Battlefield 6 launched in October to generally very solid reviews, with our own writeup awarding the FPS 4/5 stars and calling it "a carefully-crafted and layered multiplayer" experience with a lackluster main campaign. The game has a "generally favorable" 83 Metascore and EA has said it was "the biggest launch in franchise history" (which doesn't gel with the studio's recent layoffs, but that's beside the point).
So, what's the key to Battlefield 6's success compared to its closest competitor, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which launched a month later to a much less enthusiastic reception? Well, no one knows for sure, but in a panel during this year's Game Developer's Conference, Battlefield designer Jac Carlsson explains the developer's philosophy toward game feel and stresses the importance of function over form.
"How do I balance the aesthetic goals versus the core function of the game?" says Carlsson. "So if we lean into a kind of military fantasy, right? A military simulation, in a way, Battlefield also has a dash of arcade shooter to it, but at the top and foundation of it all, the team agree that the fundamentals of FPS should drive our decision. This means solid input, so low input latency, and movement and firing that is connected to the reality of the gameplay and the rhythm of the game.
"Good game feel, in this sense, starts with understanding what game you have. 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."
It's here that things get a little nebulous, but essentially, it sounds like Carlsson is saying DICE has a certain vision for how a new Battlefield game will look, but it builds that vision around core elements of gameplay rather than vice-versa.
"So response time and aesthetics are important, but they're not enough, because the qualitative behavior of that response is what's going to determine the player's ability to intuitively sequence motions and actions," says Carlsson, adding that he feels a "responsibility" to "convey the sensory input you will get in the real world, but in the game world." In essence, to make the game's controls feel intuitive, if I'm picking up what Carlsson's putting down.
Again, it's vague, but it's still an interesting insight into DICE's broad-level approach to FPS game design, especially when Battlefield 6 so recently dethroned Call of Duty for the FPS crown.
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