Summary
Battlefield 2042players will experience the horrors ofDead Spacefor a limited time starting on July 9 with Update 7.4.0. This final major update to2042’s Season 7: Turning Point will allow players to earn variousDead Space-themed cosmetics, including an Engineering Suit-inspired Legendary Casper Skin called Marked Man.
In addition toDead Spacecosmetics,2042troops will be able to survive waves of zombie-like Augmented Targets in the new 4-player squad PvE gamemode called Outbreak. At first, this crossover may have appeared to come out of left field for mostDead SpaceorBattlefieldfans, but the two EA titles have a surprising 12-year-long history together.
In late 2012, just two years after the release ofDead Space 2and one year intoBattlefield 3’s lifespan,Battlefield 3received itsfourth expansion in the form ofBattlefield 3: Aftermath. Here, the relationship betweenBattlefieldandDead Spacewould begin. In the upper right-hand corner of the map Epicenter, players can find a barren concrete wall below a sign that reads TRAVEL AGENT. If players were to blow up this wall and look inside, they’d find the helmet of Isaac Clarke’s Advanced Suit fromDead Space 2sitting on a rack.
Three years later, in 2015,Dead Space’s parent developer Visceral Games releasedthe crime and police-centricBattlefield Hardline. The developers made sure to put in numerous Easter eggs and references toDead SpaceinHardlinefor eagle-eyed fans. These include a statue of the infamous, Necromorph-creating Marker on the multiplayer map Hollywood Heights, a Japanese restaurant on the map Downtown called Ishimura after the Planet Cracker-class ship of the same name which was the setting forDead Space 1, and several unlockable patches featuringDead Spacecharacters and entities such as EarthGov and Peng that can be equipped in multiplayer.
Battlefield Hardlinewas Visceral Games' final game ever produced before being shut down in 2017 by EA.
While most of these Easter eggs are obviously non-canonical to bothBattlefield’s andDead Space’s universe, a few have led some fans to believe that the two EA games are set in the same timeline — namely, the appearance of a Marker statue, Lightspeed Boy, and Peng. WhileHardlineis set in Florida in 2012, these appearances could be seen as the beginning of later companies and organizations seen hundreds of years later in theDead Spacegames. Lightspeed Bars have no current date of origin, butPeng is said to be from a company that’s over 200 years old, according to an item description inDead Space 3. Their display inHardlinecould be the origins of these possibly 500-year-old companies.
Likewise, the Marker’s appearance inHardlinecould be seen as the beginning of humanity’s interest in the Markers. Officially,Markers and their subsequent religion, Unitology, wouldn’t be discovered and formed until 200 years afterHardline, as seen in the bookDead Space: Martyr. However, the Black Marker, the first Marker discovered by humanity, is in the Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico. It’s hinted that the Black Marker’s fall to Earth caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. While the Black Marker wasn’t officially discovered until the 23rd Century, some rich individuals may have seen or been influenced by it to create the statue inHardline, connecting theBattlefieldandDead Spacetogether.
