the date is really determined by portfolio of balancing consideration not for product readiness reasons. It's tracking well on its development milestones. We are really confident of its ship date."

Read more

Earlier this week, a YouTube video sparked reports that Battlefield Bad Company 3 would launch in 2018.

Some good news from the world of Battlefield 1: the Nivelle Nights map is coming to all players, developer DICE has announced.

Battlefield 1's big October patch comes out today and promises various improvements to gameplay, new Dog Tags and new gameplay settings, but the headline addition is it lets players browse servers for the fan-favourite Operations mode. This should make it much quicker and easier to start an Operations match.

DICE confirmed the news on Twitter (patch notes will be revealed this evening).

Battlefield 1's multiplayer will be down for two hours today, in order to deploy the latest patch. The update is automatic and downtimes are as follows:

Read more

Xbox Live Gold members on Xbox One can play Battlefield 1 for free this weekend with Xbox Live Gold's Free Play Days.

Battlefield games have been wrestling with size for a little while. Mostly, it's worn as a badge of honour - grand battles, giant maps, The Great War - and mostly that's fair. But it does lead to some problems. A death timer is replaced with a long trudge through empty, expansive desert or mud; the front line - quite important in a game based on years of static trench warfare - is often more of a swirling carousel of capture-and-forget control points; and the best work of your crack squad can, at times, feel like a churning, futile struggle to make waves in a 64-man ocean (although that kind of existential doubt is at least fitting for the setting).

Battlefield 1's next expansion, In the Name of the Tsar, comes out 19th September on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, EA has announced.

According to a blog post on the Battlefield website, 19th September is when the expansion will be available to all players, but Premium Pass owners get it two weeks earlier, on 5th September.

In the Name of the Tsar includes six new maps, new weapons, new vehicles, the new Supply Drop mode, the Hussars and the Russian Army. The DLC also adds the game's first female multiplayer character.

Read more

A five-versus-five mode is finally coming to Battlefield 1. Incursion, as it's known, goes into closed alpha next month and you can register for it on the Battlefield 1 website now. The alpha is for Origin on PC only.

Battlefield 1 is now free to download from Origin and EA Access.

The Battlefield series has had perks, or specialisations, for some time. Battlefield 3 and 4 had them, but Battlefield 1 launched without them. Now, 10 months after the game came out, they're about to be slotted into Battlefield 1.

Battlefield 1's Community Test Environment (CTE) is now available for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One users.

Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1 will join the EA Access vault later this month, the publisher has announced.

Battlefield 1 Premium Trials begins this month.

Battlefield 1 publisher EA has announced the game's first female multiplayer character, to be added via upcoming expansion In The Name of the Tsar.

Battlefield's global community manager Dan Mitre shared our first look at the fighter on Twitter last night. The unnamed soldier will be part of the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death.

The all-female squad was formed in real life in 1917, and was one of several such battalions from Russia to be involved in the war.

Read more

It's no secret the video game industry is trending towards digital, with an increasing percentage of console game sales coming from downloads each year.

But for EA, that trend is moving faster than it predicted.

In a financial call last night, EA predicted the industry will end 2017 probably above 40 per cent for full-game downloads. If correct, it means we're hurtling towards that magical 50 per cent milestone.

Read more

It sounds like EA's decision to take Battlefield to World War 1 worked out - the game's had over 19 million players.

Battlefield 1 developer DICE recently switched to a monthly update schedule for its WW1 shooter, and as part of this it's unveiled a new multiplayer map and teased future changes to the game.

The new map is Prise de Tahure, which is set in the autumn after the Nivelle Offensive. Here's the official blurb, from DICE:

Prise de Tahure sees French troops desperately holding on to re-captured heights in the Butte-de-Tahure region. The frontline trench networks cut right through several villages facing obliteration from the constant skirmishing between German stormtroopers and French raiders. This is a war of attrition. Adaptability and tactics are the means to wear your adversary down.

Read more

Battlefield 1 Premium subscribers will soon be able to share their access to extra maps with friends.

Yesterday I posted a couple of videos showcasing Battlefield 1's first DLC drop, They Shall Not Pass.

To say that people were annoyed about EA leaving the French out of Battlefield 1's multiplayer is really something of an understatement. The French army played a huge part in World War 1 and many people felt it was unfair to carve them out of history and serve them up as premium DLC at a later date.

Battlefield 1's Season Pass has been detailed, some four months since EA started selling it for £39.99, with the four expansions bringing 16 new maps and 20 new weapons to DICE's shooter.

The first, We Shall Not Pass, has been thinly detailed before, introduces the French army and encounters in Verdun, a tank assault on the banks of the Aisne river as well as the more enclosed backdrop of Fort de Vaux.

Next up will be In the Name of the Tsar, which will bring the Russian army into the fray. It's a snow-themed expansion, and will be followed by Turning Tides which will have its focus on naval warfare. Finally there's Apocalypse, which will explore some of the war's most infamous battles.

Read more

Battlefield 1's incoming winter update will be introducing a new way to earn XP, with ribbons being awarded for in-game feats.

Alongside the feature - which is returning from older Battlefield games - the class levels are having their cap raised from 10 to 50, and it's now possible to vote on maps at the end of a match.

They're the headline additions in a fairly significant update for Battlefield 1. You can have a look at the more minor details over on the Battlefield blog, and the changes are all paving the way for the first big DLC update for Battlefield 1, They Shall Not Pass, which is due next month.

Read more

Ahead of the launch of Battlefield 1, developer DICE was criticised for not including the French as a playable army given, well, the French played a pretty big role in World War 1. Well, they're set to arrive in the game in March 2017 as DLC.

They Shall Not Pass is the first Battlefield 1 expansion, and it includes, as you'd expect, new maps, weapons and the playable French army faction.

In a post on Battlefield.com, DICE said the DLC aims to recreate the Battle of Verdun, one of the largest and longest battles of World War 1. Relentless shelling created massive forest fires around the fortified city, which the developers aim to feature in its maps.

Read more

War. It's changing! Battlefield 1 is getting a sizeable update tomorrow, with the release of a map as well as the introduction of a spectator mode and a new custom game option being folded in which restricts players to their faction's standard issue rifles.

UPDATE 16/11/16 10:02am: We've seen reports and discussion of reduced performance on PlayStation 4 Pro since the introduction of patch 1.04 yesterday, leading to speculation that the Pro features are disabled in the new update. Temporal anti-aliasing has been been tweaked, but we can rule out the disabling of Pro enhancements as our data is taken from the game running the 1.04 update. We've also just re-ran a small section of campaign tests and see no obvious impact to performance.

Original story: Battlefield 1 running on PlayStation 4 Pro offers a tangible performance advantage over standard PS4 owners, potentially offering a gameplay advantage to owners of Sony's upgraded console hardware. In our tests, there's anything up to a 47 per cent frame-rate advantage in scenarios where the Frostbite engine is under the greatest stress.

We came away impressed with the PS4 Pro enhancements to the Frostbite engine when we tested campaign mode a few days back, but the lingering question was just how much the performance advantage would fold into the multiplayer game. Increased frame-rate means lower latency, meaning crisper response as well as a smoother experience. This offers a tangible advantage to Pro players, seen at its peak in 64-player games, where the Battlefield 1 engine typically faces its toughest processing challenges.

Read more

"Those who have not tasted his superbly creative bad taste are traitors." That's Salvador Dali, talking about the Sagrada Familia, which means that I've been looking things up on Wikipedia, which in turn means that this is the Eurogamer Podcast, where we talk about games, games, games! And my recent holiday in Barcelona. Have you been? You should definitely go. I had a wonderful time, and then I was quite brisk with an uppity lady at Gatwick, but hopefully Chris Bratt will edit that bit out.

DICE's Frostbite engine now powers a great majority of Electronic Arts' internally developed game - a state-of-the-art piece of technology that has strongly delivered cutting-edge experiences on key franchises including Battlefield, FIFA, Need for Speed and the upcoming Mass Effect. With some of the sharpest rendering engineers in the business working on the technology, we expected big improvements bearing in mind Pro's big GPU boost. By and large, we haven't been left down.

We'll begin with the 'easy one'. FIFA 17's PlayStation 4 Pro upgrade is impressive - not especially so in terms of visual features, but certainly for its prodigious increase to base resolution. The 1080p framebuffer from the standard PlayStation 4 version gets an uncompromised lift to native 4K - no upscaling, no checkerboarding, no temporal super-sampling. The end result is that an already clean and crisp title receives an even great boost to visual clarity.

However, FIFA's ineffectual anti-aliasing solution remains in effect at 4K. Edge and specular shimmer at 1080p is reduced owing to the higher pixel density, but it's still visible owing to the high contrast aesthetic. We did most of our testing on a 40-inch Samsung KU6400, which possesses a remarkably high pixel density, but the aliasing is still plain to see - it'll even show up in the video below. 1080p users at least get this image down-sampled, so it's less of an issue, but Frostbite's excellent temporal anti-aliasing would have helped here.

Read more

UPDATE: EA has offered the following comment on the issue. "We would like to apologise for any offense caused by content in the last 24 hours posted on the @Battlefield Twitter account," comes the official response. "It did not treat the World War 1 era with the respect and sensitivity that we have strived to maintain with the game and our communications."

Green Man Gaming users are have complained about receiving broken Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1 keys.

EA temporarily blocked Origin for everyone in Myanmar.

Battlefield 1 combines the technical spectacle of the Frostbite engine with a return to the large-scale environmental destruction that made the Bad Company titles so popular. It's one of the most significant upgrades for the series since it arrived on current-gen consoles, and DICE backs this up with a range of technical improvements across all platforms. The core technology is immediately familiar, but visual effects are considerably ramped up with lighting, post-processing and particle effects taking centrestage.

The console versions also get a noticeable boost in resolution that immediately provides better image quality over previous Battlefield games, while still allowing the developer to target 60fps gameplay. For the console releases, PlayStation 4 has the edge here, although when it comes to performance, Xbox One hands in a better experience with higher frame-rates under load. It's an interesting situation that essentially requires owners of both platforms to prioritise either image quality or performance, particularly when playing online.

In previous Battlefield titles, both consoles operate at fixed framebuffers below the desired native 1080p resolution. The PS4 version runs at 900p, while on Xbox One this was lowered to 720p. However, in Battlefield 1 both consoles now operate using a dynamic framebuffer, adjusting rendering resolution according to load. The baseline resolution comes in at around 1000p on PS4, dropping down to 900p, with pixel counts adjusting up and down in smaller increments. By comparison, resolution on Xbox One stabilises at 900p, falling to 720p in demanding scenes. This leads to a consistently sharper image on PS4, where intricate texture details resolve more cleanly. In fact, at 1000p the presentation often looks very similar to a native 1080p image.

Read more

Scratch beneath DICE's shooters and you'll often find a weird and wonderful world of strange, convoluted and long-running easter eggs.

Battlefield 1 is off to a strong sales start: in the UK it outsold the combined week one sales of Battlefield 4 and Hardline.

According to Chart-Track, which deals with physical sales only, Battlefield 1 week one sales came in just under those of Ubisoft's The Division.

Battlefield 1 is on Origin on the PC, so we don't have official concurrent player numbers, but according to bfstats.com, the shooter is extremely popular. At the time of publication 196,687 people are playing the game, but the 24 hour peaks hit a combined 800,000 across PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Read more

Happy Battlefield 1 launch day! Wait, what do you mean it was earlier this week? Hang on, what do you mean people have been playing it since last week? Oh video games, you are so silly with your early unlocks and special editions and getting people to pay £20 to play a few days early. Back in my day all you had to do was ask the man at the shop nicely and he'd slip you a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 a few days before release.

Battlefield's best stories have always been found when there are some 63 others screaming mad by your side. Playing as the lone soldier holed up in the attic of a villa, wiping out an entire squad as they rush to take a capture point; manning the AA gun on a rocky island outlet and sending a fighter plane tumbling down into the rolling seas; or spotting the silhouette of a lone horseman appearing through the fog that has just crept upon a mortar-chewed village. These are tales worth retelling.

Battlefield 1

Publisher: EA

Read more

Happy Battlefield 1 Launch Day, folks! Or more accurately, Happy Battlefield 1 Early Adopters Day!

Battlefield 1 is indeed out today, but only for those die hard fans who shelled out extra cash in order to get the game three days before the general public.

I'll be diving into the game from 12.30pm, first on our Facebook page, where I'll be streaming half an hours worth of multiplayer.

Read more

You can play as a pigeon in Battlefield 1.

The Battlefield 1 EA Access trial has gone live a day early.

One of my favourite bugs in Battlefield 4 - heck who knows, maybe it was a feature - was its stubborn insistence that I never see too far beyond the first mission of its campaign. Each and every time I logged off of a session, the save would be wiped no matter what precautions I took. Even as DICE moved to clean up the rest of the mess that surrounded the game's launch, that problem remained. Months after I'd bought the game, and after hours of enjoying its increasingly brilliant multiplayer, the single-player was still effectively unplayable. It's quite possible it was deliberate. Perhaps DICE was simply ashamed of another mediocre Battlefield campaign.

EGX, the UK's biggest gaming show, has announced that Battlefield 1 was voted Game of the Show by attendees, beating out big-hitters Dishonored 2 and Final Fantasy 15.

EA has released a new video for Battlefield 1 that shows off the campaign for the first time.

EA and Origin Access subscribers can play Battlefield 1 early, as you'd expect.

EA DICE has confirmed the maps and modes that will be in Battlefield 1 at launch, 21st October 2016.

The Battlefield 1 maps

Ballroom Blitz

Read more

Battlefield 1 developer DICE has detailed the PC technical specs you'll need to play its upcoming World War 1 shooter.

EA may just have a hit on its hands - Battlefield 1's beta was played by a staggering 13.2 million people between 30th August and 8th September.

To put that amount in perspective, let's take a look at other big-name open betas. Destiny's beta had 4.6m players. The Division had 6.4m. Star Wars Battlefront had 9.5m.

EA trumpeted the figure to fans today and named it the most successful EA beta in history.

Read more

UPDATE 4/10/16: Following on from its announcement of the Battlefield 1 military green Xbox One S, Microsoft has today confirmed launch plans for the snazzy Storm Grey and cool Deep Blue Xbox One S paint jobs.

Let's start with the horses, because that's where the magic can really be found in Battlefield 1. That's where you stop and stare and think to yourself oh my how wonderful it is to be playing a video game in 2016, where you can see this noble beast's haunches flex and flow and where you feel that same sense of wonder those first laying their eyes on the work of Eadweard Muybridge must have felt all those years ago, because horses.

Horses really can be amazing things and Battlefield 1's steeds are up there with Agro and Epona as some of this medium's very best. And then, just as you're admiring the way your soldier's pouch bounces up and down by his side and every strap on his perfectly recreated uniform looks and moves like real leather, that's when you get snared on an innocuous looking pile of rubble while some preening edgelord with a sniper rifle kills you for the 16th time.

Battlefield 1's kind of all over the place at the moment, which is totally fine of course. The open beta is, as its name suggests, a beta. This isn't the finished article, designed in part to help stress test those servers - the 900k concurrent players the game's enjoyed at points since it came out last week are making sure they're being properly stressed - and there's plenty of work to be done before its final release towards the end of October. It's broken, but there's time to fix it.

Read more

Battlefield 1's open beta is to come to an end this Thursday, the game's official Twitter account has announced.

The open beta has been running since August 30th on Xbox One, PC and PS4, giving players a taste of two game modes on a single map, Sinai Desert. Players taking part in the beta who log in on four separate days and reach level 15 are awarded with a dog tag in the final release of Battlefield 1, which is due on October 21st.

We've been enjoying the beta - I'll have some short impressions on the site in a bit - and DICE has already made tweaks, removing the timer on Conquest mode that was bugging some players. Elsewhere, DICE is inviting feedback on the beta in its official forums - so if you've any requests, let your voice be heard, and if you've any questions our Battlefield 1 beta guide can hopefully help.

Read more

Battlefield 1's open beta launched yesterday, although many players have been left unable to connect to the game's servers.

EA's Origin online service fell over last night, the first evening the beta was live - although it doesn't sound like EA was at fault.

The company's online services have reportedly been targeted and brought down by a DDOS attack. A hacking group which has caused similar trouble in the past has claimed responsibility.

Read more

Battlefield 1 is back and this time it's brought horses!

Yup, the Battlefield 1 beta is now open to all, and because I played the closed alpha on PS4, I thought I'd mix things up a bit and play 90 minutes of the Xbox One build for today's stream.

The open beta includes a brand new map, Sinai Desert, and features a gigantic armoured train along with some view-obscuring sandstorms and lots of lovely horses to ride.

Read more

There will be some bamboozling pro Counter-Strike: Global Offensive action at EGX in Birmingham next month as Gfinity flies-in four of the best teams in the world to compete for $100,000.

EA's Origin platform has jumped the gun and revealed some of the innards of Battlefield 1's £39.99 Premium Pass.

Guns, balls, robots. It's all here from 6.15pm.

DICE has opened up about the unique role horses will play in Battlefield 1.

UPDATE 31/08/2016: 10:43am: The Battlefield 1 Open Beta is now available to download for all users on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

It follows one day of early access for those who signed up via EA's Battlefield Insider programme.

You can grab the beta from the PlayStation Store, Xbox Live, or direct from the Origin client. Download sizes range between 6.2GB and 7.10GB, depending on the platform.

Read more

Battlefield, a series famed for its multiplayer battles and not its ropey stories, will be turned into a television show. Anonymous Content, the company responsible for hit TV series True Detective, will be in charge, collaborating with Paramount and EA to make it happen.

Announced just two months ago, Battlefield 1 is now available to select users in alpha form across all three major gaming platforms. In typical DICE fashion, what we have here feels like a genuine alpha test as opposed to a marketing demo so of course, you can expect some rough edges. We've spent time with the PC version already but, now that the console version is out in the wild, we've been able to put all three versions to the test. The results are certainly interesting.

Oh it's so lovely to be back in wartime France. There's something reassuringly familiar about the stomping grounds of Battlefield 1's closed alpha, and the St. Quentin Scar map that's at the heart of it all: in those gentle French hills torn violently apart and in that bucolic village that's soon reduced to rubble there's something of Call of Duty 2's Carentan, and even if the clock's been wound back a few decades it's a little reminder of an era of first-person shooters that was thought lost.

Well, well, well, what a surprise. Yesterday, all coverage of Battlefield 1's closed alpha was locked up tight under a super strict NDA which prevented us from even talking about our experiences with it.

Some Battlefield 1 fans think there will be a pigeon mode in DICE's World War 1 shooter.

We've already seen plenty of Battlefield 1 footage emerge from this year's E3. Martin and I had a good old natter over a bunch of gameplay last week and by now I'm pretty sure everyone has watched the 45 minute long, celebrity-filled Let's Play that features Snoop Dogg smoking a funny-looking cigarette and a very red-eyed Zac Efron.

So far Conquest has been the only mode shown publicly but, during our hands-on session at E3, I was able to play and capture another Battlefield favourite - Domination.

Below you'll find 22 minutes of Domination mode gameplay - that's three full matches - all taking place on a smaller version of the St. Quentin Scar map already shown in Conquest mode.

Read more

Battlefield 1 has been extensively data-mined during the closed alpha that is currently running for a select few players, revealing what would seem to be every major detail about DICE's forthcoming period shooter. And I mean everything - so if you don't want the game spoilt for you it might be best to turn your head and look away.

Redditor Lobix300 has compiled a comprehensive list that makes some revealing claims about the shooter - namely that it'll feature 10 multiplayer maps and what looks like seven game modes, with Battlefield favourites such as Rush and Conquest joined by seemingly new modes such as Possession and Breakthrough.

The number of maps would make some sort of sense, seeing as Battlefield 4 also launched with 10 maps. Battlefield 1's selection seems to take in the entire theatre of battle, and joining St. Quentin's Scar - the map that's been detailed in what we've seen of the game so far - are what seems to be various other locales. The filenames below give a fair indication of what to expect.

Read more

DICE's decision to go back to WWI for its latest Battlefield looks to have been complemented by a wealth of historical research and a neat line in authenticity, as chronicled by a recent and quite fascinating video detailing all the real-life artifacts that have made their way into the game.

Coming up to three years after its release, DICE continues to tweak and fine-tune Battlefield 4, with an all-new user interface that will make it easier for players to partner up in squads and to find maps and modes.

Battlefield 1's multiplayer modes leave out two key World War 1 countries: France and Russia.

Battlefield 1, in case you had any doubt, is shaping up to be a fine video game, even if it's a very familiar one. EA afforded us the chance to play it before the publisher's E3 showcase, granting a quick 15-minute blast across the new map St. Quentin's Scar in Battlefield's trademark Conquest mode, with a full complement of 64 players. It's a very impressive-looking game, bringing a heightened level of physicality to the series as players burst through doors or seamlessly transition into vehicles, and a new level of destruction as whole villages are levelled through the course of a match.

UPDATE: Want to see more? Here's 45 minutes of Battlefield 1 multiplayer gameplay footage, as played by celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Zac Efron and Jamie Foxx earlier today. What is that in Snoop Dogg's mouth? How well is he playing? Who cares. Look at those skyboxes and those ruins!

We're heading to a special Battlefield 1 capture event at E3 this week where we'll record our own much higher-quality footage for you.

ORIGINAL STORY:Dice showed off all new gameplay footage of Battlefield 1 at EA's E3 2016 press conference moments ago.

Read more

When a game partners with a console you don't own, does that put you off the game?

EA's development chief initially rejected the World War 1 setting for the next Battlefield because he thought it wouldn't be fun.

Less than a week since its reveal, Battlefield 1 now has the best-rated trailer across the whole of YouTube.

That statistic covers games, TV shows and movies. After six days, it boasts a colossal view count of 26m, with 1.3m upvotes and 24k down.

To put that in perspective, compare those figures with the official reveal trailer for Captain America: Civil War. It has had five months to notch up 55m views, with 348k upvotes and 10k downvotes.

Read more

In last night's EA financial splurge we learned that Titanfall 2 will release alongside Battlefield 1 this autumn. Both have very different settings but both are shooters with a emphasis on multiplayer.

A couple of years ago I was dozing in front of the TV when I woke to see a spaceship on fire. In actual fact, it was a zeppelin, vast and menacing, presented via a slightly dodgy cable channel special effect, and it was on fire because of the plucky Brits. When German zeppelins raided England in the First World War, the slightly dodgy cable channel documentary explained, they were grim agents of terror, ghosting over the channel at night, flinging their bombs and leaving devastation, death and a profound sense of national violation behind them. For a while, there was no counter, either, until people started to think about the flammable gases that kept the zeppelins afloat. Could that be the key?

Last week EA unveiled Battlefield 1, DICE's new first-person shooter, with an explosive new trailer. It takes the series to World War 1, a war that saw the old clash with the new. So, from the muddy, mustard gas filled trenches we'll see sword fights and bayonet charges and horse combat alongside tank battles, swooping biplanes and warships.

EA has officially announced the next Battlefield game as the World War 1-based Battlefield 1.

UPDATE 06/05/2016 9.10pm: EA has officially announced the next Battlefield game as the World War 1-based Battlefield 1.

UPDATE 06/05/2016 5.12pm: A new piece of Battlefield marketing material has leaked suggesting an 18th October release date.

As seen below, the ad says pre-order customers will receive the Hellfighter Pack, which is based on the Harlem Hellfighters, the first African-American infantry regiment to enlist for World War One. They also wore capes.

Read more

Battlefield 5 will be unveiled tonight at 9pm UK time, via a trailer posted online.