Daily Briefing: Thursday 10th June

Battlefield 2042 launches this October

After much fanfare EA finally showed off their new Battlefield title yesterday. Officially called Battlefield 2042, the game ditches the usual campaign and battle royale modes in favour of going all in on traditional multiplayer. It'll support 128 simultaneous players on PC and next-gen consoles, while last-gen will cap at 64 players to ensure everything runs smoothly.

• The lack of campaign is an odd one, but EA's presentation also confirmed that DICE will deliver the game's narrative over time using liveservice and seasonal content. With the game being built for next-gen, everything seems bigger this time around. The increased player count will fight it out across massive maps with a variety of weapons and playable classes. Battlefield 2042 releases October 22nd, and we'll be seeing it in action again at EA Play Live on July 22nd.

Overwatch is (finally) getting cross-play

The much-requested functionality was confirmed in a new developer update from Overwatch game director Aaron Keller. Cross-play will be launching in beta "soon" and will come to PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch - though console and PC players will remain separate during competitive play.

• It's good to see Blizzard finally opening up the Overwatch playerbase a bit - it only took them five years after all. The downside of all this is that cross-progression won't be available alongside cross-play at launch, though Keller outlined that it's something the team are "excited to work on in the future."

Call of Duty: Vanguard is skipping E3

It looks like Activision won't be unveiling their new premium Call of Duty title at E3. The official reveal will instead come later on this summer, possibly as an in-game event for Warzone - something that happened last year for Black Ops Cold War.

• Vanguard's release could mean some interesting things for Warzone, as well. Last year's integration with Black Ops Cold War was a post-launch scramble that caused a lot of balance issues, whereas Sledgehammer Games have had a lot more time to work on things. The plans include a new map - Warzone's biggest yet - which will launch alongside Vanguard.

New PS5 update is now live

Software version 21.01-03.20.00 (catchy) carries a suite of general system performance improvements, but also has a couple of specific updates and fixes for the DualSense controller. The update fixes an issue whereby the controller's battery light would constantly blink red regardless of whether it needed charge - so that's a nice fix.

• The rest of the update includes fixes for the PS5's screen reader functionality and games not being hidden on PS5 when they were on PS4. The update also makes it easier and more stable to copy games from external USB storage to the main console storage, which is another solid quality-of-life improvement.