BATTLEFIELD 5 MAY GO BACK IN TIME TO WW1

And could be due in October.

Here’s an interesting titbit from the weekend - it looks like a listing from a German retailer has revealed some interesting secrets about the next Battlefield game.

It’s a pretty sure bet a Battlefield game of some kind was going to drop this year. EA, like many companies with a big tentpole franchise, now depends on yearly releases - for better or worse. Last year was the at best cordially received Battlefield: Hardline, and before that Battlefield 4.

This listed, found on twitter, points to a game called Battlefield 5, with this ‘description: Mehrspieler Taktik Shooter im 1. Weltkrieg’. This translates as ‘Multiplayer tactical shooter in WW1’.

And the game’s got a release date of October 26, which certainly fits the historical release window.

But what would this game look like - just drab muddy trenches? Not necessarily.

There was nearly a year of war before stalemate reduced the Western Front to the brutality of trench warfare. Up until then, it was very much a war of manoeuvre, though fought using outmoded tactics. Nonetheless, we could see a range of maps, representing fortress strongpoints, French villages, crowded forests, and contested river-crossings.

Of course, you’d expect some trench maps, but to break these up you could from all-out rushes across no-man’s land, to more intimate trench raids looking to gather prisoners for interrogation.

Vehicles are little harder, but they’re there, from the early marks of Male and Female tanks of the British, the little Renault tanks of the French, and the monstrous - but very rare - German A7V (pictured above, from its home in... Queensland!), as well as various armoured cars. You could even introduce cavalry combat, and motorcycles were used heavily by dispatch riders and scouts.

In fact, the more we think about it... the more we like the idea. LET’S BIFF THE BOSCH!