Battlefield 6 launches this Friday, the first entry in four years for a once-bombastic series that never got bad, exactly, but maybe lost a bit of its identity in chasing the all-conquering Call of Duty. The die-hards will tell you that Battlefield 2042 is a great game now, after years of post-launch support, but Battlefield 6 needs to be a classic, a game so good that it can carve out space in the most cut-throat and quality-packed shooter landscape there has ever been.
The latest issue of PC Gamer, out tomorrow, features exclusive access to developers Criterion and Dice, among others, with PCG’s Jake Tucker left agog at a “streamlined first-person shooter that captures the magic of the series in its earlier days.” Maybe a strange thing for a new shooter, but that really is one of the big selling points for Battlefield 6. Psst, remember when this game was amazing?
You’re thinking Bad Company 2, definitely Battlefield 3, and maybe Battlefield 4. DICE seems to know this itself, and in previous rounds of interviews has mentioned various high points in series history. Just as the game’s preparing to launch, every developer PCG spoke to was invoking the classics.
“When we decided we wanted to do something in the near future, we looked at other Battlefields from the same era,” says lead producer Nika Bender. “We knew that Battlefield 3 and 4 were the fan favourites, and we really are leaning into what really worked, and hope that this will continue resonating with players in Battlefield 6.”
Hmmm. What would resonate most with me in Battlefield 6 is watching a plane plough into a building that collapses on every fool inside. That’s the thing I associate most with Battlefield: intense and wild firefights with the scenery collapsing and flying everywhere. A kind of controlled sensory overload, if you will.
Whatever other struggles the series may have had, best-in-class property destruction has never really been one of them. But even in that impressive lineage it’s where Battlefield 6 might shine most, with our man saying that “the only thing truly unexpected from Battlefield’s destruction is how pretty and well-optimised it is, with performance remaining rock-solid even as the map comes apart around you.” This thing runs like a dream. So we asked the technical director about the secret sauce.
“Maybe the only magic trick is that we’re not on the PS4 or Xbox One any more,” says Christian Buhl. “So we’ve kind of raised the floor of what we have in terms of memory and CPU speed, and so obviously raising that floor helps with improving performance overall. Since we’re not trying to get the game to run on a PS4, for example.”
I love that Buhl returned to really re-emphasise the PS4 aspect. I still use my PS4 occasionally, great hardware and it remains the only way to play Bloodborne. But the PS4 is now 12 years old, I type as my fingers crumble to dust, and a hyper-shiny physics fest like Battlefield 6 is where that kind of age starts to matter.
“Other than [raising the floor] it’s just a lot of work,” says Buhl. “It’s the testing, it’s testing destruction, it’s optimising different areas. We’re using the Frostbite engine, of course, and the Frostbite engine was sort of built for Battlefield. It was built for destruction. And those pieces are core parts of the engine.
“When I say we tested and fixed issues, sometimes that was the Battlefield team fixing an issue. I don’t think there was any magic bullet. It was just a lot of testing, a lot of iteration, a lot of work.”
Battlefield 6 has already shown this kind of solid performance in the wild thanks to its beta, though some may point out that this is aided by being focused on smaller maps. Buhl says this was deliberate, because they wanted to use the beta to focus on and fine-tune gunplay, and that’s just easier on smaller maps. He acknowledges this also made them the “technically easiest” but says the big boys will all be present and correct at launch: “obviously.”
Battlefield 6 launches October 10.
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