'we're Not Doing A Good Enough Job Right Now': Battlefield 6 Dev...

When I sat down to chat with Ripple Effect studio design director Justin Wiebe last week, we'd planned to talk RedSec. Wiebe helped lead the charge on Battlefield 6's battle royale mode developed primarily at the Los Angeles-based Ripple Effect, but on the day, we ended up chatting more about Portal—its expansive feature set, boundless potential, and why Battlefield Studios isn't currently doing enough to elevate community creations.

It was immediately clear that Wiebe loves Portal. He worked on the first iteration of Battlefield 6's level editing/publishing platform during Battlefield 2042 development, back when the toolset was, in his words, "more like a Battlefield builder than anything."

In that game, Portal was squarely focused on mashing up different eras of Battlefield. You could pit futuristic jets versus WW2 planes, summon bots, and tweak rules to your heart's content, but without complex scripting or the ability to place new geometry, its creative ceiling was low.

"The people were phenomenal at stretching what we had built to do some amazing things, but they had to really work hard," Wiebe told PC Gamer.

Its other big limitation was the lack of persistent servers. "If I created an experience, I had to be online hosting that experience when people logged in, or they would not be able to play," he said. "So there was almost zero chance for something to go viral."

Those are the big two problems that Battlefield Studios strived to solve in Battlefield 6 Portal. Wiebe's eyes lit up as he described the neat level editor nestled in the free Godot game engine, the web-based custom UI tool, and persistent server functionality that Battlefield 6 shipped with.

Portal is seriously impressive, but it's gotten off to a rocky start. At launch, the Portal browser was inundated with XP farms that clogged up all the server space. That's been cleared up, and now folks are finally exploring the toolset with the sort of map remixes and goofy minigames that flourished in shooters of an earlier era (and to a lesser degree, still do in the likes of Fortnite and Roblox). But of the million-plus people playing Battlefield 6 daily, not very many of them are in Portal servers, which Wiebe considers a current failure of the feature.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

"What we're not doing a good enough job of right now is surfacing [Portal experiences] for the rest of the community to play," he said. "A

Source: PC Gamer