Battlefield 6 is shaping up to be the most optimised the series has ever been on a PlayStation console.
After the popular PS5 beta, we sat down with Ripple Effect’s Technical Director Christian Buhl and Senior Console Combat Designer Matthew Nickerson to talk performance, PS5 Pro enhancements, and how this game was developed differently for previous entries in the series.
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Push Square: We know you’ve said in the past that performance is a big focus for you over things like ray-tracing, but how do you decide how far to go technically and visually with Battlefield 6 on PS5 and PS5 Pro?
Christian Buhl: Very early on in the development of Battlefield 6, we kind of decided that we need to really focus on making performance really good the whole cycle, right?
So we set up huge test farms… and then we started building levels, test levels, where we basically said, “hey, here’s how much stuff we think we want to fit into our levels”, right? So we take a level, we throw a bunch of vehicles, buildings, players in there.
It’s not a fun level. It’s just a level that’s full of stuff so that we could start running playthrough tests in them and see how far we can go. But again, our goal is we want to make sure that we always let you run at 60 frames-per-second at our fidelity target, right? So when we have things cranked up to where we want to say this is the really good looking visual fidelity that you want, but we want to also make sure it runs at 60fps. So we did that. We ran those tests. We saw what we could do.
In some cases, we optimised our code. Oh, we need to make this work better. In some cases, we said, “Okay, we need fewer buildings in a level”, right? And then we made the levels as big and impressive as we could within those constraints. And obviously, sometimes we do things [and] it wouldn’t work. We’d have to decide, are we going to further optimise code? Are we going to optimize the levels? So we did a lot of that work.
And when the PS5 Pro came on, it was kind of similar. Obviously, in some ways, that was not that hard, because it’s just a more powerful machine. We crank up the targets for resolution. And I think for PS5 Pro, it mostly just hit, because we had it running where we wanted it on PS5. When we turned the dial up on PS5 Pro, it just kind of worked.
And how did we decide how far to go? We went as far as we could without sacrificing performance.
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What did the team pay particular attention to when developing for consoles compared to PCs?
Christian Buhl: I think the short answer there is, you know… we don’t want to call it a port because we didn’t consider it a port, right?
I think in the past, Battlefield’s approach has been: we build a PC game and then we port it to console. The answer this time is we made a deliberate decision very early on that this wasn’t going to be a port. This was going to be something we built at the same time. And there were a couple of things we did for that.
I mentioned that we built huge farms, so we’re constantly testing the game on all of our console platforms. But also, we made sure that all of our developers had controllers at their desks.
It’s obviously more convenient for me to playtest on my PC when we’re distributing builds, but I playtest with a controller, and we made sure that every developer at their home or in the office has a controller at their desk so that they’re kind of playtesting that controller experience.
How are you utilising DualSense haptics and adaptive triggers, and can these features be turned off?
Matthew Nickerson: We do offer and we do support all of the wonderful technologies from both Microsoft and PlayStation, so rumble, impulse triggers, adaptive triggers, full-on haptics. And yes, we do offer the option to disable that or to have a little bit of customisability when it comes to maybe disabling certain aspects of adaptive triggers, but keeping other aspects intact.
[Also] your PS5 Controller has a speaker on it and we do offer some really cool gameplay elements in that regard. So like locking on missiles, if you’re flying or you’re on the receiving end of maybe a missile lock, it’ll actually ping really loudly off your controller. We also offer what we call Battle Chatter. And that is just while you’re playing the game, you’ll have, you know, comms and communications and just general soldier callouts playing off of the controller speaker there.
When you’re designing a shooter like this to be played on a controller are you trying to find new control scheme layouts, or do you approach it like it’s set in stone?
Matthew Nickerson: So from a design aspect yeah, we offer, I would say, a more standardised approach to key binds. We have things that are default, more things that you may find from other products, like alternative layout or what we know is called “tactical” in some games where we move crouch and melee around to make it more responsive on R3. I think it is a great offering from a player standpoint to offer those just if you come from a different product. So you have some familiar kind of key bind layout that you might be able to gravitate towards quickly.
We also offer full rebind support. So if you just say at the end of the day, I do some binds here and there, and I want to rebind everything, you can also on controller. And then we also do offer some really unique binding options when it comes to, especially like the PS5’s gyro. We actually allow players to bind gameplay elements to gyro. So for example, if you want to reload, just flip your controller up. You can set that up and program that within our options menu, and that gives you a whole slew of new options and customizability to approach gameplay elements as a player.
We saw in the open beta a couple really famous creators found the instant 180 turn we offer for both keyboard and mouse and controller. I personally use it when I use my PS5 controller to swipe up on the d-pad to activate that. So there’s a lot of cool little things that we offer to allow the player ultimate customization in terms of key binds and kind of what they want their Battlefield 6 experience to be in the end.
Cheating has become a big issue in the FPS multiplayer space. How are you combating that on consoles?
Christian Buhl: Yeah, it’s unfortunate that cheating has become a problem within the console space, especially with Cronus Zen machines and everything. So we’ve partnered with PlayStation and both Microsoft in this regard to kind of do detection. We actually have our own level of macro detection and everything.
So if players are doing rapid with Javelin on the PC side. That’s why we’ve enabled Secure Boot to help us combat the never-ending cheater problem. And we are aware of the console cheater issue, and we’re going to be taking cheating very, very seriously here.
And we want to preserve as much of the fair play and competitive integrity that we can, because at the end of the day, we want to ensure that you’re having a fair competitive space to play Battlefield in.
Have you received any helpful feedback after the PS5 beta?
Matthew Nickerson: We’ve been constantly testing our product, either internally playtests, external playtests, but open beta was kind of, you know, a flip switch in terms of just the massive amount of feedback that we knew we’d be getting.
A couple of the top ones that really stuck out were a lot of option menus, you know, players felt like the option menu was overly complicated, especially when it came to controller setting up. We had a lot of engaged players who were just like, “hey, I want to go and change this, this, this and this player option”, and they’re existing in different menus and sub menus and navigations. And so we really took a step back in terms of like, “okay, how are we allowing players to change options?”
And so we’ve made significant changes from open beta to launch in terms of overall navigation, in terms of overall bundling, especially when it came to controller options. We have a lot of them now housed as a bundle unit. So you can just easily drop in drop out and change the settings that you mostly care about as a console player, especially when it comes to dead zone tuning.
And so for launch, we’re having a much more competitive set of default changes because we understand, you know, not everybody will change their settings. They want a great out of the box experience.
Christian Buhl: I also want to expand. You asked about open beta, right? But we’ve been running Battlefield Labs since the beginning of the year, and that has been a key part of our strategy and plan is to get feedback from players on absolutely everything, right? Like, you know, is the game fun? Is it stable? Is it performant? We’ve gathered tons of stability and performance metrics during our BF Labs events.
What do console players think of this or that? We did that in BF Labs. We got a lot of data. I think that’s a huge reason why the open beta was as successful as it was. But then, of course, open beta gives us orders of magnitude more players than we had in BF Labs. So we continued to gather feedback and data from them.
And as Matthew mentioned, we got a lot of great feedback from console players and from everyone about what they wanted to see and continue to gather that performance and stability data so that we could make launch even better than Open Beta.
We’d like to thank Christian and Matthew for setting time aside to talk with us. Battlefield 6 is blasting its way onto PS5 on 10th October. Will you be squadding up when it drops? Did you have issues with the Open Beta? Let us know down in the comments below.