All wars have to finish eventually—probably, I'm no expert—and it looks like Battlefield 5 is no exception, with DICE now planning on sending it to a lovely farm where it can live out the rest of its days just chilling out. There will still be special events and some smaller updates, but it looks like this is the beginning of the end for the multiplayer shooter.
Chapter 6, which sent players Into the Jungle, will be concluding on April 29, but there's still one more standalone update to come, expected out in June. It's going to chuck new weapons, game tweaks and nebulous "content" into the mix. DICE is also working on updates for its custom community games. Senior producer Ryan McArthur notes that the team is still dealing with the shift to working from home, however, so keep an eye out for progress updates in case things change.
While details on the final update are vague, DICE shared a screenshot of a new map, which appears to be set in Libya, judging by the filename.
So that's the future of Battlefield 5, but what about the series? Neither EA or DICE have hinted where it will be going next, though we do know that there are plans for the series. In October last year, CEO Andrew Wilson told investors that the next Battlefield would appear during its 2022 fiscal year, which begins in April 2021.
These plans may have changed, of course. Back in 2019, Wilson implied that Battlefield 5 still had plenty to offer, teasing its Pacific theatre and adding that the team was thinking about how it could go forward. And now six months later it's winding down. This was also before developers ended up having to work from home, so who knows where that's left the next Battlefield?
Unexpectedly, it's the previously maligned Star Wars Battlefront 2 that's had a longer tail. It launched earlier, in 2017, and the furore over its business model threatened to bury it. Instead, it was overhauled and EA instituted some pretty significant changes across the board, not just in Battlefront, and it's grown into a great shooter. This year it returned to the original trilogy and there's been no indication that there won't be more to come.
