If you asked longtime Battlefield fans what their favorite multiplayer map of the series is, you’d undoubtedly get a wide array of answers. But about half of them would likely say it was the immensely popular Metro of Battlefield 3 and 4. This tightly packed underground warzone was a huge hit, with frenetic linear action that never failed to be intense. Unfortunately, Battlefield fans haven’t gotten anything quite like it in Battlefield 1 or V, but that all changed this week.
That’s right, Operation Underground was launched on October 3rd, and it’s similar to Metro it may as well be called an homage. The map has you battling against your foes in tight corridors that ultimately lead back to the surface of a war ravaged German city. Like most new maps in Battlefield V, it’s available in the most popular game modes, including Conquest, Breakthrough, Squad Conquest, and Team Deathmatch. For a brief time after the map is launched, Rush will be supported on it as well.
Of course, Metro wasn’t a perfect map, and is Underground even really a good successor? Well, considering that the original designer of the Operation Metro map also designed this soon to come Operation Underground map, it seems safe to assume that it will bear that same intense and frantic close quarters atmosphere. Of course, Dice said that some improvements will be made to the map formula, such as removing bottlenecks that stall gameplay, so Operation Underground should be even better than its Metro predecessor.
But with the addition of this new map comes some bad news; apparently the 5v5 game mode that Dice planned to introduce to the game has been cancelled. We got a reason for this from Senior Producer Ryan McArthur, who said “the added focus on improving the quality of the experience and adding more of the content you want” is the main reason the game mode was cancelled.
While some people may be put out by this news, it’s worth noting that the large battlefields with dozens of players fighting for dominance has always been the most popular game modes for the franchise, so it’s really no wonder that few players were interested in a 5v5 mode, which sounds a lot more akin to Call of Duty than Battlefield. Either way, even if some potentially new content has been cancelled, at least a new map is heading our way at the same time.