Battlefield 6 is 'secretly console first,' says half-joking dev who has bravely risked resurrecting 2000s-era console vs PC bitterness

Speaking to IGN in a recent interview, Battlefield Studios developers said that Battlefield 6 has been built from the start with console players in mind, going so far as to describe their approach as "secretly console first."

I'd joke that we should keep our torches and pitchforks stowed, because there is some mitigating context to the statement, but haven't seen any PC gamers reaching for their angry mob gear yet anyway. (Well, except for a lone IGN commenter who says, "So BF6 is mainly a console game now? Gross.")

How far we've come! And in context, it does sound like the Battlefield 6 devs aim to correct an imbalance, not to disregard the PC version.

"We don't want to, obviously, tear down or destroy any of the legacy that Battlefield has, which is, first, a PC game," said senior console combat designer Matthew Nickerson, who revealed in the interview that he coined the "secretly console first" saying at Ripple Effect. "But we really have to care about console at the end of the day."

Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl offered a similar take.

"Obviously, we're still also thinking about PC players, but in the past, frankly, Battlefield was built as a PC game and then ported to console, and it probably felt like that," Buhl told IGN. "That is not how this game was built. We built this from the beginning with the idea in mind that this is going to be on both console and PC. It has to feel and play like it is a console game that was built to be a console game."

Fair enough: I don't wish bad ports of PC games on our console-owning siblings. Though I can't say it doesn't rankle my '90s and 2000s PC gaming sensibilities a little to hear Battlefield 6 developers say that they've adopted a "console first" mindset, even if Nickerson described it as just "a little moniker that kind of pokes fun."

This new multiplatform world has broadly been great for PC gaming, but I still find myself annoyed by certain console-centric designs (never make me hold to press a button!) and when it comes to multiplayer shooters, the PC and console camps haven't exactly been fast friends.

PC players complain about controller auto-aim, while console players complain about aimbotters (who we don't like either, obviously), and those are two issues Battlefield 6's developers are especially focused on, per the IGN interview.

Crossplay will be optional in Battlefield 6, and Nickerson says that they've "completely redone" the aim assist from Battlefield 2042. Buhl also noted that they prefer playtesters to use controllers so that they can tune that aspect of the shooter.

"We said, 'Here, use the controller,'" said Buhl. "We wanted people to use controllers as the default for their play tests. So, obviously, you might still be playing on PC, but you're playing with a controller. That was a big part of our play testing push, is to get people using controllers."

Regarding the cheating issue, Buhl acknowledged that it's a "never-ending cat-and-mouse game," but said that they take the problem "extremely seriously" and have two teams dedicated to it, one Battlefield-specific team as well as an EA anticheat team.

"I can't promise that there will be zero cheaters if you're playing against PC players," he said. "That's just simply not possible, but I can say that we are being extremely aggressive. We see this as critical to the success of—to the health of—the game."

"Secretly console first" does seem like one of those phrases that could haunt Battlefield 6 now that it's out there—it'll come to my mind every time the game crashes—but the beta did run pretty decently on my aging PC, so I'm pre-mollified and not especially worried that the PC has lost focus. (Although those menus could stand to be less "console first.")

You can read the full interview on IGN. The developers also talked with the site about leaks ("...we knew things would leak") and again discussed the issue of goofy skins ("We want to be a gritty, realistic shooter").