EA has made a big announcement for Battlefield 6’s Open Beta.
The official Battlefield Twitter account announced this:
Open Weapons vs Closed Weapons
Why not both? Starting at Open Beta players can choose official playlists with Signature Weapons locked to class, or not. More to come.
But What Does It All Mean?
As explained by PCGamesN, this refers to a gameplay system that can potentially divide veteran players and newer players. Of course, Battlefield’s studios will want to retain as much of both types of players as possible.
In the original Battlefield games, weapons were ‘closed’, AKA locked to specific class roles. This game design forced players to learn each role, and perhaps pick one based on what they’re best on.
However, Battlefield Labs revealed a newer system where the weapons were ‘open.’ This mean all players could pick up all weapons, regardless of class. This would be a design that would make newer players happy.
Does It Make A Difference If Weapons Are Open Or Closed?
In theory, game developers will have to make a hard decision on whether they will have open or closed weapons. This system in itself has a lot of ramifications on the total game design, because everything will have to be balanced differently.
If you think about it, if weapons in older Battlefield games were switched around from closed to open, with nothing else changed, it would make some weapons much more powerful than others. That would subsequently change the meta so that only some weapons, and potentially some classes, would be much more effective than others.
What EA’s Announcement Suggests They’re Doing
But what this announcement suggests is that the Battlefield studios are really just designing their playlists for open weapons, and giving some players the choice to make them closed weapons. Theoretically, those players won’t be experiencing the game differently in those closed weapon playlists.
We would certainly be surprised if they actually did have a completely different rebalancing for closed weapon playlists. That would add to the workload to maintain Battlefield 6, especially for the online multiplayer.
We wouldn’t rule out the possibility that they would add this at launch, or set this up a few months after. If EA wants to keep Battlefield a successful live service game, they will want to cater to the player base. It has to be justified by Battlefield 6 becoming successful enough to make it worthwhile.
EA Also Mentioned Something Else…
But we can’t ignore the most interesting thing EA mentioned here. We learned that EA was planning an open beta from datamining, and the open beta launch date may have even been leaked. So now EA is just openly talking about the Open Beta. That raises expectations that it will be announced soon. Maybe, just maybe, that’s because that’s precisely what EA is planning to do.
