After a few hours playing the upcoming Battlefield 6, it's clear the game is designed to be a mea culpa to fans: Trust us, we're bringing back the Battlefield you remember. At a massive preview event in Los Angeles, I sat down to play a slice of the game's multiplayer mode -- and came off it suitably whelmed with a mix of raucous moments and tedious deaths. Ultimately, it feels like it will deliver the kind of big team battles players have been craving, with technical flourishes that amplify the gleeful chaos of a warzone.
Developer DICE has a lot to prove with Battlefield 6. Its predecessors, 2018's World War II-themed Battlefield V and 2021's near-future Battlefield 2042, made unpopular changes to the game's formula, but subsequent updates salvaged some goodwill. So there's a reason the developers emphasized that DICE's newest game drew from the wells of Battlefield 3 and 4, returning to a successful era of big, destructive battles and retreating from some of the more drastic deviations.
"We approached [this project] with this idea that not only do we want to draw inspiration from Battlefield 3 and 4, and sort of the best of the best in our series, we wanted to do it with our players," said Christian Grass, vice president and executive producer at DICE's Ripple Effect studios. "That was a big thing early on, get Battlefield Labs stood up, get [the game] out there, get players to play, and then start that conversation with them, listen to the feedback they're giving us and sort of build this game together."
With the Battlefield Labs feedback program DICE set up, it's clear the studio wants to head off any potentially unpopular changes to the core gameplay people have come to expect from Battlefield.
"With [Battlefield] Labs, everything that we're doing and communicating with our community early on, we want to make sure that we are landing it when [Battlefield 6] comes out," said Thomas "Tompen" Andersson, creative director at Ripple Effect. He noted that the team wants to "make sure that we don't have to counter some decisions that the community doesn't agree with."
Labs has already provided Battlefield 6's developers with a wealth of data, from weapon pick rates to map movement patterns, that's led developers to tune the guns and different game modes. Their attention zooms down to the level of destructibility in objects, gathering feedback on whether walls are too sturdy or fragile and how that affects the player experience.
"OK, maybe no one is using this lane, why aren't they using that? Oh, they feel like it's a kill zone, or there's not enough coverage," Andersson said. "We're taking that internally and testing and seeing if we can make that better."
Read more: How to Join the Battlefield 6 Open Beta: Early Access Sign Up and Weekend Dates
Balancing old and new Battlefield
Battlefield 6 isn't a full rejection of modernity to embrace tradition. For instance, the game offers "closed weapon" modes that only let classes field select weapon categories to reinforce roles, while "open weapon" modes give everyone access to the game's full arsenal. But for the most part, it's a return to the arcade-y modern military shooter days that the community remembers more fondly than DICE's more recent experiments.
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