We’re back with another Community Update focused on destruction, and a summary of our initial learnings from previous Battlefield Labs play sessions.
Let’s start with a preview on how we’re designing and testing destruction for the future.
OUR DESIGN PHILOSOPHY FOR DESTRUCTION
Our goals for destruction are centered around adding further gameplay depth by allowing you to reshape the environment and transform your surroundings toward a tactical advantage. For example, barging through walls to surprise your enemies, reshaping the battlefield to create new paths into the capture zones, or taking down a building to take out an attacking squad.
We're designing destruction around easily identifiable visual and audio language that lets you understand what can be destroyed, altered, or transformed through gameplay.
We aim to make destruction an integral part of your Battlefield experience to create an intuitive, fun, and rewarding environment where you feel empowered to shape the world around you.
DESTRUCTION AND GAMEPLAY
Let’s take walls as an example of the new destruction language. Once a wall takes enough damage from an explosion, smaller impacts, such as bullets, will also contribute to its destruction, allowing you to shoot your way through the wall. Audio VFX will help you not only see, but also hear whether your attacks are successful.
Different surface types now also visually degrade before breaking down through persistent surface damage. Buildings “apple-core” as they start to break down, leaving their core exposed as destroyed parts create rubble and debris on the ground around it.
New mechanics allow you to create more destruction-related opportunities during gameplay, as well as being able to influence your surroundings through the use of different weapons or vehicle types. For example, rubble caused by destruction now remains on the battlefield, and allows you to create and use new opportunities for cover and protection.
Above is an early pre-alpha example that showcases the ability to destroy a wall to quickly traverse through the building and reach the other side - without this tactical impact, you would have to either run around the block or navigate through staircases to get to the other side.
Be careful in how you use destruction to your advantage, as one advantage to you would also be an advantage to the enemy, and this exposed flooring could now be used by them to counter this new route.
FEEDBACK AND VALIDATION
Insights we’re gathering range from everything between destruction as a tactical element to you as a player being able to differentiate between non-destructible and destructible environments.
At this stage of testing within Battlefield Labs, our main focus points are:
Understanding which environments can or cannot be destroyed and which type of firepower is required for different material types
The impact of collateral damage from debris and destructible elements
Tactical use of destruction to create new pathing or persistent environments
Balancing the ecosystem of damage through firepower and destruction
OUR LEARNINGS SO FAR
Our goals for our initial Battlefield Labs play sessions were to test server performance, gunplay and movement, and for participants to get an initial understanding of what's next for Battlefield. Participants have now played through multiple sessions, and offered up thousands of pieces of feedback. As we start testing other topics such as destruction, we wanted to share some of our initial learnings and next steps coming out of those play sessions.
We encountered some initial issues with server stability and performance, which provided valuable data for us to adjust their configurations. We've already seen that follow-up play sessions offered a smoother gameplay experience for participants, and that we are on the right track to start scaling further testing with more participants in the future.
For gunplay we've learned that while gunplay feels in a good spot, there's further balancing to be done to the different weapon archetypes and their damage values. Feedback on movement suggests that we need to continue iterating on finding the right balance in speed, namely for functionality like crouch sprint, combat rolling, vaulting, and more. Be sure to check out our previous Community Update if you are interested in learning more about our design philosophy and goals for gunplay and movement.
Lastly, as we move our focus back to destruction, we have seen feedback around the balancing of destructible objects across the map and the fine-tuning of damage levels of surfaces. Destruction will be an ongoing topic within our playsessions, and we’ll continue to test these and other areas of destruction throughout upcoming playsessions.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Sign up for Battlefield Labs now if you’re interested in helping us validate the future of Battlefield. Read our FAQ if you’d like to learn more, and join the discussion on Battlefield Discord.
We’ll be back in the future with new Community Updates to keep you informed on ongoing testing and learnings within Battlefield Labs.
We look forward to seeing you in action, hearing your feedback, and chatting Battlefield with you!
// The Battlefield Team
Battlefield Labs - Community Update - Gunplay and Movement Philosophy
This is the first of our regular Community Updates to keep you informed about features we’re testing in Battlefield Labs. Today we’ll focus on elements of gunplay and movement.
OUR DESIGN PHILOSOPHY FOR GUNPLAY AND MOVEMENT
We've continually evolved our gunplay and movement mechanics throughout the Battlefield series. Now, within Battlefield Labs, we're focused on refining the best elements from past titles, modernizing them, and validating if they feel fun and rewarding, and have the right balance between intuitive control and dynamic combat.
We're designing the combat experience to ensure players of all skill levels can enjoy our gunplay and movement systems. Our goal is to offer gameplay that rewards skill with precise weapon feedback and movement options for veterans, while providing an intuitive experience for new players to learn and enjoy.
For gunplay we're exploring designs centered on helping you learn and develop skills and muscle memory through action, as weapons naturally signal their recoil direction. This feedback loop allows you to understand and adjust your aim, making it easier to handle different weapons. This system not only adds variety but also enhances each weapon's unique feel and play style.
Movement is also deeply integrated with gunplay, as your actions and targets are all part of the same cohesive combat experience. We aim to make movement both feel intuitive and rewarding to move within the world and during combat, but also when playing against someone using both the gunplay and movement systems to their maximum potential.
WHAT’S NEW AND IMPROVED FOR GUNPLAY AND MOVEMENT
Initially we’ll test select but important areas that create the foundation required to create a fun and rewarding Battlefield combat experience. We’re making focused efforts to create consistent and optimized millisecond-to-millisecond soldier combat, and we’ll share some key examples of changes that will be available during our initial playsessions.
We’ve reduced the time it takes for bullets to appear on your screen from when you press fire. This change decreases input delay, makes shooting feel more responsive, and helps you better track and hit moving targets.
We're optimizing for a 60Hz tick rate, ensuring the game server more frequently updates the positions and actions for all players. This results in responsive gameplay across all platforms and inputs. You'll notice more precise shooting and movement, enhanced damage feedback, and more accurate representation of other players' positions and combat outcomes.
We've adjusted the recoil system to make the different weapon types feel unique when firing them. Through enhancements to gunplay recoil, camera shakes, and firing settles, each shot’s recoil direction now matches its gameplay angle. The weapon visually stabilizes the more accurate your handling is, making you feel like you're actually firing and controlling it.
To evolve the moment system we've revamped animations and reintroduced movement features such as crouch sprint, combat dive and landing roll, and added visual indicators to make it easier to understand when movements such as vaulting or leaning are possible.
FEEDBACK AND VALIDATION
At this stage content within Battlefield Labs is pre-alpha, and playsessions take place within a closed dev environment focused on testing small chunks of a larger array of features. Some gameplay features are placeholder, work-in-progress and with bugs and performance not being representative of the final experience. However, even during this early stage of development you'll get a good sense of our new design approach.
During our first playsession our teams will be validating the systems and stability of Battlefield Labs such as server performance, while participants will be able to familiarise themselves with what’s next for Battlefield through testing the gunplay and movement experience, focused on:
Feel of the different weapon archetypes
Improvements to aim and control
Weapon balance and fun factor
Look and feel of movement
Moving and interacting within the map
Combat pacing.
STAY TUNED
Lastly, a reminder that while our playsession will be within a closed environment, and we can't invite everyone to every session, we'll make sure to keep you informed on ongoing Battlefield Labs playsessions and learnings through these regular Community Updates.
Sign up for Battlefield Labs now if you’re interested in helping us validate the future of Battlefield, and read our FAQ if you’d like to learn more.
We’ll be back in the coming weeks to talk more about our learnings from our first playsessions, as well as another feature focused Community Update.
//The Battlefield Team
Please keep in mind that everything related to EA Playtesting is STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL. This means no posting or sharing details of this Playtest, in person, on social media or anywhere else. Acceptance of the Pre-Release Game Program Policy, EA User Agreement, and EA Privacy & Cookie Policy are required to participate.
This is Battlefield Labs
Welcome to Battlefield Labs.
We'd like to invite you to join us for our most ambitious community development collaboration ever. This is an opportunity to provide feedback, validate the future of Battlefield, and have a direct and lasting impact on the next generation of Battlefield games.
Our collective Battlefield Studios teams have been hard at work and are now entering a critical phase of our development cycle, where your feedback is crucial in helping us know what to prioritize, improve, and refine before release.
What Is Battlefield Labs?
Battlefield Labs is a place for us to test concepts and experiences we’re excited about with you, our players. We want our community to play a key role in the future of Battlefield and this is an opportunity for many of you to do just that.
We will test (almost) everything but not everything you see will be complete. To ensure that your feedback has impact, players will experience, under NDA, different pieces of an unfinished puzzle so we have time to incorporate your feedback into the final product.
Even in pre-alpha, we are proud of where the game is at. We tirelessly playtest, but your feedback will supercharge our development as we strive to hit that perfect note between form, function, and feel.
This is an unprecedented moment for Battlefield. We will start by testing the pillars of play, like core combat and destruction. Then transition to balance and feedback for our weapons, vehicles and gadgets, ultimately leading to where all these pieces come together in our maps, modes, and squad play.
And yes, we will be testing Conquest and Breakthrough, the heart and soul of our all-out warfare experience, but BF Labs will also be a place to explore new ideas and fine-tune and improve Battlefield pillars like our class system (Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon) to create deeper more strategic play.
How do I get involved?
Sign up now. To form an accurate snapshot of our community we need a variety of players - veterans and new recruits - ready to play and feedback on our vision for the future of Battlefield. Initial invites will be limited to a few thousand participants with servers located in Europe and North America. Over time we’ll invite tens of thousands more with support for further territories.
Regardless of your level of participation, we want all Battlefield fans to be a part of the process. We’ll be posting work-in-progress public updates from our community team where you will hear directly from developers at Battlefield Studios.
There will be ample opportunity to play and converse around the next Battlefield ahead of its launch. This is just the beginning.
Until then, join us on the official Battlefield Discord as it’s our prime way to stay up to date on all things Battlefield!
Let’s build Battlefield together. //The Battlefield Team
This announcement may change as we listen to community feedback and continue developing and evolving our Live Service & Content. We will always strive to keep our community as informed as possible.
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This is the first of our regular Community Updates to keep you informed about features we’re testing in Battlefield Labs. Today we’ll focus on elements of gunplay and movement.
