All Battlefield Games in Order, by Release and Timeline

Twenty-four years after DICE dropped 64 players onto Wake Island, the Battlefield lineup runs from Battlefield 1942 to Battlefield 6 and its free battle royale, REDSEC. Along the way, Battlefield has jumped between World War I, Vietnam, the year 2142, Miami police raids, and a frozen future where Europe is fighting for warm land. That makes the series easy to love and surprisingly hard to keep straight.

Release order shows how the Battlefield series grew, from PC-only Conquest servers to console campaigns, destruction, 128-player matches, and a free battle royale. Timeline order is looser, since almost every entry tells its own story, but it's still fun to see the wars line up by era. Only the Bad Company games and the Battlefield 3 and 4 pair share characters or a wider plot.

The table below covers all Battlefield games, the 13 mainline releases plus the five bigger spin-offs, sorted by release date. The last column lists the era each one is set in, for anyone who wants to play the wars as history (and fiction) ordered them. Expansions such as Road to Rome or Bad Company 2: Vietnam sit inside the entry of the game they belong to.

If one of these grabs you, plenty of the newer entries are available as Battlefield game keys for PC and Xbox. Below, you'll find every release with its key facts, two short write-ups, and my verdict on whether it's worth your time today.

1. Battlefield 1942 (2002)

Battlefield 1942 is the first Battlefield game. DICE put infantry, tanks, planes and warships on the same map and handed every vehicle to whoever got there first, and the series still runs on that idea. Conquest had two teams fighting over flags that doubled as spawn points, bleeding each other's tickets until one side ran out. The maps covered the Pacific, North Africa, Western Europe and the Eastern Front, with Wake Island, Omaha Beach and Stalingrad among them.

Nothing felt scripted. A match could turn on one pilot taking off from a carrier, or a squad stealing the other team's tank from behind its own lines. Two expansions, The Road to Rome and Secret Weapons of WWII, followed in 2003, and the mod scene (Desert Combat above all) kept the game alive for years. Playing it now means community servers and a lot of patience with 2002 controls.

My Verdict: Play it for the history lesson. Everything Battlefield does well started here, but the game itself has aged hard.

2. Battlefield Vietnam (2004)

Battlefield Vietnam took the 1942 formula into the jungle and gave the two sides very different toolkits. US forces had helicopters, bombers and heavy armor, and the North Vietnamese side leaned on booby traps, tunnels and anti-tank weapons. The maps drew on real battles and places, including Hue, the Ia Drang Valley, Khe Sanh, the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Fall of Saigon. It was also the first game in the series with a 3D map.

Vehicle radios played 1960s music, and you could load your own audio files, so a Huey full of players could fly into a hot landing zone with whatever song the pilot picked. Ask anyone who played it and the radio comes up first. It sold close to a million copies by November 2004 and won soundtrack awards along the way. Online play today depends on fan servers, much like 1942.

My Verdict: The most characterful of the early PC entries. Helicopter play here is still a blast, and the asymmetry makes it feel unlike anything else in the series.

3. Battlefield 2 (2005)

Battlefield 2 is the game that turned Battlefield into a team sport. It added squads of up to six players, squad leaders who could set targets, and a commander on each side with artillery strikes, supply drops and UAV scans. The three factions, the US Marine Corps, China's People's Liberation Army and a fictional Middle Eastern Coalition, fought across modern maps such as Strike at Karkand, Dragon Valley and Gulf of Oman.

It was a huge hit, with 1.2 million copies sold in its first month, and its persistent ranks and weapon rewards arrived before that became standard in shooters. Special Forces, Euro Force and Armored Fury added night maps, new factions and US-based battlegrounds. For a whole generation of PC players, Karkand is still the map they compare everything to, which is why Battlefield 3 remade it.

My Verdict: The most important game in the series. If you only play one of the early entries, make it this one, through the community servers that keep it running.

4. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (2005)

Modern Combat was Battlefield's first proper console game, and it was the first one with a real single-player campaign. You fight for both NATO and China in a war over Kazakhstan before picking a side, and the story eventually reveals that a terrorist group called Burning Flag started the whole thing. Its standout trick, hotswapping, let you jump straight into any friendly soldier you could see on screen.

Multiplayer was trimmed to 24 players across Conquest and Capture the Flag, which suited the hardware of the time. Online support has since ended on every platform, the last of it on PS2 in 2014, but the campaign still works. It's an odd, slightly forgotten branch of the tree, and it shows DICE testing story ideas it would sharpen in Bad Company.

My Verdict: A curiosity for collectors. Hotswapping is still a neat idea, but there's little reason to hunt down an old console for it.

5. Battlefield 2142 (2006)

Battlefield 2142 is the series at its most science fiction. A new ice age has buried much of the north. The European Union and the Pan Asian Coalition fight over the last livable land in what the game calls the Cold War of the 22nd Century. Giant battle walkers stomped around next to tracked and hover tanks, and you could rain down on the map in personal drop pods.

People still miss it for Titan mode. Each team had a giant flying warship protected by a shield, and ground missiles had to bring that shield down first. Attackers then boarded by pod, wrecked four consoles and blew the reactor, with 30 seconds to get out. The game also had four kits with rank-based rewards, the Northern Strike booster pack in 2007, and a fair bit of backlash over in-game advertising billboards.

My Verdict: The one fans keep begging DICE to remake. Titan matches remain some of the best objective play Battlefield has ever had.

6. Battlefield: Bad Company (2008)

Bad Company introduced two things the series has never let go of: the Frostbite engine and serious destruction. Walls, roofs and whole houses came apart under fire, so cover was only ever temporary. The campaign follows Private Preston Marlowe and a squad of misfits (Sarge Redford, Sweetwater and the explosives-happy Haggard). Together they chase mercenary gold through a fictional country.

B Company jokes and bickers its way through the whole campaign, and that lighter tone set it apart from the grim military shooters of the era. Multiplayer launched with Gold Rush, an attack and defense mode built around destroying gold crates, and Conquest arrived later as a free download. It never came to PC, which still stings for some fans.

My Verdict: A fun, funny campaign that's hard to play today without a PS3 or Xbox 360. Its sequel does everything it did, only better.

7. Battlefield Heroes (2009)

Battlefield Heroes was EA's first free-to-play Battlefield, a third-person shooter with a cartoon look and a goofy take on World War II tanks, planes and rifles. The Royal Army and National Army fought it out with three classes: the all-round Soldier, the heavy Gunner and the fast, fragile Commando. It ran in a browser launcher, which made it easy to try on almost any PC of the time.

Real money bought cosmetics, and later items that could tip a fight, which drew plenty of complaints. EA shut the official servers down on July 14, 2015, together with its other free-to-play shooters, though fans have kept a restored version running. Heroes matters most as the earliest test of the free model that REDSEC returned to more than 15 years later.

My Verdict: Charming in its day, but it's gone. Mention it to a 2009 PC player and you'll probably get a smile.

8. Battlefield 1943 (2009)

Battlefield 1943 was a small downloadable game that brought the 1942 Pacific maps to consoles on Frostbite. It launched with three maps, Wake Island, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, and a fourth one, the air-only Coral Sea, went live once the community reached 43 million kills together. Matches were 24 players with three classes and plenty of planes and boats.

For its size, it was a big success, and it showed that Battlefield's classic sandbox fit on PS3 and Xbox 360. A PC version was announced and then canceled in 2011 so DICE could focus on Battlefield 3. Wake Island in particular became a recurring guest, with remakes showing up in later games, Battlefield 6 included.

My Verdict: A lovely little package in its day, now stuck on old consoles. Play Wake Island in a newer game instead.

9. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2010)

Bad Company 2 brings back Marlowe, Redford, Sweetwater and Haggard, this time on PC and consoles. The campaign opens in 1944 with Operation Aurora, a raid on a Japanese-held island that ties into the Scalar, an electromagnetic superweapon. The rest of the story chases that weapon from South America to Alaska during a fictional war between the US and Russia.

Rush turned the multiplayer into a legend. Attackers pushed through pairs of M-COM stations and defenders tried to hold them, and Frostbite 1.5 destruction meant the buildings around each objective looked different every round. The Vietnam expansion followed in December 2010, and the game went on to sell more than 12 million units. Ask longtime fans for the best Battlefield game and this name comes up constantly.

My Verdict: My pick for the best mix of campaign and multiplayer in the series. If you can find a populated server, nothing about Rush here feels dated.

10. Battlefield Play4Free (2011)

Play4Free was a free-to-play remix of Battlefield 2, with eight of its maps (Karkand and Oman among them) and a class system and gameplay pulled from Bad Company 2. It ran on 32-player servers with a micropayment store, and for many players with weaker PCs it was the easiest way to get a modern Battlefield fix.

EA closed it on July 14, 2015, the same day Heroes went offline. Looking back, it was a stopgap that kept Battlefield 2 maps in rotation between big releases. Those maps were the draw, and fans have never stopped asking for Karkand.

My Verdict: Fine for its time and long gone now. You won't miss anything by skipping it.

11. Battlefield 3 (2011)

Battlefield 3 was DICE's big swing at the mainstream, built on Frostbite 2 and finally bringing 64-player battles back to PC. The campaign follows Sergeant Henry Blackburn of the US Marines through Iraq, Iran, Paris and New York in 2014, told in flashbacks during an interrogation. It looked incredible for 2011, and the lighting, sound and suppression effects still hold up well.

Multiplayer ran through Battlelog, a web browser hub, which felt odd at first and became part of the game's identity. Maps like Operation Metro and Caspian Border became classics, and the Back to Karkand pack remade four Battlefield 2 maps. It sold 5 million copies in its first week and 15 million by June 2012. The PC version came to Steam in June 2020.

My Verdict: Still a great multiplayer game and the best looking of its generation. The campaign is forgettable, so jump straight into Caspian Border.

12. Battlefield 4 (2013)

Battlefield 4 picks up six years after Battlefield 3, following Sergeant Daniel Recker and the Tombstone squad in a 2020 conflict between the US, Russia and China. It was the series' big next-gen launch on Frostbite 3, and its headline feature was Levolution: map-changing events like the collapsing skyscraper on Siege of Shanghai or the flooding on Flood Zone. Commander mode came back from Battlefield 2 and 2142 too.

Netcode problems, crashes and broken hit registration dominated the first months after launch, and DICE set up the Community Test Environment in April 2014 to fix them with players. Those fixes worked, and the game turned into one of the best-loved shooters of the decade. Years later, people were still filling its servers.

My Verdict: The most complete modern Battlefield. Ignore the launch story and play the version that exists today, it's excellent.

13. Battlefield Hardline (2015)

Cops and robbers in a Battlefield game? Hardline went for it. Visceral Games, the studio behind Dead Space, built the campaign around Detective Nick Mendoza. It plays like a TV crime drama, with episodes, recaps and stealth options for arresting suspects with your badge. It took you from Miami to Los Angeles and leaned far more on story than any Battlefield before it.

In multiplayer, Heist had criminals breaking into a vault and police defending it, and Blood Money had both sides grabbing cash from the same pile. Hotwire turned capture points into cars you had to keep driving. It played faster and smaller than a normal Battlefield, and plenty of fans felt it should have been its own spin-off.

My Verdict: A solid shooter that never felt like a Battlefield. Hotwire is a ton of fun, but this is the easiest entry to skip.

14. Battlefield 1 (2016)

Battlefield 1 surprised everyone by going back to World War I, and it's the most atmospheric game in the series. The campaign is told as War Stories, short tales about a British tank driver, an RAF pilot, an Italian soldier, an Australian runner and a Bedouin fighter alongside Lawrence of Arabia. A prologue with the Harlem Hellfighters comes first, and dying again and again as different soldiers makes it one of the best openings any shooter has.

Multiplayer added Operations, a mode where attackers push across several maps in a row, and Behemoths, huge vehicles like zeppelins, armored trains and dreadnoughts that arrive to help the losing team. Four expansions followed, from They Shall Not Pass to Apocalypse. The game sold more than 15 million copies, a big win for a setting most publishers had avoided.

My Verdict: The best atmosphere Battlefield has ever had, and a fine place to start. Play Operations on a full server at least once.

15. Battlefield V (2018)

Battlefield V returned to World War II and kept the War Stories format. Nordlys follows the Norwegian resistance, Under No Flag a British commando, Tirailleur Senegalese soldiers in France and The Last Tiger a German tank crew. Gunplay is among the best in the series, and the fortification system lets you build sandbags and barbed wire to hold a point.

The reveal trailer drew backlash, sales fell short of EA's expectations, and content was delivered in Tides of War chapters, including the Firestorm battle royale (built with Criterion) and a late Pacific update. Active development ended in 2020, which left the game feeling unfinished to many. What shipped plays better than its reputation.

My Verdict: Great to play, frustrating to think about. The Pacific maps are worth your time, and the gunfeel is top tier.

16. Battlefield 2042 (2021)

Battlefield 2042 skipped the campaign entirely and went all in on multiplayer, with 128-player matches on PC and current consoles. Its story plays out through the background of a world wrecked by climate collapse and stateless soldiers called No-Pats. Classes were replaced by Specialists, named characters with gadgets like a wingsuit or a grappling hook, and the change split the community.

Missing features and bugs made it the lowest-rated entry in the series, and it lost 70% of its Steam players within two weeks of launch. Portal, the custom mode that brought back maps and gear from 1942, Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3, was the bright spot. Season 3 brought back a class system and later seasons reworked the launch maps. Season 7 arrived in March 2024 as the final one, and by then the game was far healthier than at launch.

My Verdict: Much better now than its reputation, though it's still the weakest modern entry. Portal alone is worth a few evenings of nostalgia.

17. Battlefield 6 (2025)

Battlefield 6 is the back-to-basics game fans asked for after 2042. Classes and a campaign are back, and the destruction takes clear cues from Bad Company 2. The story follows the Dagger 1-3 squad under Gunnery Sergeant Dylan Murphy as a fractured NATO fights Pax Armata, a private military company, in a war that runs from 2027 into 2028. The campaign moves through Gibraltar, Cairo, Tajikistan and Brooklyn. Four EA studios worked on it under the Battlefield Studios banner.

EA reported over 7 million copies sold in the first three days, the biggest launch in Battlefield history. Seasons have kept new maps coming through 2026, including classic remakes and the return of Wake Island. If you're picking it up now, Battlefield 6 keys for PC and Xbox are the cheapest way in.

My Verdict: The best Battlefield since Battlefield 4, and the easy pick for anyone starting today. The campaign is just okay, but the multiplayer is the series at full strength.

18. Battlefield REDSEC (2025)

Battlefield REDSEC is the free-to-play spin-off that launched alongside Battlefield 6 Season 1. Its battle royale drops 100 players onto Fort Lyndon, which EA calls the biggest Battlefield map ever, a stretch of Californian suburbs and beaches where almost every wall can come down. Destruction changes the usual battle royale rhythm, since you can blow open a new route rather than wait for a door.

Gauntlet is the second mode, a squad elimination tournament where eight teams of four play short mission-based rounds and the weakest teams drop out. REDSEC also supports Portal for custom rules, and progression carries over with Battlefield 6. It's free on Steam, the EA app, Epic, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, though console online subscriptions may still apply.

My Verdict: The best free way to see if modern Battlefield is for you. Gauntlet is the mode I'd play first.

FAQs About Battlefield Games

Final Words

Line up all the Battlefield games in order and the series looks best when it trusts the sandbox. It stumbles when it chases another shooter's trend, whether that was cops and robbers in Hardline or Specialists in 2042. Battlefield 6 had the biggest launch in the series by going back to classes, destruction and big combined-arms maps.

For a newcomer, the path is short: start with Battlefield 6 or the free REDSEC, then go back to Battlefield 1 for atmosphere and Bad Company 2 for the best campaign. The PC classics are worth a visit if you're curious where Conquest came from.

What comes next? Battlefield 6 seasons are still rolling out, and fans keep asking for a Bad Company 3 or a 2142 return. Neither has been announced, so for now the near-future story stops in 2028 with Dagger 1-3, and 2042 and 2142 remain the only dates beyond it.

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