Tuesdays are usually the quiet day in the Game Pass calendar. Not this one. October 13 delivers a genuinely stacked drop: Battlefield 6 joins the library on the same day its Season 5 kicks off with a battle through Las Vegas, and two brand-new games — Valor Mortis and Deep Dish Dungeon — launch day one alongside it. If your backlog just groaned, it has every right to.
The lineup is confirmed across TrueAchievements, Video Games Chronicle in Game Pass coverage: Battlefield 6 arrives for Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass via EA Play, on cloud, Xbox Series X|S and PC, while both day-one launches land for Ultimate and PC subscribers the same day.
Battlefield 6, With Season 5 Attached
The headline act needs no introduction, but the timing does the talking. Battlefield 6 does not just join Game Pass today — it joins on the launch day of Season 5, which, per TrueAchievements, battles through a Las Vegas setting. As a Las Vegas-based newsroom, we are contractually obligated to be delighted by a season that turns the Strip's backyard into a battlefield, and we are. Season launches are when a shooter's population spikes, its meta resets and its lobbies fill with returning players; dropping the full game into Game Pass on exactly that day is the smartest possible on-ramp for new recruits.
Two more Season 5 details from TrueAchievements' reporting are worth knowing before you update. The free-to-play RedSec mode is available to all players, so even non-subscribers can sample the season's biggest mode. And Season 5 removes the Gauntlet mode — so if Gauntlet was your ritual, consider this your warning to have gotten your last runs in. Live-service seasons giveth, and live-service seasons absolutely taketh away.
Valor Mortis: The Day-One Swing
If Battlefield is the known quantity, Valor Mortis is the fascinating gamble. It is a first-person Soulslike from One More Level — the team behind Ghostrunner — published by Lyrical Games, set in a supernatural version of the Napoleonic Wars. You play William Dowsett, a soldier resurrected from the dead, in a Europe where the war is very much not staying historical. And in the detail that sold a thousand downloads: Vincent Cassel voices Napoleon.
First-person Soulslikes are a high-wire act — the genre's deliberate, punishing combat has to survive the move from third-person spacing to in-your-face proximity — but One More Level has already proven it can make first-person precision feel exhilarating rather than clumsy. We covered the launch separately in our Valor Mortis day-one story; the short version is that this is the most interesting pure-games bet in today's drop, and Game Pass is exactly where a swing like this finds its audience. It is also available to buy on PS5 and Steam, per the launch coverage, for players outside the Xbox ecosystem.
Deep Dish Dungeon: The Cozy Counterweight
Not everything today wants to punish you. Deep Dish Dungeon, the other day-one launch, is a dungeon crawler built around exploration: head down solo or in co-op with up to two other players, gather resources, fight through the depths and upgrade your campsite between runs. After a Soulslike and a full-scale military shooter, a game whose core loop includes improving your campsite sounds less like filler and more like pacing. Every good Game Pass wave needs a game you play at 11 PM with your brain half-melted, and this looks like today's.
The Catch: October 15 Taketh Away
Now the part of the sermon where we tell you to check your downloads. Per Video Games Chronicle, a notable list leaves Game Pass on October 15 — including Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Evil West and Pacific Drive, among others. That is a brutal departure list. Clair Obscur alone is the kind of game subscribers mean to finish for months; if you are mid-campaign, you have two days, a member discount window, or a difficult conversation with your calendar ahead of you.
A practical note for subscribers deciding what to install first: Battlefield 6 is the big download and the time-sensitive one, because Season 5's opening weeks are when its new maps and modes will be at their most populated. Valor Mortis, as a single-player game, keeps — it will be just as punishing and just as strange next month as it is tonight, which makes it the perfect second install. Deep Dish Dungeon is the one to coordinate around, since co-op games live and die on whether your group actually shows up; get the group chat agreement before you get the download started. Sequencing a Game Pass day is half the hobby at this point, and today genuinely rewards a plan.
Net-net, though, this is one of the strongest single days Game Pass has had in a while: a marquee shooter arriving with its new season, a day-one Soulslike with real pedigree, and a co-op crawler for the quiet hours — balanced, as always, by the quiet removal truck backing up to the library two days later. Download Battlefield first, start Valor Mortis tonight, and finish your Clair Obscur run like it owes you money. More games coverage is on our games front, the GTA VI wait continues in our GTA 6 launch countdown, and today's headlines are on the news front.
What GameSpot Adds: A Best-Seller, Two New Maps, and a Server Browser at Last
There is more to today's Battlefield story than the Game Pass arrival itself. According to GameSpot, Battlefield 6 launched into Game Pass today for Ultimate subscribers on PC and console, with the game also available to stream — and GameSpot reported the context that makes that a genuinely big get for the service: Battlefield 6 was 2025's best-selling game overall in the United States. A service does not often land the previous year's top seller while it is still this current, and subscribers are effectively getting the biggest commercial shooter of last year as part of a subscription they may already be paying for.
The Season 5 details also run deeper than a new setting. According to GameSpot, the Season 5 update is out today, October 13, and adds new maps that include Las Vegas and Area 51 environments — a pairing that manages to be both local pride and pure conspiracy-bait at the same time. GameSpot also reported that the update adds a proper server browser, a feature fans had been asking for since launch, which may end up mattering more to the game's long-term health than any single map: server browsers are how shooter communities organize themselves, find their preferred rulesets and stick around.
Then there is the edition news, which is where today gets expensive for the impatient. According to GameSpot, Battlefield Studios also announced a Game of the Year Edition, and its main selling point is the Ultimate Shortcut Kit — a bundle that instantly unlocks everything for all four classes and includes one season of Battlefield Pro. GameSpot reported that the Shortcut Kit is also sold on its own for $30, so players who only want the unlocks, without the edition around them, can buy exactly that and nothing else.
Our honest take on the Shortcut Kit is mixed, and it is worth saying plainly. Unlock-everything bundles are convenient for late arrivals who want to compete on equal footing, and $30 is at least a clear, single price rather than a maze of microtransactions. But part of Battlefield's pleasure has always been earning your kit piece by piece, learning each class as it opens up. Whether the shortcut is a welcome on-ramp or a paywall around the fun will depend entirely on why you play — and thanks to the Game Pass arrival GameSpot reported today, a lot more people are about to find out which kind of player they are, for no extra cost at all.
