One of the most defining aspects of the Battlefield series of games is it’s realistic and unprecedented destruction that makes it stand in a league of it’s own among the first person shooter genre. And of course, the upcoming Battlefield 6 dials it all up to 11 which adds a real sense of emergent gameplay where in any moment, a significant part of the levels may change drastically which would open up entirely new tactics and approach.
And in a recent interview with PC Gamer, Battlefield 6’s technical director, Christian Buhl has stated that as the upcoming game is not released on the previous-gen systems such as the PS4 and the Xbox One, it really helped free the developers from the technical restraints and allowed them to craft and optimize the destruction feature in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
“Maybe the only magic trick is that we’re not on the PS4 or Xbox One any more,” states Buhl. “So we’ve kind of raised the floor of what we have in terms of memory and CPU speed, and so obviously raising that floor helps with improving performance overall. Since we’re not trying to get the game to run on a PS4, for example.”
“Other than [raising the floor] it’s just a lot of work,” says Buhl. “It’s the testing, it’s testing destruction, it’s optimizing different areas. We’re using the Frostbite engine, of course, and the Frostbite engine was sort of built for Battlefield. It was built for destruction. And those pieces are core parts of the engine.
“When I say we tested and fixed issues, sometimes that was the Battlefield team fixing an issue. I don’t think there was any magic bullet. It was just a lot of testing, a lot of iteration, a lot of work.”
Visual features like the procedural destruction in Battlefield 6 goes a long way of making the game feel much more realistic and creates a far more immersive gameplay experience than what most other shooters can possibly hope for. Of course, the Frostbite engine that’s powering Battlefield 6 is directly responsible for the jaw dropping destruction effects as it’s one of the only game engines out there that’s capable of such physics intensive real-time simulations.
Battlefield 6 is slated to be released on October 10 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and the PC platform.
