Accidental Leak: Battlefield Labs Footage Unveils Features of Battlefield 6

A bunch of playtester footage for the next, modern-day-set Battlefield game has slipped past EA’s non-disclosure agreements and erupted all over social media. The footage stems from the company’s Battlefield Labs community testing program, and consists of multiple consecutive minutes of burly shootyfolks running down alleyways through showers of grit, firing very briefly at enemy troopers, and getting themselves bullet-bonked back to the lobby screen.

EA had been taking the videos down, but have seemingly now decided to let them roll. It’s the kind of tactical withdrawal in the face of overwhelming numbers that seldom occurs to me when I play Battlefield, because I always play Battlefield in the character of a movie extra. I am here to cultivate the ambience for other players by prancing around yodelling “INCOMING”, not contribute to our victory.

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From the footage, we glean a few bits of information about the new game, which has yet to be formally revealed (or titled). In good news for people who hated Battlefield’s specialist system, it looks like the old Assault, Engineer, Recon, and Medic classes are back. So are those picture-in-picture spawn select views that once allowed you to watch your squadmate running directly towards an enemy tank, then decide to spawn on them anyway.

There are new squad animations for victory screens, which seem well-placed to help with sales of cosmetics. There’s also the ability to drag downed team mates to cover rather than trying to defib them in a raging crossfire (see also: how I like to play Battlefield). And there are glimpses of the new destruction systems, with whole buildings falling over at the behest of rocket-propelled grenades.

If I have one request for nu-Battlefield, it’s destruction physics of sufficient granularity and improbability that I can engineer really silly terrain traps. The tech has surely caught up with the blue sky thinking by now. I want to whittle buildings down to a single load-bearing doorway, then open it with a sniper bullet and drop the whole skyscraper on somebody’s head. Less Spielbergian gravitas, more Looney Tunes, please!

The new Battlefield is the work of series creators DICE and long-haul Battlefield support studio Ripple Effect, together with Need For Speed outfit Criterion and Dead Space rebooters EA Motive. Ridgeline Games were working on the campaign at one point, but EA closed them down.