All-new for Battlefield 5 are fortifications. This isn’t quite throwing up shacks and other shelter as you might in Fortnite, but it’s building in general that allows you to improve your chances out on the battlefield by fortifying and strengthening key positions.
Much of the Second World War was about fortification, and BF5 is aiming to demonstrate that primarily through this new feature. Fortification comes in a variety of forms – so you might build around a ruined, shattered shell of a home in order to turn it into a viable defensive position. You can toss down sandbags to create cover. It’s possible to drop down barbed wire to slow the advance of infantry, build trenches for cover or place tank stoppers to prevent the most deadly armor from pushing too close.
Every class in Battlefield 5 has access to a tool to build, but the Support class is better at it. They’ll be able to build better stuff more efficiently, so the class is still valuable in its own way. There’s a general flattening of class roles, actually – we’ll talk about that later.
Changing the actual make-up of the war zone itself seems to be a key theme of BF5, in fact. Stationary weapons like artillery and huge anti-tank weapons can now be attached to the back of vehicles and towed around, allowing you to re-position them to best suit your objectives. This doesn’t sound like a big deal until you really consider the implications: in past games, an ace pilot could learn the anti-air positions on a map and dodge between them. In BF5, they have no such luxury.
Battlefield is most at home in multiplayer, and DICE say that these tools are designed to add to the overall tool-set available to players in what they call the Battlefield sandbox. They seem like changes that could have a significant impact indeed.
