The relentless annual release schedule of the Call of Duty franchise is showing no signs of slowing down, with attention already starting to turn towards the earliest reports and rumors for 2025’s entry to the IP. While fans have come to expect this rapid turnaround of CoD content over the years, 2025 will be unique in the sense that CoD 2025 will seemingly have to compete with the next major Battlefield release.
Call of Duty and Battlefield have stood as two giants of the FPS industry for some time now, and while the competition between the two has waned in recent years, 2025 could be a monumental year for this rivalry. From the earliest reports surrounding both titles, it seems that the upcoming projects will share some stark similarities in things like their major settings, yet one aspect of each title will most likely be very different from their predecessors. Both Activision and EA will have to learn from the recent shortcomings of their respective franchises, and multiplayer map sizes are likely to take opposite directions with CoD and Battlefield‘s upcoming plans.
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Both Call of Duty and Battlefield’s 2025 Games Need to Rebalance Map Sizes
Reports around 2025’s Call of Duty entry allege that the upcoming title will be a direct sequel to 2012’s Black Ops 2, plunging the franchise back into a near-futuristic setting for the first time since 2018’s Black Ops 4. This would mean two consecutive years of Black Ops releases for the franchise, running a real risk of repeating the same criticism around rushed development and repetitive gameplay that the consecutive releases of MW2 and MW3 garnered not long ago.
While many rumors and reports indicate that 2025’s Call of Duty entry will be a direct Black Ops 2 sequel, nothing about the upcoming project has been officially confirmed, including its major developer.
This puts a serious amount of pressure on 2025’s CoD release to really differentiate itself from Black Ops 6 with a focus on rectifying the loudest criticisms of the title, and the map pool of the 2024 game is one area in particular that 2025’s CoD could look towards to achieve this. One of the most common critiques of Black Ops 6‘s launch map pool concerned its abundance of smaller-sized maps, with the game lacking a real variety in size to appeal to all playstyles.
The many post-launch maps of Black Ops 6 have not done an amazing job at increasing this variety through larger maps, and so there is a clear avenue for 2025’s CoD to launch with a much more balanced pool of small, medium, and large experiences to do away with this lingering criticism. Of course, this year’s Battlefield release will have plenty of lessons to learn from the tumultuous life cycle of Battlefield 2042, where an opposite direction for maps is seemingly being taken.
Battlefield is Looking to Refine its Smaller Scale While Call of Duty Needs to Expand
For all the faults around Battlefield 2042‘s launch, one longstanding point of criticism of the 2020 title lay in how massive its maps were. The game’s jump to 128-player matches proved to be too much in the eyes of many fans. A lot of 2042‘s maps were extremely large to accommodate this huge playercount, and DICE has seemingly identified this as a key area that 2025’s Battlefield release can improve upon.
Early reports around 2025’s Battlefield suggest that it will draw from fan-favorite entries like 2011’s Battlefield 3. If so, it seems likely that the game will return to the franchise’s classic 64-player approach. Of course, this reduction in players-per-match will see the return of smaller-scale maps, marking a big deviation from 2042‘s launch ethos that goes against the likely direction of 2025’s CoD title. There is already a lot of attention being placed on a potentially reignited rivalry between 2025’s Call of Duty and Battlefield offerings, and both projects are moving towards a similar middle-ground of scale that might make this even more exciting to see unfold.
- Released
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October 25, 2024
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Suggestive Themes, Strong Language, Use of Drugs