Battlefield 6 continues the series' tradition of finding increasingly bombastic and intricate ways of blowing stuff up. Walls can disappear, ceilings can crumble down, and even entire buildings can turn to mush under the weight of a tank, but the developers at DICE Studios had access to a "big red button" that blows up everything, everywhere, on any map with a single tap – and I couldn't be more jealous.
Battlefield 6 producer Jeremy Chubb and design director Shashank Uchil confirm as much in an interview with Kotaku and apparently it's just as fun as it sounds. "It usually causes some big meltdowns in teams working on performance because we designed the maps not to be instantly triggered, like every instance of destruction," Chubb says, which led to some "raised eyebrows."
The big button that blows everything up isn't just in the Frostbite Engine for funsies, though. Battlefield developers actually use it to ensure a map is just as fun to play while fully destroyed as it is at the start of a match, when it stands as it was originally designed.
"Think of the map as [having] three different states, right," Uchil explains. "The map starts out in a pristine state, or however it is meant to be at the beginning. And then, as the map progresses, it gets more and more destroyed. And towards the end, if everybody's using a rocket launcher or C4, you hit peak destruction. And like I said, the game has to be good in all three phases, the pristine phase, the in-between phase, and the final phase."
Destroying everything at once means the devs can determine things like whether there's still enough cover after every wall's been blown up or whether demolished maps are still fun to play on, according to Uchil. Practical, sure. Now EA just needs to show us what that looks like, because seeing an entire map go boom sounds like a thrill. (Modders will probably find a way regardless.)
