"Kick Off Summer With the Must-Have Downloadable Game for Only $15


STOCKHOLM - DICE, an Electronic Arts Inc. studio, today announced that Battlefield 1943™ will be exclusively available July 8th on Xbox LIVE™ Marketplace and July 9th on the PlayStation®Network. Battlefield 1943 is an all-new download-only action game that brings DICE’s first-class vehicular warfare to gamers for just $15, or 1200 MS Points.

Battlefield 1943 is a critically-acclaimed First-Person Shooter (FPS) multiplayer game that puts players in the middle of a dogfight on land, sea or in the skies. The game introduces two thrilling new modes that can be played across four classic Battlefield tropical WWII maps: Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Coral Sea. These maps are inspired by the award winning Battlefield 1942™ game, but have been redesigned and reengineered using the DICE destructible Frostbite™ engine which takes down walls, blockades and cover spots, leaving players with almost nowhere to hide. The game delivers endless hours of social online gameplay – an extraordinary value at just $15.

The Coral Sea map which is included in the game will be unlocked as part of a worldwide community challenge, where players will work together to reach 43M kills on both Xbox LIVE and the PlayStation Network. To help gamers reach that goal, up to 24 players can play together online in countless matches. They will have the freedom to compete by land, air and sea as either the US Marines or the Imperial Japanese Navy. Whether they choose to play the role of a rifleman crawling through the trenches, a steel-fisted tank commander, or a dog fighting ace pilot, gamers will have the power to rule the Battlefield.

“Battlefield 1943 is going to change consumer expectations of what a downloadable game can be. By offering Frostbite’s next generation destruction technology with a full Vehicle Warfare FPS multiplayer experience at a mere 560MB, Battlefield 1943 sets a new standard,” said Gordon Van Dyke, Producer on Battlefield 1943. “Our goal is to blow people away with a fully accessible, retail-calibre game for veteran Battlefield fans and shooter fans alike to enjoy for only $15.”

For more information on DICE, please visit www.dice.se or www.ea.com. For more information on Battlefield 1943 please visit: www.battlefield.com/1943. Or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/OfficialBF1943.

The game will be available on the PC in September. "

"We are still waiting on 1st party confirmations for a date and it is looking more and more like very early July to be honest with you guys. And before you lalalala and moan, this is out of our control and we wait just like everyone else."

"Bleh asks: Will we see other maps from the original 1942 being added at some stage? What are the chances of more maps down the lie? And will they be incentivised like Coral Sea?

Gordon Van Dyke: Coral Sea is its own special deal, but we have no solid plans for updates at this point beyond what is being released.

Patrick Liu: It was kind of a spontaneous project for us, if you can call it that, so we don't have any concrete plans right now if and when we add more content."

"1UP: How did the idea to do Battlefield 1943 as a downloadable title come about?

LG: Actually, the whole project started from having resources in between the projects. I mean, nowadays we're around 260 people, which means we have a number of projects that we're juggling, and we try to sync them up so that when one is wrapping up, the other one is wrapping down. But there will always be some slack in between where you have people between projects, and that's how it all started. Seeing the Frostbite engine that we built for Bad Company and onwards, we just saw the huge potential of getting to revisit the sands of Iwo Jima and so on.

We saw huge potential, [so] we put a small team to see what we could get out of it just as an experiment to start with. And I think we left them alone for quite some time, which allowed them to go crazy and really create something that surprised us all. So in the end, it seemed [like] we had to check that everything was doable, and that we could downsize it enough to get it up there and all of that. So it started as an experiment, and I would still see it as an experiment since it's the first time we've done something like that. But my honest take is that it's a great game and I have high hopes that people who like Battlefield will like that game."

"We have also gotten information from a tipster that Battlefield 3 will be similar to Battlefield 2 and will support up to 40 players per team. There will also be 24 different vehicles that you can choose from and 17 different weapons. Like Battlefield 2, the game will also feature unlockable equipment.

So when will Battlefield 3 be released? The time isn't known but EA says not this year. We also heard that it would be the holiday season in 2010, however like with many of the other Battle field installments we'll probably get an early one map beta that can be played free a few months before. We're speculating that we'll see a Battlefield 3 Beta download in the Summer of 2010. However, nobody knows for sure."

"Reserve Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and get instant access to the AKS-74 assault rifle for multiplayer action. Firing over 650 rounds a minute, this silent but deadly little beauty will give you maximum pwnage over your friends and enemies. Available for online and in-store customers, while supplies last."