Last month, I had the unreal privilege to attend the Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal event in Los Angeles, where I spent upwards of eight hours going hands-on with the ambitious next entry into the long-running first-person shooter series. Playing on a PC rig that costs more than my car, I joined packed lobbies filled with professional FPS players, streamers, and journalists, without more than a minor technical hiccup. Far from the environment I would find myself in when playing Battlefield casually later this year, the persistent question in the back of my mind was: “How will this run on my PS5 at home?”
Well, a short few weeks after the event concluded, I had my answer. Curious, I joined the Battlefield 6 multiplayer beta on PS5, eager to see how well optimised the experience was on console, and how desperate I would be for a superpowered PC that could run everything on ultra. While a beta isn’t always indicative of the final product, I wrapped up my 20-odd hours with the beta, exceptionally impressed with the visual quality and performance that was afforded to someone relaxing on their couch with a DualSense in hand.
Convinced that this was either the result of potent magic or an egregious amount of hard work (probably the former), I sought to learn more about the development process during a recent chat I had with Battlefield Studios Designer Matthew Nickerson and Technical Director Christian Buhl. Covering everything from development difficulties and community feedback, through to graphics modes and the unique challenges that come with them, I had a fantastic conversation with Matthew and Christian and thank them both for their time.
Before we get stuck into the interview, EA provided us with Battlefield 6’s console performance targets, and they’re worth skimming over before we leap into the first question:
- Xbox Series|S: Maximum resolution of 1080p and targets 60FPS
- Xbox Series|X Fidelity Mode: Maximum resolution of 1440p and targets 60FPS
- Xbox Series|X Performance Mode: Maximum resolution of 1280p and targets 80+FPS
- PS5 Fidelity Mode: Maximum resolution of 1440p and targets 60FPS
- PS5 Performance Mode: Maximum resolution of 1280p and targets 80+FPS
- PS5 Pro Fidelity Mode: Maximum resolution of 2160p and targets 60FPS
- PS5 Pro Performance Mode: Maximum resolution of 1620p and targets 80+FPS
WellPlayed: I played a decent amount of Battlefield 6 on PC during the reveal event, and then jumped into the beta on PS5, so I can attest to the quality across both. What were some of the struggles that you faced trying to achieve parity across all platforms?
Christian Buhl: I can talk a little bit about some of the technical stuff around hardware, and then Matthew can talk more about the controller input stuff.
I’ll start by saying that our approach from the very beginning was that we wanted to focus on performance and stability, and we wanted to treat console and PC as equal targets for the game. In the past, I think Battlefield has approached consoles as a port of the PC game: We build the PC game, we port it to consoles.
We didn’t want to do that this time. We wanted those to be just more target platforms than we needed to hit. We have massive farms of PCs across various specs and all the console hardware we’re targeting, including Xbox Series S, Series X, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 5 Pro, which we constantly run the game on. And from the beginning, our goal was to keep the game performing and stable at a high level.
Of course, that goes up and down over time. But rather than saying, “hey, let’s build a bunch of cool shit and put it in the game,” and then at the very end try to get it to work, we said, “we’re not going to add too much stuff to the game until we get it to work and perform well.” Throughout the entire process, we were constantly pausing, updating, fixing performance, and getting it to where it needed to be. Hopefully, you saw that payoff at the open beta, where the PC game performed extremely well and the console games performed extremely well. Obviously, we’re used to developing across different levels of hardware. We target mid-spec PCs, ultra-spec PCs, and consoles, so we had to make sure that we were running and testing against all those platforms. And Xbox Series S, obviously, has less performance, a weaker CPU, a weaker GPU and less memory than the other console platforms. And so there were some challenges along the way, particularly dealing with the lower memory of the Xbox Series S. But again, we’ve been testing and running on things all along the way, so it was just a matter of making sure that we tuned our dials, our resolution and our fidelity for each platform so that we could hit the frame rates we were targeting.
Matthew Nickerson: From the design side, we have two main inputs to care about: keyboard and mouse, and controller. From the get-go, we’ve really designed the game around whatever you could do on one input; you needed to be able to perform that swiftly and competently on the other as well. We have less real estate in terms of buttons on controllers. So we needed to know what we needed to surface to the player. How do we keep the player engaged on the thumbsticks, to keep them moving and keep them looking around? We’ve come up with some really creative solutions in that regard, and also with the level of customisation that players expect to play around with.
We’ve really focused on consoles and controllers leading the charge here, and we have a design direction around that.
WP: With Battlefield 6 offering crossplay, how did the team go about balancing the game to ensure all platforms are on equal footing and one doesn’t have a clear advantage over the other?
MN: From the get-go, we inherited a lot of the overall systems from [Battlefield] 2042, in terms of things like aim assist. We had a lot of data to go off of because 2042 provided crossplay for the user. So, we looked at the history, all the way through all the seasons, because there were manual improvements, little by little, on aim assist and everything as that game matured and progressed. So when we inherited all of that on Glacier, the first thing we did was look at the data points of what 2042 was spinning out, and then we did a post-mortem of what we thought we could deliver on Battlefield 6. Ultimately, our mantra as a team and for my team, especially, has been, regardless of the input or whether you’re playing on console or PC, we want you to have the best possible play experience, and crossplay obviously delivers that for us.
We want to have a fair, competitive, and balanced approach. We call it Aim Assist 2.0. It’s an evolution of what we had in 2042. We’re talking real-time renders now. We moved away from squares, boxes and spheres to capsule-oriented meshes for aim assist. We’ve really upped the level of consistency and performance across the board. We’re going very light with aim assist. We’re not adding rotational aim assist; we actually removed snap zoom, which was in 2042, as we believed it was too mechanically heavy. We want to humanise aim assist, as we call it here internally.
At the end of the day, aim assist is there to assist the player, but we need player input to even activate the system. We want the player to feel good about what they’re doing in-game, achieving those kills, and they feel like they achieved it. Not some system or code that achieved it for them. So that’s our differentiating point, and that’s our approach when it comes to a design standpoint of what cross-play is and what cross-play means for Battlefield. We have some really cool, interesting, and unique ideas and implementations that are maybe counterintuitive to what’s found in other products out there. But, again, aim assist is always a hot topic, no matter what game you pick, whether you’re a CoD player or an Apex player or whatever. We’re really excited about the solution we have, and we’re focused on what we feel works best for Battlefield.
WP: Something that I find really intriguing about Battlefield 6 and its development is how heavily the team leaned on Battlefield Labs and community feedback. How early into the development process was cross-play introduced into Battlefield Labs, and what were some of the key learnings you took away from the experiences players had there?
CB: Our intent, as you mentioned, was to get players involved as soon as possible. Giving us feedback, understanding performance, understanding stability, and giving feedback on everything from the design of our levels and the design of our missions to console controller inputs. So we’ve had cross-play in Battlefield Labs from the beginning because that was important to us to start getting that [feedback] from the beginning.
MN: Battlefield Labs, from the design side, has been instrumental in helping us prove theories, mature them, and tweak them to where we feel like we’re happy, and ultimately, the community is happy. One prime example that we had as we went into Labs was the vehicle versus infantry combat from 2042. Generally, controller players felt like infantry versus infantry combat felt pretty solid, but whenever they entered a vehicle, either as a tank driver, a helicopter pilot, you name it, and they were fighting against another vehicle, which is a huge part of Battlefield, or they were a gunner on a tank using a .50 cal to hit infantry, there was no aim assist. And they really felt that, so a lot of players, including myself when I played, would switch to a keyboard and mouse for that. They would think, “Hey, we’re not getting any assistance from the controller, we might as well switch inputs.” We really tried to solve that, so we added aim assist [to vehicle combat].
We call it the Battlefield triangle, internally, which is infantry versus infantry, infantry versus vehicles, and vehicles versus vehicles. And now all of those are interconnected. They have their own set of unique parameters, settings and tunings when it comes to aim assist. So, we have a holistic controller experience, and the first feedback we received was, “I don’t feel the need to switch to another input anymore. I feel like the controller as a whole, with everything that Battlefield offers: vehicle gameplay, infantry gameplay, whether I’m fighting vehicles or I’m in a vehicle myself, I don’t have to switch inputs.” And that was a great thing to hear.
So we knew we were on the right track, so we’ve been refining that constantly over the past eight months and trying to land on something that works, because we want vehicles to maintain power; we don’t want to have this auto-aim system where you have a rocket launcher and you’re just blowing up tanks left and right. We understand that infantry is the deadliest anti-vehicle counter that exists in the game, and we want to be respectful of that, but we also want to provide some assistance when it comes to certain aspects [of vehicle combat]. So yeah, it’s been a great way to get feedback in Labs, and there are countless other examples that I could provide where players have really let us know how they feel and have changed the course or the direction of the design for Battlefield 6.
CB: It’s worth noting, too, that our feedback on controllers started well before Battlefield Labs. We’ve been doing a ton of internal playtesting, and one of the things we did [about] two years ago was make a big push to make sure that everyone had controllers at their desks. When I do a play test, which by default is on PC, I use a controller so I can understand what the controller experience is like. When I do my Labs test, I do it on my PS5. I’m going from my PC on the day-to-day play test to my PS5, and it still feels the same, which is what we wanted to achieve.
So we had this big focus to make sure that, before BF Labs, we were doing a lot of internal play testing with console and with PC, and using cross-play, so that when we add it to BF Labs, it’s not like we were starting from scratch. Instead of, “Hey, we’ve never tried this before,” it was like, “Hey, we’ve tried a bunch of things, we think they’re good,” and then players give us a lot of feedback to make it even better.
WP: With Battlefield 6 being a multiplayer-focused experience that will undoubtedly attract high-level players with concerns around input lag and delays, what technical and design considerations were made when implementing quality and performance modes?
MN: We have our own little Digitally Foundary-style lab here to test a lot of stuff in terms of frame pacing, but also general input between USB-corded, Bluetooth, and so on. We’ve even made significant progress just this week in terms of our latency input numbers. We’re constantly scrutinising that, we’re comparing them against our competitors, and we want to beat our competitors across all the different [metrics]. We have like 20 different [metrics], like shooting, standing, crouching, proning. All these different actions, we want to be the cleanest, most efficient and instantaneous experience on the market.
From a design standpoint, we’ve got things like double inputs, where you tap a button to interact and then hold the same button to reload. That’s where we ask, “What’s the hold timer? Are we punishing players too much when it comes to something that exists only on controller?” You have that limited button situation [on controller], so we’re very cautious and very much in tune with what latency we’re adding to the game, and it fits into the overall responsiveness puzzle.
CB: Just to add on that from a technical perspective, we’re targeting 60 frames per second as the minimum target for fidelity mode on all consoles and on most PC specs, our min-spec has a little bit lower target, but that’s partly to ensure that if you’re playing with the settings that we suggest you’re gonna have a comparable experience no matter what platform you’re playing on. Obviously, if you’re playing on a min-spec PC, you might have a little bit less frame rate, and that will impact things. Otherwise, we say, “Here’s the experience we want you to have,” and that should be equivalent regardless of what platform you’re on.
WP: Do the two of you have a personal preference on which platform you like to play Battlefield 6 on?
CB: I mean, I have a PS5 in my living room, I also have an Xbox in my living room, actually, but I set up BF Labs on the PS5 because that is kind of my primary. So mainly PS5, but I’ve played on Xbox as well, and on PC. I got so used to using the controllers that I don’t even know if I know how to play [on keyboard and mouse] anymore.
MN: For me, it honestly depends on the day. I try to rotate through all the platforms. For the two open beta weekends, I had 20 hours on Xbox, 20 hours on PlayStation, and 20 hours on PC.
We do offer keyboard and mouse on console, so that was a very interesting experience. That was something that we were really keen on delivering, so I really wanted to make sure that I was enjoying myself and having a consistent experience regardless of the platform I chose. I think the open beta was a testament to that. The open beta was quite an old build; we’ve made significant progress internally, so it was a cool snapshot to go back to.
As a developer, you’re stuck in the trees all day. You play the game in and out, and you see small, intricate changes, but to see a snapshot from so long ago and to see where you are now, it’s really cool.
So I’m continuing to do that, but I prefer either PC or PlayStation; that’s usually what I find myself. For a controller, I tinker around with a bunch of different things, but it’s mostly the DualSense Edge that I typically use.
WP: Ah, the DualSense Edge, the gentleman’s choice. Do you have analytics to show console players using mouse and keyboard? I’d be curious to see how widely spread that is.
MN: Yeah, we have analytics for all the different input devices and the platforms they’re used on. We’ve been building really good relationships with both Microsoft and PlayStation for quite a while now, especially since we’ve been so console-focused, on delivering a really good product for Battlefield 6, so that’s really excited them. So they’ve kind of opened the gate and been like, “Here’s the latest SDKs (software development kit), here’s what we’re working on.”
The last people to visit were PlayStation execs, who were constantly playing the game; they couldn’t put it down, and they were having a great time. And we showed them all the cool stuff that we were doing in leveraging their technologies.
So, yeah, we have analytics that show that there was a group of people, on console specifically, that really wanted keyboard and mouse, and it’s our job as developers to offer that kind of thing out of the box for PlayStation and Microsoft.
We can either choose to be like, “Cool, we accept it,” or we can turn it off. We decided to keep it, and we’ve been working with both Microsoft and PlayStation to close cheating loopholes, and Cronus ZEN, all the new stuff with that, because we are opening ourselves a little bit to that. But, at the end of the day, we need to have a player choice that, regardless of platform, you can pick your favourite input, perform really well on it, and have fun and hang out with friends, because that’s what makes Battlefield a blast.
WP: Thank you so much for your time. That was incredibly insightful.
CB: Thank you.
MN: Thanks.
We got to spend almost eight hours playing Battlefield 6’s multiplayer at the reveal event in LA, and we had a hell of a time doing so. Head on over to our full hands-on preview to read about our experience with the game.
Battlefield 6 releases on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on October 10.
