‘Battlefield 2042’ won’t have a battle royale mode. Exhale. That’s ok.

“We looked at ‘Battlefield 2042’ and said, ‘Hey, we really want to push the sandbox forward. What’s the most innovative way we can do that, to push the market forward, to push our own franchise forward?’” Gabrielson asked rhetorically in a later interview with The Washington Post. “The first thing we said is, okay, we’re going to reimagine all-out warfare. Up the player count, up everything else to really deliver that kind of high scale, epic warfare experience. And then we said there’s probably more ways for us to innovate and push further. And then we came around with this idea that we’re calling Hazard Zone, which is a squad-based, high-tension mode, a really kind of contemporary design. It’s not your classic battle royale, and it’s something we’re going to show more about in the next couple of months. … It’ll feel really ‘Battlefield’ when you see it.”