Battlefield Portal developer Rob Donovan spoke about some of the upcoming game mode’s content and his concerns about XP grinding.
On Thursday, July 22, we learned about a new mode coming to Battlefield 2042: Battlefield Portal. The mode will let players make their own custom games, giving them control over everything from time to kill to which vehicles spawn on the map. More than that though, Battlefield Portal is combining a number of older Battlefield titles, including Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 3. While Thursday’s presentation shone a light on Battlefield Portal, we still had a lot of questions after it wrapped up. To answer some of those questions — such as how XP gain would work in Battlefield Portal and whether or not the maps included from older games will make their way to 2042 ‘s All-Out Warfare mode — I spoke to Rob Donovan, a senior game designer at Ripple Effect. What are you shooting for with Battlefield Portal’s player experience? Is this something for players to toy around with or something that takes up a larger chunk of their time like Halo 3 ‘s custom games? I’m not going to speak to Halo 3 ‘s custom games, but we’ve been, as a studio, developing Battlefield Portal in secret for quite some time, and we’ve been talking about it, we’ve been playtesting it, we’ve been discussing it. We think that we’re on to something really special, and we really hope that the community receives it warmly and that it becomes something that is really popular. We don’t want to take away from 2042, but we think that there’s a large enough Battlefield ecosystem that players can go from All-Out Warfare to a Battlefield Portal kind of experience either day to day or in the same session. Is Battlefield Portal something that will persist in future Battlefield titles past 2042? I mean, it’s a bit of speculation here. Unfortunately, I’ve got to go back home after this interview and get back to work shipping this thing, because we’ve only got a couple of months left. We’ve been laser-focused on what we’re going to have at launch, what we’re going to be able to ship when 2042 comes out all at once. So, long-term plans are certainly things that we’ve been discussing, things that we’ve been thinking about, but in terms of what is going to happen in the future, certainly the next Battlefield title, I don’t know what it is or when it’s coming out, so that’s a little too far out. Will players be able to edit how many vehicles are present in a match? In a match with 128 players, can I have them all in tanks or helicopters? You cannot. There are a lot of technical hurdles around vehicles and players combined with vehicles. What we’re offering at launch is, you’ll get the full suite of vehicles for that team that you’re playing as, whatever that looks like. Battlefield 3 has a lot of vehicles, but 2042 has even more. So you can certainly restrict any of those vehicles if you don’t like them. If you only want one side to have tanks you can turn everything else off and just have tanks. If you want the other side to have helicopters you can turn everything else off and give them helicopters. But what you can’t do unfortunately is add more vehicles on top of that. No, you can’t have 128 vehicles.
