Watch out for that falling breezeblock! It’s about to– ah, too late, you’ve been donked. A clip of loud wreckage, gunfire, and bazooka’d buildings has fallen dustily into our lap via a promotional video for Battlefield 6 (or whatever the developers plan to call the next of these large-scale first-person shooters). Mostly, it’s a lot of producers talking a big game about “levelling up” the “core experience”, which seems to remain blasting a building you don’t like with a rocket-propelled grenade. We can tell from the final 10 seconds of the video, which show some of the game’s actual running and/or gunning.
Watch on YouTube
Yup, sure looks like a Battlefield game. A rocket is fired into a building, lots of dust and rubble falls down around soldiers, a big tank parks itself helpfully in the middle of the road.
The producers chat from a hypescript for most of the rest of the video and hail from four different studios, all working on the game in some way or another: Dice, Criterion, Motive, and Ripple Effect. We already knew most of what the video covers, including that the shooter will have a single player campaign, and that it’ll take place in a modern or near-future setting.
The only new thing is mention of a program called “Battlefield Labs” in which members of the public can sign up for the chance to playtest the game. It seems like a fancy way of saying “sign an NDA and we’ll give you a test build”. EA (among other companies) commonly source playtesters from the public like this. Think of the open and ongoing testing done for another EA studio, Full Circle, who like to watch people play Skate and presumably take notes when players fall and hurt their little bum-bums.
As for the four-studio unity on display, it is hard to take this display of corporate unity at face value. Criterion’s role on the game means that their plan to work on the next Need For Speed game is postponed. And Electronic Arts did have a fifth crowd involved on the campaign at one point – Ridgeline Games, a studio set up by Halo series veteran Marcus Lehto. But EA shuttered that studio last year. So, uh, no mention of them in this promo piece. Awkward.
