Battlefield 2042 Season 7 will be its last – Motive Studio founds new Battlefield team

thesixthaxis.com:

EA and DICE have confirmed that Season 7 of Battlefield 2042 will be its last, with the companies looking forward to “what comes next” for the Battlefield franchise. That will no doubt be another big blockbusting online shooter, but Motive Studio will be creating a new team for Battlefield at their studio.

There will still be some ongoing development and support for Battlefield 2042, with new in-game challenges, events, modes, and ongoing maintenance for the foreseeable future. It feels like the next game from DICE is in full production and they want all hands on deck instead of throwing effort into an older game.

Battlefield 2042 launched in November 2021 to criticism from reviewers and fans alike. The game made bold moves to increase match sizes to 128-players, tried to introduce characters instead of classes, and more, but didn’t stick the landing with a buggy launch and some gameplay changes proving to be rather unpopular.

DICE has stuck with it though, and after stabilising the game as a whole, made changes in response to player feedback to reintroduce classes, rework maps, scale modes back in size or ditch them entirely and more. Season One was delayed significantly as they made that initial recovery effort, so the game has only received seven seasons across two and a half years.

It was in the immediate aftermath of Battlefield 2042’s launch that EA put Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella in control of the Battlefield franchise with the intention of creating a “connected universe”. That saw EA found Ridgeline Games with Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto leading the team in mid-2022. Then EA shut the studio in early 2024. Now there’s a new Battlefield team at Motive, with VGC having reported a few months ago that Criterion will now heading up the next single player Battlefield.

It will likely be a good while before we see anything out of either Motive or Criterion for Battlefield, though with this announcement for 2042, it could well be that EA is gearing up to announce