The team behind Battlefield 6 is working hard to deliver the best experience it can based on fan feedback. Since Battlefield 6’s beta last August, fans have been demanding things like bigger maps, better player visibility, and the return of classic locations from previous games. It took a bit, but Battlefield 6 has finally began implementing that feedback.
That’s not to say the team didn’t hear players all the way back then, it’s just that it takes a lot of time. As a result, they’ve created a beefy roadmap for 2026 that seems to address a lot of the biggest pieces of feedback in chunks.
We sat down with Ariel Giovannetti, Seasonal and Competitive Creative Lead, Motive, Battlefield Studios, to discuss how long it takes to make a season of Battlefield, why Battlefield Studios chose to reimagine Golmud Railway and Grand Bazaar, and how the developers are trying to strike a balance with fan feedback.
IGN: This is probably your biggest season yet, or at least the start of a very significant pipeline of plans. When did you start planning this season?
Ariel Giovannetti: So the process is a bit fluid because it starts very early. We start, even before launch, having a lot of conversations. It’s just that the amount of work invested into one area or the other starts to shift as time moves forward. I participated in basically shipping Battlefield 6. So as Battlefield 6 was being shipped, then the designation of time started to shift, and then once we’ve got the player’s voices, we keep modifying the season. So a season starts maybe a year before.
So there are very long processes of working on the creative aspects, sitting down with the creative director, thinking about the features, and where do we want to take the story? Where do we want to take the features? And then that starts to change over time. But for that to change over time, you actually need to set up a base very early on. So yeah, it’s very interesting.
A lot of work goes into a season and the processes are very different between the different stages. One is an initial stage of daydreaming and being creative and thinking about what we want for the franchise and how we want to achieve those goals. And then that starts to become real. And when it starts to become real, there’s a lot of voices that come in that add their valuable feedback. There’s the realities of production, there’s a lot of things that happen during that trip.
IGN: I think it’s helpful for players to have a sense of how long, realistically, it would take to implement feedback I submit to you today. Obviously, it varies depending on the scope of your feedback, but it’s helpful to have an understanding of how long I should expect before I’m like, “Oh, they’re not hearing me.”
Ariel Giovannetti: That’s a well-defined problem space. Sometimes, feedback can be addressed very quickly and we do our best to set up systems that we can support that quick iteration of the feedback. But then there are more larger changes that maybe it’s not even the development time that it would take for the change to be applied, but how safe it is to apply the fix with all the other systems and all the other modes and all the other classes.
So even though the change might be adjusting a few numbers for the tuning, we can’t release that without going through [Battlefield Labs, the community testing environment], for example, or going through intense play testing because we know that feedback that we take from the community and that we apply directly, we are actually doing a disservice to the community if we don’t do the proper job of making sure that it’s going to be good for the whole of Battlefield.
So I understand that sometimes the frustration is like, ‘Oh, but I want it now!’ You want it now, but you also want it good! So there’s a lot of effort that goes into making sure that it’s good. But yeah, we are doing our best, giving visibility over our timelines, giving visibility that we hear the concerns and the feedback.
I hope the roadmap shows that we are listening, that we are working towards those goals that the community is setting for us, but at the same time we’re moving responsively because Battlefield is huge. And the other challenge that people sometimes miss is that Battlefield is a sandbox. Battlefield allows for a lot of creativity. That’s in our DNA. We want that sandbox experience. We don’t want to box the experience, but a boxed experience is easier to tune. Something that might be obvious, you implement it, it’s like, oh, these guys are using it like this … Oh, no.
IGN: It breaks everything else.
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