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The next Battlefield is officially Battlefield 5, live reveal May 23 (update)

May 23, we’ll all find out

Owen S. Good is a longtime veteran of video games writing, well known for his coverage of sports and racing games.

Update 2 (May 16): This year’s Battlefield game is officially called Battlefield 5, and EA has shared a first look at the logo. The reveal event is set for 4 p.m. EDT on May 23; it will be livestreamed on the Battlefield website, as well as Mixer, Twitch and YouTube.

Update (May 11): The Battlefield live reveal will be hosted by The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah.

Original story: On May 23, we’ll find out where the next Battlefield is headed. The obsessive Easter egg hunters of Battlefield 1 figured it out by listening to water dripping from a pipe and realizing it was Morse code.

Like most Easter eggs and ARG hunts, this one took a long time to unwind. Battlefield 1 players had long noted the locked and blocked door in the basement of the Fort Vaux map, released in March 2017 as part of the They Shall Not Pass expansion, and schemed out ways to open it. Two days ago, they did — see the video above — realizing that the key to unlocking the door was breaking signs and flipping switches in a certain order, one that spells out “isolement,” which is French for “isolation.”

Inside, they didn’t find much of anything — other than this painting.

Battlefield 2018 teaser - horse painting Electronic Arts

Apparently there is a dripping pipe overhead, and its drip-drops, in Morse code, spell out a URL: ea.com/neverbethesame. Going to that page gets you a date: May 23 is when we all find out the next Battlefield’s setting.

As for what that may be, both VentureBeat and Eurogamer, citing unnamed sources, said back in March that the next Battlefield is headed to World War II. Battlefield publisher Electronic Arts did very well with 2016’s Battlefield 1, bringing the series to World War I; its main competitor went back to the Second World War last year with Call of Duty: WWII. The last Battlefield game with a World War II setting was 2009’s multiplayer-only Battlefield 1943. The only disc-printed, retail-released Battlefield set in World War II was the first one, Battlefield 1942, in 2002.

Whatever the case, we’ll find out what’s going on in two weeks. The 2018 Battlefield game is scheduled to be released this fall.