Battlefield 6 goes back to 64 players per match because 2042's 128-person matches "just didn't catch on," design director admits: "Look, we try stuff. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't"

Battlefield 6 is right around the corner, and it sounds like the devs across Battlefield Studios have taken plenty of lessons from the last installment, 2042, when it came to shaping the upcoming FPS game – including which parts they wanted to ditch entirely.

In an interview with Edge magazine for issue 415, design director Shashank Uchil acknowledges the decision to bring the maximum number of players per match back down to 64, despite Battlefield 2042 allowing 128 to play at once. "Look, we try stuff. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's as simple as that," he admits.

"We thought larger player numbers would work – it just didn't catch on. It's like when a band tries a new sound. Because we like it, but then players don't – and in the end, we are subservient to the players. We do what the players want."

Uchil notes that "Battlefield players are very vocal" and will "tell you what they want." The devs "all read the Reddit," which the design director calls "the number-one source, and all of us are on there."

Not all feedback comes from Reddit, though. Christian Grass, the general manager of Ripple Effect (one of the studios involved in Battlefield Studios), notes that "since March, we've had people, in their homes, on their machines, playing Battlefield 6 and providing feedback to us."

I'm sure we can expect notes to have been taken from Battlefield 6's beta, too. There was a lot of criticism of the FPS game's menus and user interface, and while technical director Christian Buhl recently explained that "we're not going to rebuild our menu from scratch," he added that "we are looking to improve [based on] some of the biggest feedback."

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