EA has made good on their promise with Battlefield Labs and shared their first public update.
It’s a quick state of affairs, as EA just publicly announced Battlefield Labs at the start of the week. They also let us know that the first playtests under this initiative was starting today, but we didn’t quite know what they were working on yet, until now.
The Battlefield Twitter account made a full post explaining that they were working on gunplay and movement. To summarize, they identified these actionables:
- Reduction of time for bullets to appear on-screen from when players fire, to decrease input delay
- 60hz tick rate optimization
- Recoil system overhaul so each weapon type actually feels different as they’re fired
- New visual indicators so that it’s easier to see where vaulting and leaning are possible
- Old movements brought back, including crouch sprint, combat dive and landing roll
They also revealed these items that will be subject to assessment in the first playtests:
- Feel of the different weapon archetypes
- Improvements to aim and control
- Weapon balance and fun factor
- Look and feel of movement
- Moving and interacting within the map
- Combat pacing
They end the blog post with the promise to update the public once again on the result of their playtests, and telling fans to connect with them so that they can be involved now, even to a limited degree.
As we reported yesterday, EA’s Respawn just cancelled a project they had in incubation. It may be easy to forget sometimes, but it just so happens that Respawn’s boss, Vince Zampella, is also the man in charge of the Battlefield reboot. So it may be a shame that that Respawn project isn’t coming to fruition, but it’s easy to see that there was good reason for them to do so.
Zampella is putting his focus on getting the Battlefield reboot right, and he’s making sure they do everything possible to calibrate their project to players’ expectations. In fact, it sounds a whole lot like Joe Ziegler promising that Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter, Marathon, would itself have public playtests and other opportunities for fans to share feedback, when he addressed fans last October.
The big unmentionable here should be obvious to everyone; nobody wants to come out with the next Concord. Fans may believe it should be easy for developers to understand exactly what they want to see in their games; but if that was truthfully the case, there would be a lot more games getting Metacritic scores in the 90s. These game developers may no longer fully trust their own judgement on what gamers want, and that’s why they’re eager to shop for that feedback.
We wouldn’t be surprised if other upcoming online games also get extensive playtesting as well. In this increasingly challenging market, it’s literally a matter of survival for these studios to get their games right straight out of the gate.
