Dead Space And Alex Garland’s Film Civil War Are Inspiring The Battlefield Reboot

EA Motive has shared some interesting insights about the upcoming Battlefield reboot.

We recently reported that EA plans to release the first game in the Battlefield reboot in this financial year. In other words, it’s coming out before the end of March 2026.

In a new interview with Inverse, Motive’s management name dropped some of the media they’ve been watching and playing that’s been inspiring them in making the game.

Executive producer Philippe Ducharme brought up Civil War, the 2024 war drama film directed by Alex Garland and starring Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny. Kirsten and Cailee played journalists navigating a terrifying vision of America’s future, where the federal government is in war against several secessionist movements. In Ducharme’s words:

Some of the things that we’re pushing [in this game], the film is actually a good reference.

Creative director Roman Campos-Oriola chimed in:

The elements we’re really interested in is the concept of talented but ordinary people put in extraordinary situations. That creates a very interesting dynamic in terms of relationships with other people. These are elements we’re looking to capture in the single player.

Campos-Oriola then brought up Dead Space, their most recent project, and how their experience there informed how they were going about their next project. In his words:

Dead Space allowed us to know the quirks and strengths that we all have, and how we complement each other as a team.

Ducharme then added insight on Dead Space’s design:

On Dead Space, we talked a lot about the curve of tension. How to go from beat to beat, having the highs and the lows to keep players hooked, and even play with their expectations a little bit. It’s obviously very different in a game like Battlefield. But we still brought that mentality over.

Campos-Oriola also brought up Paramount + show Special Ops: Lioness.  While Inverse came to the conclusion that Motive is thinking about making a game that subverts the franchise’s traditional gung-ho depiction of war, there really isn’t anything particular special about even that. Battlefield’s biggest competition, Call of Duty, has already incorporated the trope of the US military’s moral complexity into their storyline canons, and so has Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, and Battlefield itself. The discourse over all war films being pro-war/anti-war has existed decades before Battlefield itself, and the best Motive can do is add their contribution, that gamers will interpret to fall somewhere in the scale between the two extremes.

This could turn out to be interesting, but if Motive’s first game, Star Wars Battlefront II is any indication, it’ll be more of a fun story than a challenging one. It at least gives us a reason to pay attention to the Battlefield reboot’s release.