It’s been apparent for some time now that Battlefield 6 is ready to break the internet, eat Call of Duty’s lunch, and somehow revitalise the love of military FPS multiplayer shooters all in one go. It’s a feat that most had deemed impossible, but Battlefield Studios will hopefully pull it off regardless, thanks in no small part to its use of community feedback.
Now I will say that my usual response to developers championing community feedback is for my eyes to roll into the back of my head as I tick it off my bingo card of cliché dev phrases, but in this case, it really does seem like Battlefield Labs has had a major impact on Battlefield 6’s development.
Battlefield Labs is BF Studios’ most exclusive club, a public-facing playtest that only the most avid fans get invited to. “Developing on a live game, you can easily get players’ feedback,” says lead producer Nika Bender in an interview cover feature for our Print Magazine. “Battlefield Labs is our way of getting players’ feedback during development time, while we can still address it. This means that by the time the game is out there, it includes player feedback, and we give players what they want.”
Many developers claim to listen to their playerbase, but only a few in the multiplayer shooter arena have actually made changes to back up those claims. But after a god-awful Battlefield 2042 launch, the turnaround with Battlefield 6 has been legendary, and a feat that I wouldn’t have even thought possible if you’d told me four years ago.
“An unspoken pillar of our development is how much we believe in the power of tapping into the community and what the community wants,” Bender says. “There’s a lot of new takes, a lot of exploration and a lot of new experimentation. Because we still wanted to create a completely new Battlefield experience, but I know we tapped a lot into the fan favourites from those two games.”
“I think some of that testing is weapons-related,” Fasahat Salim, design director at Criterion Games, adds. “I know there was a lot of time-to-kill and time-to-death stuff that the community was raising, and these are part of some explorations and tweaks that we’re currently testing in Labs.”
One of the big changes going into Battlefield 6 is the addition of open weapons, and while it may not be exactly fair to say that this is the more popular option, it does give players more ownership and creativity over what they want their loadouts to be like.
Allowing players inside way ahead of any other playtesting, this not only functioned as a great way to get early feedback but also as a fantastic marketing tool. The first thing I heard about Battlefield 6 was a bunch of leaks spread from Battlefield Labs by some eager and trigger-happy player. Spreading like wildfire across the internet, these leaks were the first spark of community hype the likes of which I haven’t seen in quite a while.
But as Salim points out, this is only the beginning of listening to community feedback: “Battlefield Labs has been a big part of dev for this game, and moving forward, it’ll probably be a staple of development for us, to be honest.” I just hope and pray that really is the truth, because we all know what happens when a game puts player feedback on the back burner.
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