Battlefield 6 Director Explains Portal Upgrade And Other New Features

Everyone and their mums seem to be enjoying the Battlefield 6 open beta at the moment, but there's still a lot about the upcoming shooter that EA has held back from revealing. GAMINGbible recently sat down with Criterion Games to discuss the upcoming multiplayer shooter, why the series is going back to modern day, and to break down the new and upgraded features the game will be getting.

Fasahat Salim is the Design Director for Criterion Games, one of the four developers working underneath the Electronic Arts' Battlefield Studios banner. For Battlefield 6, the studios wanted a return to form for the series, bringing back the traditional classes and expanded destruction physics to reel in fans of the older games.

“It’s the biggest Battlefield, and we don’t take that lightly,” Salim told GAMINGbible. “The key for us is to not necessarily be bigger for the sake of being bigger. It’s about taking all of the things we know that represent Battlefield at the foundation of what we’ve been doing for as long as we’ve been doing it.

“So, looking back at those games and all the things we know that worked and resonated with the community; taking those elements that are Battlefield, taking them to the next level, and asking ourselves ‘How do we take things like destruction and classes to the next level?’”

In terms of which Battlefield games were looked at the most for inspiration, Salim cites the popularity of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 as the reason to return to a modern setting.

“That was our North Star, we wanted to hit that modern feeling, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t strip it all down and look at the stuff that worked in some of the other Battlefield games. That boiled down to destruction, large-scale maps, focusing on classes, and allowing players to fulfil that fantasy of whatever class they are playing as.”

Battlefield Studios is made up of four developers: DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect and Motive Studio. For a project on this scale, and with so many hands involved in spreading the load across all aspects of the game, effective communication and collaboration techniques are crucial.

“It’s been really useful for the way we’ve built this game,” Salim said. “When we say this is the biggest Battlefield, we mean it. It’s not just singleplayer and multiplayer, there’s Battlefield Portal and a lot more. So, it only made sense to get as much talent into Battlefield Studios as possible, and that’s how we set it up.

So, how do we go about doing that? One of the big things was that there are a lot of skills spread across these studios, so being able to lean on them for disciplines and expertise for anything we don’t have in-house is really valuable. It allows us to get that momentum in the content that we’re building, and not necessarily be shackled by the fact we don’t have that in our own studio. And the same goes for the other studios to lean on Criterion for any support. So, all that sharing is something that spreads across the whole game.”

It’s no secret that the previous game in the series, Battlefield 2042, was met with a mixed reception from the community when it launched back in 2021. The four class system was replaced with a brand new specialist system, something that proved to be unpopular with players. The maps were also heavily criticised for being too big, not providing much cover, and overall just not being as interesting as the maps that populated earlier games in the series.

As I covered in my preview of the beta last week, Battlefield 6’s maps feel closer to the feel of those that appeared in Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4. Like those games, there's a strong sense of map flow, they're more suitable for all different playstyles, and the destruction system is a lot more emphasised.

“Maps are the bread and butter of what we do. The massive large-scale environments are still there, but there are a few things that are slightly different. Destruction is one of the obvious ones. Destruction being at the scale of what it is, but more importantly, it being a tool where players can now engage with it through tactical opportunities and make choices they couldn’t before. That’s very much part of the experience, where it’s more of a strategic tool rather than just something that looks cool.

“That’s one thing, and the other thing is we’ve made a strong effort not only worrying about the large-scale map we’re building but also focusing on the micro zones within it. We call them Combat Zones, and the idea is that we don’t want the maps to just be a location that we drop a whole bunch of game modes into, but we want each of these levels and the spaces within them to play well with whatever game mode you’re engaging with.

“So you can drop into a Team Deathmatch in a smaller map, and while it’s located within a much larger map that we’ve built, that space in particular has been built to accommodate those smaller game modes in addition to the larger ones.”

Salim doesn’t necessarily see Battlefield 6 as a way of “righting the wrongs” of 2042, but he does reckon “there were a lot of learnings to be made from that game, and I think there’s a lot of things we’ve actually built on top of 2042. I think it’s more about not looking at a single game, but looking at the collection of Battlefield we’ve done in the past and picking out the throughline of what works about the series at its core.”

As for what features specific to 2042 made it over to Battlefield 6, Salim went on to tease a little more about what the new version of Portal looks like. For the unaware, Battlefield Portal was essentially a tool in Battlefield 2042 which allowed you to create custom rules in your own Battlefield servers, using content from previous games. The feature returns in Battlefield 6, but Salim calls it “more of a platform than anything else.”

“It’s a massive, massive upgrade on what was done before. It’s not going to be limited to you just being able to create custom game modes and using assets from previous Battlefield games. Of course, you can still do that if you want to, but the key thing for Portal now is it’s not a full blown expression of what people want to create. We have a spatial editor, so people can actually create environments, move assets around, and ultimately customise what they want that experience to be.

“They can then go about scripting things. We’ve got a scripting editor in there, so you can choreograph experiences and AI to do whatever you want. This time around it’s more than just creating offshoots of what was already there, and you’ll actually be able to create brand new experiences.”

In terms of what these could be, Salim teased “top down 2D shooters” and “horde modes” as potential new experiences that can be had in the new Battlefield Portal. It sounds like it goes way beyond that though, and that players may even be able to create narrative experiences and venture into genres outside of shooters.

“That feeds into one of the key things we have been focusing on with this project, which is how can we give players the tools to express themselves? Portal is just one way of doing that, but that also applies to loadouts and classes, and destruction as well. These aren’t just things to engage with, but also a way for you to express yourself.”

As we moved on to discuss the Battlefield 6 classes; Assault, Recon, Support, and Engineer, Salim walked me through how each of these classes are different or similar to their iterations from earlier games.

“The key for us was that we fulfil the fantasy of filling those roles. I’m an engineer, I’ve always loved playing engineer. My fantasy as an engineer main is that I want to be the anti-vehicle guy, so I know how to get the most out of my experience. We know there’s a huge appetite for people to work with the loadouts that resonate with those classes, so they feel like they can fulfil that fantasy.

“But it was also important for us to evolve that. That meant listening to player feedback and especially using the Battlefield Labs program as a way to find the sweet spot and give players more creative agency. We want players to express themselves with the weapons they use, so irrespective of what class you pick, you can still change your weapons outside of the traditional loadouts related to those classes.

“I think this has been a really interesting evolution of how we feel about classes. You still get to fulfil that traditional Battlefield fantasy, but agency and creativity has been a big part of this process as well.”

Players have now had a chance to check out Battlefield 6 through its first open beta weekend, which began on Thursday and runs until the end of today. Another beta weekend will follow next week, between 14th August and 17th August.

From the looks of it, it seems that the open beta has probably become one of the most successful betas to date, accruing over half a million concurrent players during its first few days alone. It’ll be interesting to see if this is enough to convince players to pick up the full game when it launches later this year.

Battlefield 6 releases on 10th October, 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.