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Posted by Jeremy Peel on December 21

There has never been a clear single-player identity in the battlefield, but there is still time.

You and your friends are in the car, listening to the "Total Eclipse of Heart" on the radio when your rides quickly sink to the bottom of the sea. Although the sealed vehicle is full of oxygen-it's actually a diving bell with a seat belt-your escape window is closing quickly. The two team members were desperately trying to pull a third out of the stuck chair, and when Bonnie Tyler turned the chorus up an octave, they began to realize that this effort was futile. "Oh, buddy," one person cried. "I don't want to die in this song." Under the strange lighting inside the car, your doomed companion handed you a pistol and ordered you to shoot through the windshield. "For the survival of the wolf," he argued. "It has to bite off its own leg."

This sequence was first shown to reporters on a San Francisco movie screen in March 2013 and will be shown to the public shortly afterwards. It will be the cold start of the Battlefield 4 campaign. This marks the last time a single player game truly leads the DICE shooting game. In the years since, EA’s marketing of Battlefield games has always favored the iconic multiplayer part of the series, which is understandable—this year, when 2042 was launched, there was no single-player campaign of any kind, and it was eventually bitten. Got his own leg.

But the change, like an Apache helicopter heading towards the target, is pending. Last week, EA provided the public with a very detailed "Battlefield" game development plan breakdown. Supervised by Vince Zampella, the co-creator of Call of Duty, the head of Respawn, and the increasingly powerful executive within the publisher, the plan involves not only DICE, but also a new studio in Seattle. The latter will be operated by Halo designer Marcus Lehto and will focus on "storytelling opportunities" and is destined to appear in "Battlefield 2042" and later.

"This new studio will work closely with DICE and Ripple Effect Studios as the driving force of the narrative to help create a great player experience in the battlefield world," Battlefield General Manager Byron Bied told Gamespot.

The new narrative of "Battlefield" may just be layered on top of its existing multiplayer game mode. Other online shooters have been doing this, with varying degrees of success: Warzone connects its rather incoherent storytelling to the hunting of objects around Verdansk; Apex Legends uses the more popular Team Fortress 2 method, by supplementing Short films to enrich its cast.

But in view of Lehto's previous work, I have a hunch that reorganization means a single-player campaign in Battlefield 2042. This will be good news for those who believe that DICE has not been able to sell its climate catastrophe premise without a single-player storytelling. There are many interesting legends on the fringe of DICE’s future background, about displaced refugees, the late Michael K. Williams, and a world of post-patriotism. However, you can only convey so much information by throwing a tornado on the map every few rounds.

This is an important function of the single player campaign: acting as an ambassador for the online shooting game world and characters. Although bean counters may argue that they are an expensive indulgence, they lay the foundation for longevity and help sell copies of future entries. Yes, Halo Infinite can be the first to launch a multiplayer game with great success-but only because the previous Halo campaigns have injected meaning and memory into these thick colored suits.

EA's investment in big-budget story shooters will also make COD popular. This year's Vanguard launched an unremarkable campaign-but in the absence of competition, the Activision team had little incentive to strive for better results. A direct competitor may usher in a new era of ambitious and experimental in the field of military first-person films.

What form the modern battlefield can take is an open question. DICE's history of non-essential, non-commitment solo episodes only gives new storytellers one advantage: a blank sheet of paper. Although some people are still skeptical of the miscellaneous staff of Bad Company, people have little expectation about what the battlefield will look like. This allows Lehto and his team to freely transform DICE's multiplayer toolkit into a new goal. , Without immediately arousing the anger of fans. 

There may be some clues in Lehto's final game Disintegration-this is a squad shooter modeled after the mid-00s console game model, such as Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six Vegas. Although Disintegration was bombarded when it was released, it is easy to see how its squad commands apply to a universe in which there is always an ally nearby on a fighter jet or tank, or at least on a quad bike. On the bombing, it was probably Bonnie Tyler wearing headphones.

In general, the battle of Battlefield 4 failed to achieve the personality and sadness of its drowning car vignette. But it also has its moment, as long as it stops copying the COD, loosens the belt, and opens the multiplayer toy box-allowing you to rampage through the wide corridors that include parks, streets full of bunkers, and multi-story buildings that collapsed in the fire. It feels particularly good when it lets you get in and out of the vehicle freely, reminiscent of the ever-changing scale of Titanfall 2 and the turbulence of the early halo. If anyone can achieve the latter, it is Lehto, who designed the Master Chief.

When you contribute to something bigger than yourself, "Battlefield" is at its best: as an engineer, let the track roll long enough to achieve the goal; assault infantry smoke bombs can be cleared by comrades Sniper's bottleneck; drone experts shoot down the helicopter by flying RC between the helicopter's blades. Single player campaigns should reflect this, as a tasting menu of moments that only players of the highest level can experience in a multiplayer game. If Lehto and the team get it right, they can have an FPS different from anything else in a well-organized solo space-a huge sandbox made up of many moving parts, seen through a mobile camera, leaving you in a scriptless The center of chaos.

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