With less than a month to go until the launch of Battlefield 6, we've been able to get to grips with everything but the shooter's customizable Portal mode. Designed to let players build their own Battlefield mode, Portal was certainly the best bit of Battlefield 2042 – even if it was mostly used to relive the days of Bad Company 2 (and rightly so).
In Battlefield 6, Portal has been expanded to give fans the closest thing to dev tools they can get. You can get a taste for its offerings in this video, but EA has broadly remained pretty tight-lipped about the mode. To learn more, we caught up with Ripple Effect's Christian Grass, vice president and executive producer, and Thomas 'Tompen' Andersson, creative director of Battlefield.
Bring your own Battlefield
Though Battlefield 2042's implementation of Portal already offered generous customization options, Battlefield 6 will take things one step further. As a highlight, Grass points to a spacial editing system – meaning players will be able to mess around with the geometry of existing maps and move elements around. While that alone starts the timer on how long it will take for some intrepid fan to make their own Operation Metro-inspired murder corridor, in theory those tools could be used to make entirely unrecognizable maps.
The goal of this, explains Grass, was to make Portal vastly more flexible. "We spent a lot of effort building that, so you can move certain things around and create more of your own custom experience," he says, describing it as a "big" element of the mode. Another is the addition of "some AI capabilities". "You can do horde mode, and things like that," says Grass, who says the feature is essentially "light programming, which means there's endless possibilities".
Though not as flashy, Portal will also feature customizable UI. "That's one of the things we felt was limiting us," says Grass, who feels that only letting players change text was too limiting. Now, the options are far broader. "There's one experience that was built internally – we created a buy station! So you could go up and buy a weapon with UI. That was created through Portal."
"Someone on the dev team actually created Pong," he adds, laughing. "They used the UI tool to create Pong!"
"That's a good thing though," says Andersson. "The Portal team is obsessed with sitting and testing these things to make sure that it's useful – powerful – for people to be able to create the experience that maybe we wish we could have enabled before. So there's tons of stuff that will not see the light of day, but they tested it."
For the pair, "powerful" is a choice word. "Our philosophy has been power over accessibility," says Grass. "That doesn't mean that we don't want to be accessible, but we decided that having more power will create more interesting experiences.
"If you focus more on accessibility and simpler tools, you'll get more derivatives," he continues. "We have that as well - we have a system where you can create your own experiences through mutators. You can create a hardcore mode, or increase lethality, remote HUD, or whatever. But to do the community experiences that we're talking about, we wanted power. So that's the focus, but of course we try to make the power as accessible as we can."
It's interesting to see EA double-down on user-creation: the likes of Fortnite and Roblox continue to thrive on it, and it's something Rockstar is delving further into by supporting nopixel. But outside of Counter-Strike, it remains relatively untapped in modern FPS titles. The more Grass and Andersson discuss Portal, the more its absence in the run-up to launch makes sense. This is a mode designed for the community to pick up and run with – until that community gets its hands on Battlefield 6, we'd probably just be seeing a lot of Pong.
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