AL HAYAT - EA shooter 'Battlefield 6' to appear in October

Publisher Electronic Arts threw events for journalists and influencers in multiple locations around the world to announce the October 10 release date, hoping to stoke renewed hype for a flagging property.

"This is a new start" for the series whose beginnings stretch back to 2002, Damien Kieke, game design director at Swedish studio Dice, told AFP in Paris.

Long a beloved mass-combat format that AE says has won over 100 million players in the past two decades, "Battlefield" inexorably lost ground to "Call of Duty" over the years.

EA has acknowledged that the latest instalment, 2021's "Battlefield 2042", did not perform as well as hoped at release, without providing sales figures.

That puts pressure on the new game to perform, after occupying several hundred developers split across four studios worldwide for four years.

"We needed that firepower to recreate that feeling of total war," said Roman Campos-Oriola, creative director at Montreal studio Motive, which led work on the single-player campaign mode.

- 'Believable context' -

The story follows a near-future conflict in 2027, which sees the United States and allies fighting a tooled-up private army dubbed Pax Armata alongside several European former NATO countries.

"We came up with all this a few years ago, so if there's anything very close to today’s reality, it's a coincidence," Kieken said.

“We wanted a believable context to better immerse players” in the action, he added.

But the most addictive side of “Battlefield” has always been its online multiplayer option, which gives players free reign to fight on foot or in tanks, jets and helicopters across miles-wide maps.

Journalists from more than 30 outlets were invited to try out “Battlefield 6” in a room packed with PCs in Paris on Thursday, escorted by actors playing soldiers in full war gear.

The game offers hyper-realistic graphics to players on PC, Xbox Series and Playstation 5, as well as fully destructible environments that allow for tactics like demolishing structures with rocket launchers.

With dozens of players in each match, the games have typically rewarded good communication and strategy as much as mayhem, with teams cooperating to control objectives, eliminate enemies or infiltrate their opponent's home base.

The roster of locations available on launch will include the streets of Cairo, Gibraltar and Brooklyn as well as the mountains of Tajikistan.

Developers promise that they will add other game modes and battlefields in the wake of the release.

- Autumn showdown -

Where "Call of Duty" focuses on tighter, smaller skirmishes, Battlefield has always striven to paint on a more epic canvas.

It’s "this mix of large-scale battle, vehicles and squad-based gaming" that sets it apart, said Campos-Oriola.

Over the years, the series moved away from reproducing famous historical battles -- including in WWI, WWII and Vietnam -- towards fictional scenarios.

EA bosses will be hoping a return to the contemporary world featured in the third and fourth games dating back to the early 2010s will revive flagging sales.

The new release will go head-to-head in autumn with "Call of Duty: Black Ops 7", one of a long-rolling string of games in the franchise from Activision Blizzard, whose release date has yet to be revealed.

While dubbed "Battlefield 6", the new EA game is in fact the 10th in the series, which also includes several spin-off titles.

L.al-Mutairi--al-Hayat