Battlefield 1 is coming in October, and EA is keeping the Battlefield hype train rolling by offering up the two previous installments in the franchise for only $5 apiece this week.
Both Battlefield 4 and Battlefield Hardline are available for the extremely low price of $4.99 across Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC via EA's Origin service. Curiously, the deal doesn't seem to apply to the Xbox 360 version of the game. It lasts until June 20, so if you've been waiting to see what Battlefield is all about, you won't likely get a better chance.
Sweetening the deal is the fact that EA has been giving away various Battlefield 4 and Battlefield Hardline map packs for free over the past month. Players who added those free DLC packs, even if they didn't own the game at the time, can now pick up the games for $5 a pop and experience almost everything they have to offer, DLC included. Of course, it probably would have made more sense for EA to discount the two games first and then proceed to give away the DLC, but beggars can't be choosers, I suppose.
It's all being done in order to promote Battlefield 1, which releases on Oct. 21 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. The World War I shooter is one of the most anticipated releases of the year, with its announcement trailer becoming one of the most liked (and most viewed) trailers on YouTube. The game even scored second place when it came to the most tweeted-about games of E3, with only Nintendo's long-awaited Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild creating more buzz on the popular social media platform.
That's all good news for EA, which was initially hesitant about allowing developer DICE to push forward with a game set in World War I. Executives at the company feared that trench warfare wouldn't be fun for players, and also worried that younger players might not even know about World War I.
Judging from the reaction so far, those executives appear to have been horribly, horribly wrong. Battlefield 1 looks to be the breath of fresh air the franchise, and the shooter genre in general, needed, as highlighted by a hefty chunk of multiplayer gameplay shown during EA's E3 festivities. From fully destructible environments to new gameplay mechanics, Battlefield has never looked better.
