After the unhappy reception for Battlefield 2042, EA went all in on player feedback, methodically addressing complaints and promising that the next Battlefield game will center the opinions of fans from the start, with what EA CEO Andrew Wilson calls “the biggest playtesting initiative in franchise history.”
Wilson has been talking up Battlefield 6 (or whatever the new game ends up being called) to investors for a while now, and in this week’s quarterly address he reported that a “core group” of playtesters have already played thousands of hours of the game.
The CEO reiterated his usual talking points during the call: This is the “biggest Battlefield” yet, with “the biggest team behind it” yet, and EA has learned its lesson from Battlefield 2042.
“We’ve always worked closely with the community, but we haven’t always worked as closely as we should have,” he said during the Q&A portion of the call. “We haven’t always really worked to help them understand the things that we’re building and for us to understand the things that they really want out of a Battlefield.
“We know that when we get it right, Battlefield is a giant franchise and often the biggest shooter in the year. And so this time, we wanted to ensure that, one, our player base and our global community had a better understanding of the things that we were building and how we were building and some of the approaches that we’re taking to building, but more importantly, we wanted them to have the ability to feed back on map construction, weapon lineup, progression, all of the things that make Battlefield great at Battlefield scale.”
Wilson also acknowledged that he would say that everything is going great, but even so, I can’t say I’m not curious about what makes this Battlefield so “big.”
The word probably doesn’t refer to map size or player count, since Battlefield 2042’s 128-player maps weren’t received all that well. It may just mean that they’ve spent a lot of money on it, which they clearly have.
This is the first Battlefield produced with Infinity Ward and Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella in charge of the series, and a bunch of studios are involved aside from series progenitor DICE.
Ripple Effect, which made the cool Portal custom servers mode for Battlefield 2042, is “working on a new Battlefield experience.” Motive, the studio behind the Dead Space remake and Star Wars: Squadrons, is working on singleplayer. Need for Speed studio Criteorion is working on Battlefield, too, as well as another “Central Tech Team.”
Fellow PC Gamer Battlefield-liker Morgan Park and I have a running joke about new Battlefield games, which is that the newest Battlefield is always the worst Battlefield ever, but only until the next one comes out, at which point it becomes the best Battlefield ever, and everyone wonders how EA could’ve been so foolish as to change direction.
Will the new Battlefield break the cycle? It’s hard to imagine a lot of people going to bat for Battlefield 2042 given how acidic the initial response was, but it is funny to notice Delta Force, a free-to-play shooter that cribs quite a bit from Battlefield 2042, doing brilliantly on Steam today.
EA will now open up its Battlefield Labs testing program to even more players as it heads into a summer reveal. So far, a 10 second clip in the Battlefield Labs announcement video is all we’ve seen of the game, at least officially—you can find supposed leaked footage with a quick search, and, yep, it looks like a Battlefield game.