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