Ahead of E3 2019, EA has made Battlefield 5 available through its Origin Access Basic subscription. That means you can play the 2018 shooter for the $5 per month subscription fee, or just take part in the 7-day free trial to get a taste of it.
This is an unusually recent game to be added to the free library, only nearly matched by Madden NFL 19. But there's reason to think this is setting the stage for an upcoming announcement, as Battlefield has its own prominent placement just after Apex Legends on the company's EA Play schedule. Each of the scheduled games is expected to get some announcements of future updates, so making Battlefield more widely available at a low cost for PC players could make it more inviting for whatever is in store next.
EA is forgoing a traditional press conference in favor of a series of EA Play streams this year. Some of the games on the slate are unreleased, like Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order and the upcoming sports games, while others like The Sims 4 are EA mainstays. Anthem is curiously missing from the lineup, despite being the company's most recent game release.
EA Play will serve as the unofficial start of E3, replicating something similar to a press conference before the actual press conferences start in earnest on Sunday. But the event has been spreading further and further, and this week was chock full of events including Google's Stadia Connect, which unveiled lots of details about its streaming solution. EA was listed as a Stadia publisher but without any specified games, so we may see those soon.
