After whatever the hell was going on with Battlefield 2042, Battlefield 6 was a glorious return back to the modern military aesthetic. While the game has slipped from its launch hype with fans still waiting for larger-scale maps to launch, the core experience is still pretty great.
Unfortunately, employees across Battlefield Studios (the coalition of dev teams that worked on the game) are being laid off right now, likely due to the game’s drastic drop in player counts. Nevertheless, additional content is in development for the game for the rest of Season 2 and beyond.
In a discussion during GDC captured by GamesRadar, Battlefield designer Jac Carlsson explained that the purpose of the series isn’t just to be a realistic simultion of military combat. After all, that’s what games like ARMA are for. Instead, the series is designed to be a “military fantasy” that balances “the aesthetic goals versus the core function of the game.
“Battlefield also has a dash of arcade shooter to it,” the designer said, “but at the top and foundation of it all, the team agree that the fundamentals of FPS should drive our decision.” Carlsson explained that this means every game in the series should have “solid input, low input latency, and movement and firing that is connected to the reality of the gameplay and the rhythm of the game”.
The designer explained that to sell the military fantasy of Battlefield 6, the core movement needs to feel so good that you can lock in and escape into the game world. Carlsson says that the team working on the game have a “responsibility” to immersion, and most of that is by making the controls intuitive enough that you’re not thinking about them while you play.
“Good game feel, in this sense, starts with understanding what game you have,” he said. “If you strip away everything and just look at the core function of it, it’s an FPS, so the first person movement, firing, damage, has to guide what I call the alignment of perception in gameplay.”
Battlefield 6 does have some controls quirks which stop it from becoming the smoothest experience in the world, but it’s great for the most part. Running through a building under tank fire with your knife out does feel incredible, although in my personal opinion movement felt slightly heavier and more grounded back in Battlefield V.
Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Battlefield 6 feels fantastic to play. Even as the game continues to coast by with the same issues its had since launch, BF6’s core mechanics do feel fantastic. Maybe that’s why the game’s continued UI issues, annoying matchmaking, and poor vehicle balancing feels even worse.
