Update: And it's official! Battlefield 1 brings the franchise back to The Great War, announced alongside an in-engine trailer filled with gritty trench warfare, charging cavalries on horseback, old-school biplane dogfights and the recognizable bass riff of "Seven Nation Army."
Battlefield 1 hits store shelves Oct 21, 2016 for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
Original article below...
Putting the cart before the horse, pre-order incentives and promotional banners have spoiled the official reveal for the upcoming entry in the Battlefield series - which, oddly enough, will be titled Battlefield 1.
Pictures of retail signage posted on Reddit, as well as a premature posting on the Xbox Live Dashboard, leaked details on the game and its potential early 20th-century setting.
The promotional art for the numerically-challenged Battlefield features a burning zeppelin and a combat-ready figure wielding a trench club and what appears to be a Mauser C96 - an early semi-automatic pistol that saw use during WWI, indicating a possible timeshift from modern-day combat to The Great War.
Battlefield (World War) One
While official word won't drop until around 4pm EST today on Battlefield's official web page, the chances of a WWI setting - or an alternate take on it à la BioShock Infinite, another zeppelin-loving, Mauser-wielding first-person shooter - are also backed up by the leaked pre-order bonus itself.
The digital content for pre-ordering the game (you don't know anything about) is called "The Hellfighter Pack," which reportedly contains items related to the historic 369th United States Infantry Regiment - better known as The Harlem Hellfighters, the United States' first African-American regiment during WWI.
While the wind might have been sucked out of DICE's sails, it's hard for us to be sympathetic - when you put out a 9-second trailer as a teaser for your teaser, you just beg for more information to leak out than you bargained for.
