Yeah it is. Their reasoning is that the game is shifting from military vs military to skirmishes between survivors.
Context wise, that is all good and well, but MP works on the notion of humans vs Chimera. The Humans are struggling to survive, the Chimera are in massive abundance making their so called reasoning for 8 v 8 MP rather poorly reasoned.
I just hope this game has 4 split-screen offline and 2 player split-screen online. Because campaign co-op and 8v8 online MP is pretty weak imho.