Battlefield 4 Announced, By Way Of New Medal Of Honor Trailer [VIDEO]

We all knew it was coming, but we didn’t know it would be this soon. A new trailer for the upcoming Medal of Honor: Warfighter contains an announcement that pre-orders of Warfighter‘s collector’s edition will grant access to the Battlefield 4 Beta. There’s no telling when exactly that beta will begin, but the fact that they’re talking about it means it can’t be too far off.
It looks like the Battlefield franchise may be taking steps down the road to becoming a Call of Duty-esque annual franchise. DICE, the Swedish studio behind the Battlefield franchise, has traditionally taken their time making games, and the quality level of most of their releases has reflected this. A more frequent release schedule may have a negative impact on the level of quality we can expect from DICE’s future games.

The game this announcement was buried in a trailer for, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, is already a very similar game to the current iteration of Battlefield. Developed on the same engine as Battlefield 3 - a DICE-built engine called Frostbite 2.0 – Warfighter seeks to be a similarly gritty modern FPS. The only discernible difference between the games is that Medal of Honor seems intent on selling you on the single-player campaign, which they promise will “put you in the boots” of elite armed forces units, while Battlefield is much more multi-player focused. The need for both of these franchises to exist was puzzling already, but an increase in the number of Battlefield games will make it downright ridiculous.

Inevitably, EA knows they can sell virtually any number of brown-tinged military FPSs, because that’s what folks are buying in the millions these days. We can only hope that they won’t resort to turning a prestigious franchise like Battlefield into an annual holiday sequel farm. And hey, it’d be nice if they let DICE make a sequel to their 2008 game Mirror’s Edge already.