Battlefield 6’s Portal mode, which allows players to run their own servers with custom rules and edited maps, will allow us to construct our own maps from a ‘blank slate’ template—but not right at launch.
Portal was the best feature in Battlefield 2042, allowing players to set up pseudo-dedicated servers with their own special rules and map rotations. It was almost like the old days—as close as you can get in a modern software-as-a-service ecosystem, at least—and my favorite thing about Battlefield 6 so far is that EA has doubled down on Portal.
In Battlefield 6, your Portal ‘server’ will no longer disappear after everyone leaves, sticking around in the server browser as if it were a proper rental, and the developers have expanded the map and logic editing tools.
In a recent correspondence with the Portal development team, PC Gamer’s Morgan Park asked whether we could go so far as to delete all of the buildings in a map to transform it into a flat wasteland. Not right now, says principal game designer Greg Black.
“Currently spatial editing is entirely additive,” Black told us. “Players won’t be able to modify the existing asset instances in a map, but will be able to add new instances and build whatever they can imagine with them. We are very interested in expanding the spatial editing capabilities of the Portal tools to allow for things like you are describing in the future.”
It sounds like subtractive editing is just an idea at this point, but Morgan also asked whether we’d be given a ‘blank slate’ map to build onto in the meantime, and the answer was affirmative.
“We are planning on releasing our first ‘blank slate’ map specifically for Portal sometime after release, but we are still putting the final touches on it,” said Black. “You’d be surprised how much work goes into a ‘blank’ map!”
As an example of what was possible in Battlefield 2042’s less-powerful Portal mode, my first act in it was to make a server where everyone spawned in the sky, falling, and then respawned back in the sky whenever they got close to the ground, so that all fighting had to take place airborne or standing on a rooftop. Players who stood on rooftops with sniper rifles, however, received messages that they’d violated the Bushido code.
I can’t believe that never took off, but maybe I can properly realize my vision for Fally-Shooty using BF6’s more powerful tools. According to software engineer Gabriel Lacayo, Black once created a BF6 Portal mode full of “erratic and snake-like types of bots that would try to swarm you and stab your legs,” so maybe I’ll toss some of those in.
Morgan wasn’t all that impressed by what he saw of the Battlefield 6 campaign, but otherwise, he and I have good feelings about EA’s attempt to propel the series back into the limelight. We don’t really play Battlefield games for the campaign, after all, and so far BF6 shines where it ought to: on big maps with lots of vehicles. It’ll be out on October 10.
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