If you’ve been keeping up with Battlefield, you’ll be aware of EA’s plans to hold invite-only playtests for the series’ next instalment as it seeks to avoid the kind of disastrous response Battlefield 2042 received. And with the first of these now underway, it’s perhaps not a huge surprise to learn players are already ignoring their NDAs and leaking early gameplay online.
Pretty much all we know about the next Battlefield so far is that it’s set in the modern day, and will bring back traditional classes and more focused maps after the unpopular changes made in Battlefield 2042. Beyond that, it’s all speculation – although one sleuth scoured the new game’s concept art and identified landmarks suggesting it could be set in Gibraltar.
There’s so much still being kept under wraps, in fact, that it’s perhaps a surprise EA is willing to start playtests before anything close to a big reveal. But here we are, with the first phase of its Battlefield Labs initiative – described as the “most ambitious community testing program in franchise history” – now live. And despite participants needing to sign an NDA before they can get involved, gameplay is already popping up in various corners of the internet.
Inevitably, EA is now embroiled in a game of whack-a-mole as far as the leaked gameplay is concerned, but plenty still lingers. Most of the footage surfaced so far consists of multiplayer sessions in Conquest mode, all playing out across the narrow, criss-crossing streets of what appears to be a North African city, and featuring plenty of environmental destruction.