Battlefield 6 Looks To The Future By Staying True To Its Foundations And Creating Meaningful Change Through Community-Driven Feedback

While I may be one of the few who openly enjoyed Battlefield 2042, I’ll also be the first to admit that the fundamental changes it made to the series formula were damaging. While some studios would double down on the decision or close their eyes and pretend the discourse isn’t real, Battlefield Studios (consisting of DICE, Motive, Ripple Effect, and Criterion) appears to be doubling down on the feedback as a means to mount a comeback. Battlefield 6 is arguably the most important release in the series’ history, and that’s a sentiment that isn’t lost on the folks behind the scenes.

During our time at the Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal event in Los Angeles, we had the opportunity to sit down with DICE producers David Sirland and Alexia Christofi to discuss the ins and outs of the upcoming first-person shooter’s online offering. The pair spoke to us about the impact player feedback from had on the development of BF6, the learnings the team took from Battlefield 2042’s tumultuous reception, and what to expect from the return of Portal.

WellPlayed: Battlefield has always been about more than just what’s reflected on the scoreboard. How does the team go about balancing that and making sure that supporting your team is just as satisfying as getting a high kill count?

David Sirland: I think the key thing is for that to be a balance, right? And to get to balance, you need to iterate. And the stuff we’ve done with Battlefield Labs, the early testing before we launch the game, helps us get closer to it. I don’t think we’re there yet fully, but it is very much something we’re considering, because we know that this is a game about shooting and being good at shooting, so that should be rewarding, and people should be rewarded. But it’s also about much more. In the squad pay aspects, being a good [Support] or Engineer or whatever it might be, needs to be rewarded to an equal amount without it being spammable, and there’s a fine line. But I think we’re in a decent spot. I don’t think we’re there fully yet. I would say it needs more [balancing]. I mean, you play that way as well, right?

Alexia Christofi: Yeah. I mean, I’m a Support through and through, all the time. And I think there’s so much about it that benefits everyone. So, for example, the Drag and Revive, if I’m playing in a squad, I’m playing with an Assault class and an Engineer, and maybe, the Assault’s gone down, and the Engineer is dragging them to revive them, I can run up with my defib and get us in the fight really quickly. And I think we do a lot of stuff with our scoring events to make the individual classes feel really good and to feel impactful.

DS: And to get the same little dopamine hit, right?

AC: Yeah, and there’s mastery to it as well. We make sure that each match is important; there’s also a long-term thing to it. There’s a difference between someone who’s just started playing Support versus someone who’s an expert with the Support class. 

DS: I would say as well that with the Gadgets, especially the iconic Class Gadgets like the defibs, we really tried to make them deeper, to give them something more than just a fire-and-forget thing. We want to make sure that it’s more specific. You did that for a reason here, or timed this just right. A key thing for that, I think, especially for someone who might not be the best at shooting, or is maybe new to the game, and I’m trying out Support, is to give them a really good loadout as well.

We’re trying to make sure our Field Trainings are solid. There’s one in open beta, but in the full game, there will be two of them per class. One of them is the Combat Medic, the other one is the Fire Support, which is more like shooting an LMG, that kind of stuff. For me, the default loadouts have been a hidden knowledge thing in Battlefield. What goes well with what? This weapon, this Gadget, you know? So the fact that I have the defibs, I have the Supply Crate, I have a short-range weapon of some sort, and I have the smoke grenade, and there’s a little help text that tells you, “Hey, here’s how you play this setup”. And that’s where you’re starting, that’s part of the progression as well. We’re hoping that helps as well, to get players to understand, “Oh, the combination of these things is what I’m supposed to be using.” So it’s not just a single Gadget, because I think that’s a missing element of mastery that a lot of players don’t get to unless they play a lot of hours. We can be much better at that, and I think we are really trying with this game to push that and to make sure players feel that. Also, of course, we can add more subclasses over time to provide more ways to play. 

AC: I think the class system in Battlefield is so integral to what we do. It’s one of the things that makes Battlefield so special. So being able to both reward people for playing different classes and also make sure that people feel like they’re getting the recognition they deserve is super important to us.

DS: That’s one of the rationales for the open weapons being the default setup. The way I play now, which has changed a lot, is to look at the whole situation, especially with the squad. “Oh, they have these classes. I will fill in with this.” Then pick the weapon for the situation, long-range mode, short-range, whatever. 

WP: You have the freedom to mix and match?

AC: Yeah, exactly. But it doesn’t necessarily tie directly into shooting either, and that’s something that I think adds a lot of depth. Even though you can pick any weapon with any class.

WP: So you mentioned Battlefield Labs. Battlefield is a long-running franchise, and for any long-running franchise to stay relevant, you need to have a good relationship with your audience. How vital has Labs been for the development of Battlefield 6?

DS: It’s been crucial, right? It’s one of our rationales. We were told, “Make the best battlefield you can.” Ok, cool, we’re gonna start from the ground up and make the gunplay and the combat the very best it’s ever been, and we’re gonna nail it on a quality level we’ve never really seen. The only way to do that is for us to test that publicly, because we also need to prove it to our players as well. This is Battlefield, it feels like Battlefield. And, as you know, that means four different things, depending on which game you started with. So we need to make sure that this game hits the mark, but still has its own identity and is its own thing. I think Labs makes this possible at this level and at this size as well, because with four studios, we push a lot of changes into the game, constantly, and as you can probably see, if you played on Labs or have seen Labs footage, the difference between that and the open beta is quite staggering. That’s because that’s two months of work from this massive team. But with that many changes, that’s one inherent risk per change. So Labs is the great enabler for this. It’s a validator that we’re still good as well. Not only does this latest thing work, but we also didn’t break anything else. 

AC: The validation is something that’s really important to us. There are people on this team who have been making Battlefield for years, who are complete veterans. There are people who are new and are able to make decisions, put them in Labs, and see people play them the way that we expected them to or wanted them to is validating our designs. The feedback is super valuable as well. All the data we get from it is so important. We use it a lot.

DS: Yeah, the closed weapons ordeal, let’s call it. That’s appropriate. Since we have Labs, we were planning on doing the closed weapons. We wanted to prove the classes without the weapon factor being the driving force, which is why we pushed for that, and made sure we did a lot of iterations with that. But then that just scaled up to such a big topic. We’re like, “We should super speed that up and get it into open beta so we can try both,” because that will be the game in the end. And we can get that out fast. Labs enables that too, because without that, we would never risk that sort of late change. It would be too risky to sit on a beta build.

WP: On the point of change, I think a lot of the discourse around Battlefield 2042 was that there was too much change and strayed too far from the core tenets of Battlefield. How do you reconcile wanting to innovate and change while staying true to what is core to the series?

DS: I think what’s needed, and what this game has come with, is the want to make the best Battlefield we can. We also looked at our pillars from a franchise level and really clarified. Sure, we knew it was destruction, classes, and vehicles. 

AC: But it’s “What do those things actually mean?”

DS: Yeah, and what are they not. We needed to define that clearly, because that guides us for a long time, like ten plus years, or whatever. It should be that stringent. Sure, you can amend it and change it, but everyone on the team should be able to feel that and be like, “Okay, I know what we’re doing.” So, when I get a new idea, does it fit? Yes, cool. It’s not like it tells exactly what to do, but it should tell you the lane to stay within. I think that is what’s needed. Because I think that maybe, if anything, for 2042, that wasn’t super clear, right, especially not over time. It was more of a reaction to something that didn’t wor,k and we changed it as fast as possible.

AC: We learned so much from 2042. We took so many learnings from that, and while it strayed from what people found core to Battlefield, it meant that it was very clear and easy for people to vocalise the things that 2042 was not, and what we need to make sure Battlefield 6 is. 

DS: And the order of them, right? Stuff like maps having enough cover or sight lines, the ranges of weapons and the maps being designed for that from the get-go. That kind of stuff is now number two in priority, after combat and movement. That needs to be really high up. We can’t make that a lower priority than the vehicles and destruction, the core tenets, the easy-to-understand parts of Battlefield. The glue needs to be there, the core really needs to be there. 

WP: I think Battlefield 6 has a really interesting opportunity, with the first-person shooter multiplayer landscape being quite messy at the moment. A lot of the bigger names are focused on crossovers and cosmetics that don’t jell with the game’s theme to draw people in. Without adding in the Ninja Turtles, what is the team doing to keep players coming back to Battlefield 6 in the long term?

AC: I can take that. That’s my jam. Progression is really important to us. And keeping people invested in playing is really important to us, too. I talk a lot to the community. And all through 2042, a lot of the stuff that people were saying was “we want more stuff to do. We want more stuff to earn, and more stuff to keep us playing.” 

So we’ve got loads of different progression vectors. We’ve got weapon progression, we call it Mastery. We want you to master all these different weapons, and we want you to play with all these different weapons and unlock attachments and unlock mastery skins and things like that. And then we’ve got what we call assignments, which is a way to get mastery with a class, for example

DS: It also helps with the player onboarding.

AC: Totally. So we’ve got all these different challenges and different vectors to get people playing and unlocking stuff. And another thing we have is what we call Accolades, which is part of our scoring event. So when you do really cool stuff, the game tells you. When you get a headshot and then another headshot, it will tell you “double headshot” or “triple kill.” And those unlock things as well. We want ways for you to show off how good you are at this game, and be able to say, “Hey, look at me, I’m amazing at what I do.”

DS: The open beta is going to be a big testing point for this as well. It’s probably the biggest [beta] we’ve ever had. And it has progression, it has multiple maps, it has multiple guns. It has a lot of game in there, and that’s super useful for us because it needs to last, right?

AC: And we want players to have variety in how they express themselves, in terms of skins, etc. But we want those to be grounded, and we want those to feel true to the franchise. 

DS: When we ship the game, we will also have class shoulder silhouette identifiers, similar to BF3, but they’re part of the costume. There are also some aspects [that are class-specific], like ghillie only being used for Recon. It’s not a lane you have to follow, but it clearly helps, and it makes it more interesting as well. I think it’s more important for a person spawning in, “I’ve got an antenna, I’m a Recon,” rather than, “I see a Recon, I need to act differently.” But that is important as well, it’s part of the immersion. 

WP: Battlefield Portal’s return was probably the big surprise for me, and I was really stoked to see that it was coming back. What learnings are you taking from Portal’s introduction in 2042, coming into Battlefield 6?

AC: The creation suite is bigger, but the other big thing that we realised was that [in 2042] it felt a little bit hidden, and was almost like this short part of the game, and we don’t want it to feel like that anymore. We want community experiences to be there, front and centre on our main menu like our all-out warfare modes, for example. So that’s a big thing for us, thinking about how to bring it into the mainstream so that people want to play with Portal more, people want to play community experiences more. So there’s a lot of stuff we’ve done around things like progression. We have what we call Verified. So, if you create an experience on the web builder portal.

DS: Like Conquest with closed weapons. That’s pretty vanilla; that’s obviously a verified experience. We are much more lenient with other things like that than in the past.

AC: Anything that is labelled as a Verified experience will offer full XP. And as you’re about to play a community experience, it’ll tell you whether there’s full XP enabled. And another thing we’re doing is putting the server browser front and centre, so that you can go in and look for both experiences and servers and easily and quickly identify them.

I would say that, on the forefront of it, the tool suite is bigger, and there’s so much more you can do. And we want to make it more obvious and available for players to see our creator experiences. And we want to make sure that you’re not penalised for playing those experiences too. All these things together, hopefully, we think, build a really strong package with Portal.

WP: David, Alexia, thank you so much for your time today. I know it’s a busy day for you both.

AC: No worries at all, thank you so much.

DS: Thank you, too.

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.