After having wrapped up two successful open beta periods for Battlefield 6, the studios behind the title have now provided details about the kind of feedback they got from players, and what kind of changes we’ll see made to the upcoming shooter on the way to its October 10 release. In a lengthy post dubbed “Open Beta Debrief”, the developers wrote about changes to game balance, both in terms of mechanics, as well as overall game design.
Some of the biggest changes we’ll be seeing in the final release of Battlefield 6 when compared to its open beta will be to weapons and movement. Several weapons are getting adjustments, ranging from changing up recoil and tap-fire for all weapons, to specific weapons getting changes like the M87A1 shotgun now requiring more pellets to secure a kill.
Movement is also getting changed up; horizontal speed, for instance, won’t carry over as much from a slide into a jump. Jumping consecutively also confers a greater speed penalty, and the jumping heights have been readjusted to make sure that players won’t be able to get to unintended locations as easily as they could in the open beta. Along with this, physics for how the parachute works are also being re-tuned, with less initial acceleration when opening the parachute, giving players a greater degree of control over their descent.
As for game modes, EA has confirmed that it intends to keep the Rush mode at smaller player counts for the sake of not only balance, but also the developers’ vision for the mode. For those wanting a similar game mode with a higher player count, the studio will work on Breakthrough, which can feature up to 64 players, depending on the map. EA has also noted that players who want to try out Rush with larger player counts can do so through Portal. The smaller-scale game modes like King of the Hill, Team Deathmatch and Squad Deathmatch will stick to 16-player matches.
Along with all of these details, the Battlefield 6 developers have also revealed some interesting statistics about the open betas, from the number of enemies killed – almost 5 billion – to how many players revived friendlies – almost 31 million, and even the monetary damage caused by players waging wars against each other – $196 trillion. The infographic also provides a breakdown of how many players picked each class.
Assault was seemingly the most popular class in the Battlefield 6 open betas, with 32 percent of all players picking it. This was followed by Support at 26 percent, Engineer at 23 percent, and Recon trailing behind at 19 percent. Some other interesting stats include 337 million kills with shotguns, 7.4 million kills with defibrillators, 5.3 million kills by just running over an enemy in a vehicle, and 3.4 million destroyed jets.
Battlefield 6 is currently under development for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The open beta was so successful that EA’s stock price went up, and analysts have predicted that it led to 800,000 pre-orders on PC alone.