PSA: Battlefield 5 Will Be Offline For One Hour On January 20

EA's military shooter Battlefield V will be offline briefly tomorrow, January 20, for a round of regular maintenance, the studio has announced.

The maintenance period will begin at 0800 UTC and run for a period of about one hour, ending at 0900 UTC. During this period, all servers for Battlefield V will be down, meaning you can't play multiplayer.

Should EA need to extend the maintenance period further, the developer will notify players. This downtime appears to be regular maintenance and not in response to a larger issue.

Battlefield V originally released in November 2018 and it sold more than 7 million copies in its first two months. That's a huge number, but it's below EA's expectations. EA blamed the less-than-expected sales numbers on the game's delay from October to the more crowded November period along with a marketing campaign that failed to generate enough buzz.

EA did not release a new Battlefield game in 2019 or 2020, opting to release Battlefield 6--or whatever the game ends up being called--after the next-generation consoles had more time in the market to grow to a bigger userbase. The new game is due out this year for PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC.

Basically nothing is known about 2021's Battlefield game apart from that it's developed by DICE and is said to have "crazy ambitious ideas." DICE has studios in Stockholm, Sweden and in Los Angeles, California. The DICE LA studio is now being run by Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella, as part of the expanded responsibilities of his recent promotion.

Battlefield V took place in World War II, while 2016's Battlefield 1 was set during World War I. The series hasn't seen a modern-day release since 2015's Battlefield Hardline.