Could Battlefield 6 Season 2 turn the tide for the ailing first-person shooter?
After an incredibly strong launch in October last year, player numbers have been steadily declining, and now fewer than 9% of its release day audience are playing daily, according to data from SteamDB. Given the fact that the Season 2 launch was delayed once to ensure extra polish, it’s clear that developer Battlefield Studios has a lot riding on this release.
With new maps, weapons, vehicles, a fresh battle pass, and more, this latest dose of live service content seems to have everything that fans could possibly want. “Season 2 is definitely bigger than what we have done in Season 1,” explains producer Phil Girette as we talk ahead of the season’s launch.
“Everyone sat together and said, ‘This is really, really strong.’ We want to use Season 2 as kind of the foundation going forward – this is the level we need to hit. We hope that the players think the same, but I think this is going to be the strongest season yet.”
Back to basics
According to Girette, the priority this season is “mostly delivering the bread and butter of the game,” though with “one key differentiator” in some new mechanics designed to “ put a fresh spin on gameplay as well.”
With the update live today, players are already getting to grips with some of the features introduced in one of the biggest new arrivals: Contaminated. Set in the German countryside, this map features a good mix of wide open spaces and tight corridors with frequent bursts of deadly ‘VL-7’ gas.
Navigating gas-filled areas requires a gas mask, which is automatically added to your inventory when you spawn. Although it protects you from the substance’s psychoactive effects, which include distorted sounds and even the odd hallucination, it’s only temporary protection that requires limited-use cartridges.
“There are a lot of opportunities for ambushes [in the gas]. It plays with visibility,” Girette says. “It plays a little bit with perception as well, once you start to hallucinate. We wanted it to be fun to be on the map and just give the map a different spin.”
Although novel for Battlefield 6, this is not the first time that toxic gas has featured in the series. Few Battlefield 1 veterans would forget the deadly clouds that engulfed parts of that game’s maps, a mechanic that many found frustrating to deal with as it gradually chipped away at their health.
Feedback from that game is something that the team has taken on board, however. “We have a lot of people still that worked on Battlefield 1 and that remember the gas,” Girette adds.
“We brought it back, and this time around, it’s not damaging the player. The idea behind it was that it plays a lot more with your senses, and from a vision perspective, we wanted players to take things a bit slower. Whether they will actually do it is, of course, a different question, but [they should] be a little bit more technical and strategic.”
According to Season 2 hardware associate producer Kit Eklof, the studio also saw bringing back toxic gas as “a challenge” to take on. “How can we change the things that the players didn’t like about the previous iteration of gas?” he asks. “I think that the team really took that on and made something more fun out of it.”
All out war
Scale was also an important consideration when designing Contaminated, with the team wanting to deliver a more traditional Battlefield experience compared to some of the small environments in the current line-up. “It’s roughly the size of Eastwood”, begins Girette.
“The motivation behind the map was that we wanted it to be all-out warfare. We want the infantry fights that can happen indoors, but also happen outdoors, and we want there to be vehicles as well.
“The Battlefield experience that you would expect from this game especially shines in modes like Conquest, Breakthrough, Escalation. This is the map for the players that really enjoy that kind of experience.”
“If you’re really a die-hard Battlefield fan, there’s so many things that are in the Battlefield DNA that we’re adding to Battlefield 6 here, which I think is really, really exciting. And on top of that, some innovations as well,” Eklof says. He also describes “the feedback on the game being really fast” as an “active topic” that’s being discussed within the studio.
He reveals that it’s the motivation behind some upcoming balance changes as well: “With me being part of the hardware team, seeing how the weapons people work with this, they are looking at many different ways that we can adjust the weapons’ to kill, and what we can do about that. […] You won’t see a final solution in Season 2, but there will be things coming later on that the team is working on.”
Asked whether he thinks Season 2 is the perfect time for lapsed Battlefield 6 players to return to the game, Girette replies, “Yes, absolutely.”
“If you look at what components a Battlefield season should have, then I think it checks all the boxes,” adds Eklof.
We’ll have to wait and see whether players come flocking back to Battlefield 6 now that Season 2 is live.
The best gaming consoles
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/rU5Fs8zssma9VZVhJ3i3a7-840-80.jpg
Source link
dash.wood@futurenet.com (Dashiell Wood)
