Battlefield 2042’s fifth season won’t actually be its last

battlefield 2042 developer DICE announced this week, against all odds, that season five will not be the game’s final season. The developer confirmed in a Tweet that there will be one more season, simply called Season Six for now.

The timing of the announcement is quite interesting, and has broader implications for the future of the first-person shooter.

For starters, today marks the launch of the fifth season of Battlefield 2042, which was released earlier alongside a major 5.0 patch. As with all previous seasons, players get a new map at launch along with some new weapons, with a mid-season update featuring an overhaul of one of the game’s launch maps, as well as more additions to the game. game.

The Battlefield 2042 Year One Pass only promised four support seasons with identical content expectations for each. That ended with the fourth season, which added the ultimate specialist to the game. Season 5 was seen as DICE’s fix, a sort of last hurrah for the team to finish reworking the last of the game’s launch maps (thus fulfilling a promise to redesign them all), and perhaps deliver a few more weapons, and maps for the game.

Season five brings all of that, albeit without a new stuntman. Players expected that and DICE communicated it in advance, of course. The studio publicly moved away from the specialist system and recently reintroduced classes into the game. That was the only natural decision made after changing the focus from 128 players to 64.

DICE even hinted that the fifth season would be the game’s last by not talking about the future of Battlefield 2042 beyond it during a recent developer stream. In fact, with reports that development had been left to “a minimal team” – something EA disputed at the time – there wasn’t much hope the studio would go beyond the bare minimum.

It’s unclear how much new content players can really expect from Season 6, or if Battlefield 2042 will receive any support beyond that. He says the studio isn’t fully committing to a “year two” here. However, it is good news for players who are hoping that DICE will stick with the game longer and give them more to enjoy.

Although the post-launch maps have been very well received, the studio has only delivered one per season so far, so the cadence of content has been pretty poor, compared to previous Battlefield games, even the troubled Battlefield 5.

DICE has arguably restored most of the missing features in Battlefield 2042, or at least improved its new iterations enough that they fit thematically within what the series is known for. More work to make the game more aligned with Battlefield principles certainly wouldn’t hurt, so we’ll have to see.