The relentless annual release schedule of theCall of Dutyfranchise 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 ofCoDcontent over the years, 2025 will be unique in the sense thatCoD2025will seemingly have to compete with the next majorBattlefieldrelease.
Call of DutyandBattlefieldhave 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 withCoDandBattlefield’s upcoming plans.
Both Call of Duty and Battlefield’s 2025 Games Need to Rebalance Map Sizes
Reports around 2025’sCall of Dutyentry allege that the upcomingtitle will be a direct sequel to 2012’sBlack Ops 2, plunging the franchise back into a near-futuristic setting for the first time since 2018’sBlack Ops 4. This would mean two consecutive years ofBlack Opsreleases for the franchise, running a real risk of repeating the same criticism around rushed development and repetitive gameplay that the consecutive releases ofMW2andMW3garnered not long ago.
While many rumors and reports indicate that 2025’sCall of Dutyentry will be a directBlack Ops 2sequel, nothing about the upcoming project has been officially confirmed, including its major developer.
This puts a serious amount of pressure on 2025’sCoDrelease to really differentiate itself fromBlack Ops 6with 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’sCoDcould look towards to achieve this. One of the most common critiques ofBlack 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 ofBlack Ops 6have not done an amazing job at increasing this variety through larger maps, and so there is a clear avenue for 2025’sCoDto launch with a much more balanced pool of small, medium, and large experiences to do away with this lingering criticism. Of course, this year’sBattlefieldrelease will have plenty of lessons to learn from the tumultuous life cycle ofBattlefield 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 aroundBattlefield 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 of2042’s maps were extremely large to accommodate this huge playercount, and DICE has seemingly identified this as a key area that 2025’sBattlefieldrelease can improve upon.
Early reports around 2025’sBattlefieldsuggest that it will draw from fan-favorite entries like 2011’sBattlefield 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 from2042’s launch ethos that goes against the likely direction of 2025’sCoDtitle. There is already a lot of attention being placed on a potentially reignited rivalry between 2025’sCall of DutyandBattlefieldofferings, and both projects are moving towards a similar middle-ground of scale that might make this even more exciting to see unfold.
