Battlefield V is launching October 19, and when it does, you don’t have to go solo in the War Stories or fight other humans in the online multiplayer, because developer DICE has a cooperative mode that will never end called Combined Arms. The studio revealed during an event today that these cooperative adventures will connect the other modes as a way for new players to get accustomed to the Battlefield experience while also hanging out with friends.
“With Battlefield V you will be able to go online with up to four players to take on a wide variety of missions,” senior producer Lars Gustavsson explained during a media presentation to the press on Tuesday. “Here it’s about pushing forward to see if you have what it takes to go for that final objective.”
The backbone of Combined Arms is a tool that takes various elements and mixes them together to create something unique each time you boot it up. This is how DICE plans to keep co-op feeling fresh over time.
“We have a new system called the mission generator,” said Gustavsson. “It creates dynamic objectives and narratives in order to keep that cooperative experience feeling fresh and challenging.”
While procedural generation is not random, the idea is that software pieces a mission together and a human doesn’t have to oversee the process. It’s easy to see how that could wind up pushing out repetitive objectives that stop feeling fresh after a couple of days. I asked DICE about this, and it says that its team will monitor player behavior and try to build on top of the most beloved content based on that feedback.
“The great thing with this game is that we can create new missions quickly,” Battlefield producer Ryan McArthur said. “We designed it so a lot of these things are built off our back-end technology so that as we see where players are going, we can create new missions and put them into the system that players can pull from every day. With a live service, we can find what players are interested in and then quickly curate new missions that emphasize those experiences.”
Finally, Combined Arms feeds all of your progression back into your Company, which is Battlefield V’s customization hub. In the Company, you can put new skins and other vanity items on various soldier classes and vehicles that you will then take back with you the next time you go into a cooperative or competitive multiplayer match. You also get Company rewards from the single-player War Stories, so everything you do in the game is part of you working toward the same goal within the same progression ecosystem.
“The way I look at it, Combined Arms is the experience that connects the dots between single player and multiplayer,” said Gustavsson. “But when we built it, there was the underlying thought of creating a safe haven for newcomers that was still within the sandbox of Battlefield. Go in there, have fun, and learn the ropes of Battlefield.”