EA confirms Battlefield 4

More bad company than BF3 in the campaign aspect - and it needs to be next-gen for me with at the very very very least 32 players and hopefully 64 as the maps get a bit scarce when designed for pc - but Bad Company's were obviously designed for consoles and 24 players.

I'd rather they didn't for a while. It was a massive gap between 2 and 3, 2 years between 3 and 4 isn't enough really (the beta for BF3 came out near the release of the full game, I'm guessing its like this for 4 as well). I'd rather they waited til next gen so the consoles can have bigger maps and 64 player matches.

To be honest I am not surprised - EA obviously want to compete with Activision on their release schedule of the CoD franchise. It seems that Dice (Battlefield) are set to compete with Infinity Ward and Co (Modern Warfare) and Danger Close (Medal of Honour) is set to compete with Treyarch (Black Ops). Either way it is still similar to Activision's approach - have 2 studios working on First Person Shooters and release a game yearly - with each studio given 2 years to produce their game!

Etc

Everyone wants to compete with Activision to be honest, it's a mega-franchise and deserves the competition. Personally I think only BF competes with it release cycle wise and MoH is being forcibly used as competition without allowing to have its own style, with Dice doing the first games MP.

I think that EAs release schedule is set to change - Respawn will be added to the mix soon too, so the cycle should increase to 3 years, or we'll get summer goodness.

They can change their release policy as often as they want, i won't be changing my buying policy to match

A next-gen, destructo-licious giganto map filled frostbite super edition powered Battlefield 4 may be worth of a few shillings however!

It feels very very recently that BF3 came out...*just checked - Oct 2011*...does it all seem a bit too soon to anyone else? The team have been working on all of this fairly substantial collection of DLC for a while since it went gold, but even so, is there really enough time to have exhausted it? Obviously they won't be doing a new engine, so perhaps they could make 3 and 4 compatible in multiplayer...THAT would be interesting.

Imagine it, just one 'Crossover' playlist lobby, which had a spattering of each of the two games, it would great way to coax a BF3 player like me on to 4 if they didn't jump in right away.

It feels very very recently that BF3 came out...*just checked - Oct 2011*...does it all seem a bit too soon to anyone else? The team have been working on all of this fairly substantial collection of DLC for a while since it went gold, but even so, is there really enough time to have exhausted it? Obviously they won't be doing a new engine, so perhaps they could make 3 and 4 compatible in multiplayer...THAT would be interesting.

Imagine it, just one 'Crossover' playlist lobby, which had a spattering of each of the two games, it would great way to coax a BF3 player like me on to 4 if they didn't jump in right away.

It may only have come out in Oct 2011 but BF4 is not expected until Oct 2013 at the earliest - and the DLC is due to finish in March 2013 too so there will be a god 6 months+ of NO BF content. I am sure EA are expecting their developers to be able to make a game in 2 years and support it for a while with DLC content (In the same way that Activision do) It isn't as if they do not have a good engine to work with and I can't see the Frostbite Engine being replaced for a few years yet.

It has always been a wish of mine to see former maps available in the latest edition of the game automatically (If you installed them and DLC maps to your Hard drive) It does bug me that we have to 'buy' the maps again - at least with CoD we got Terminal Free but I would still like to see a system where all maps are available - like Guitar hero tracks or dance central dances are carried over into the latest games.

After this I would like to hope for BFBC3