A new challenger has appeared. In the fiercely competitive world of video games, it's common for new contenders to fade away as quickly as they burst on to the scene. But Battlefield 6 is hoping to change that. It's the latest entry in a long-running military shooter series often framed as a grittier, more realistic answer to Call of Duty. The title's never quite managed to match its most famous rival in terms of sales or players, but there are signs the new installment could close the gap.

Going from research to production, especially for large and complex software systems, is fundamentally a hard problem. In large-scale game production, one of the main reasons is that the development environment can be very different from the final product. In this technical paper we describe an effort to add an experimental reinforcement learning system to an existing automated game testing solution based on scripted bots in order to increase its capacity. We report on how this reinforcement learning system was integrated with the aim to increase test coverage similar to [1] in a set of AAA games including Battlefield 2042 and Dead Space (2023). The aim of this technical paper is to show a use-case of leveraging reinforcement learning in game production and cover some of the largest time sinks anyone who wants to make the same journey for their game may encounter. Furthermore, to help the game industry to adopt this technology faster, we propose a few research directions that we believe will be valuable and necessary for making machine learning, and especially reinforcement learning, an effective tool in game production.

Each annual Call of Duty title is the collective effort of multiple studios working together for years. In a 2021 investor report, Activision stated there are over 3,000 workers assigned to the franchise. With production values that high, Sony maintained that no other publisher could possibly challenge Activision's position in the market, citing Electronic Arts' Battlefield (another blockbuster military action series) as a competitor that has still fallen woefully short of threatening the world's most lucrative first-person shooter. Call of Duty has sold 425 million copies in its lifetime. Comparatively, Battlefield has sold roughly 88 million copies as of 2018.

Put another way, to help right the ship going forward, EA and Dice had to throw a full third of "Battlefield 2042′s" freight overboard. That does not feel great if you paid full price for this game, especially when there are no guarantees Hazard Zone will be replaced with anything of substance. The Hazard Zone announcement also came within a week of EA and Dice stating they would shelve the 128-player version of the game's Breakthrough mode, which, alongside Conquest, is one of the two major components to its "All Out Warfare" pillar experience. Massive player counts on expansive maps were a huge part of the marketing push for "Battlefield 2042," so scaling down Breakthrough seems like an admission of another miscalculation.

For the past 10 years or so, if you lived in a big city and fancied hearing an orchestra play something from Metal Gear Solid or Sonic the Hedgehog instead of the Romantic period, there has been no shortage of options. Touring orchestras have played music from games such as Pokémon, Final Fantasy and Assassin's Creed for appreciative audiences all over the world. The largest such series, Video Games Live, has been running since 2005 and has played over 400 shows in Los Angeles, Beijing, Sydney and elsewhere. But this summer, for the first time, video game music will be part of the BBC Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall in London. A concert on 1 August will feature orchestral selections and adaptations from soundtracks spanning gaming history, including The Legend of Zelda, Shadow of the Colossus and Battlefield 2042.

In a statement to The Washington Post addressing reports of the town hall, EA Vice President of Communication, John Reseburg, characterized it as "an in-depth and very humble internal conversation about the recent Battlefield launch. It was about key learnings and actions we are taking, not blaming external factors." It is good that EA and Dice are assessing what went wrong around "Battlefield 2042" and that developers are working to improve it. But hopefully no one loses site of the biggest problem of all. The initial decision to patch up a flawed game after release -- particularly over the holiday season when developers traditionally take a needed respite -- shows zero respect for consumers. "Sell it, then fix it" is a recipe for disaster for any product, and that's exactly what was cooked up with "Battlefield 2042."

The Post played the Beta on an Alienware laptop with an Intel Core i7-9700K CPU (3.60GHz) with 16 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card. The game looks stunning, with rain swirling and foliage swaying in the wind. Dice emphasized in the preview briefing that the team had added a lot of fixes and polish that would not be seen in the beta, but still, there were a good number of bugs. Unseen forces would spastically yank the pixels of some dead bodies, helicopters struck by tank shells emerged unscathed, and the map's rocket centerpiece, which blew up on launch when shot by a tank, exploded, stopped and then exploded again.

From the first time it was mysteriously referenced in public, DICE developers have repeatedly described Battlefield Portal, the newly-revealed creative mode for the upcoming "Battlefield 2042" as a "love letter" to their community. During the hour-long EA Play livestream Thursday, that letter was unsealed. Its contents showcased a new mode in which players can use a free tool to customize multiplayer matches in a plethora of detailed ways to craft and share unique, playable experiences using assets from "Battlefield 2042" and several past installments of the franchise. Now, DICE's developers are hoping the community will embrace its overtures and go on to make lots and lots of beautiful Battlefield babies, so to speak.

Before it hosts its Play Live event on the 22nd, EA will stream a series of "Spotlight" panels throughout the month of July. In all, fans can look forward to four such panels. The series will start on July 8th with an event devoted to Battlefield 2042, Apex Legends and first-person shooters more broadly. The panel will feature contributions from both Dice and Respawn Entertainment. Introducing Spotlight--a new #EAPlayLive series where celebrated studio developers talk shop & swap stories.

Bitcoin has had a rollercoaster ride over the last months. Once Tesla's darling, with its value climbing, when the EV maker dropped BTC pricing, the cryptocurrency plummeted in value, (it's down 37 percent over the last month, at the time of writing). But hey, don't tell El Salvador. President Nayib Bukele has followed through on his campaign promise to make the turbulent Bitcoin legal tender, alongside the US dollar. It means that, in about 90 days, the cryptocurrency can be used as payment for goods or services unless a business doesn't have the facilities to accept it.