Live on stage from a Los Angeles warehouse on Wednesday, EA kicked off its Battlefield 6 multiplayer presentation with a crowd pleaser: Portal is back, and it's way more powerful.
The custom games toolset that debuted in Battlefield 2042 has undergone some serious upgrades that sure make it seem like a proper, Halo Forge-style mode.
You can still tweak numbers and place bots in BF6 Portal, but now you can also add objects to the world, move some existing elements around, write custom UI, and create modes with more sophisticated scripting. Modes created by the community will be found in a "front and center" server browser with hand-picked highlights appearing regularly in official playlists.
It's all part of a renewed effort by Battlefield Studios to bring a little bit of Battlefield's bygone server browser culture back (with obvious guardrails), and do better by the Portal community than it did with BF2042.
"We've improved our main menu UI to make it easier to find, share, and create things," said DICE producer Alexia Christofi in a Q&A with press and influencers.
"One of the things we heard last time was that [the server browser] was quite hidden. So we've made sure to do what we can to make it front and center in our main menu. We're making it easy for you to search for servers created with community experiences."
Before you get too excited about the words "server browser", know that Portal isn't a traditional server browser suite with unique IPs, renting services, and 24/7 access. Portal is more like Halo's custom games browser, where players have to spin up a session each time to play and servers don't persist without someone in them. It is a server browser by definition, but it's still an entirely closed system, sadly.
In a fact sheet provided to press, EA gave some examples of custom games (it calls them "community experiences") that have already been created with Portal:
- A "horde mode" with a buy screen built with custom UI tools
- An "arcade-style puzzle mode" utilizing custom UI
- A "verified community experience" version of Conquest without vehicles
- A top-down shooter
- A platforming level made with the spatial editor
What does it mean when your Portal mode is "verified"? You can earn full XP and progression while playing it, just like any official playlist. It sounds like verification is a mostly automated process—as long as your mode doesn't stray too far outside vanilla BF6 rulesets, it's a valid way to level up.
One annoying thing: The Portal editor will once again exist outside the Battlefield 6 client itself within a custom version of the Godot game engine. It's better than no editor at all, but I imagine its inaccessibility will limit how many players become creators.
Portal was just the tip of the iceberg at the Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal—EA also spoke about open vs closed weapons, we now know BF6's max player cap, and learned EA is kicking the battle royale reveal down the road. I also played four hours of multiplayer and came away very excited.
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