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.
Ariel Giovannetti: Yeah. So for us, keeping that sandbox identity is critical and that means testing, that means playtesting, which is different than regular testing, that means iterating and also means communication because sometimes we do a change that is going to be really good for the game, but then the community doesn’t know how to interact with that. An example of that is, counterplay gadgets that might be a bit more specific in their use, but then there’s this piece of, ‘Okay, we need to let the community learn about the creative uses of that counterplay and how to apply it.’
And that’s a little bit of a part of the fun of, oh, people don’t understand how to use this, but I found a way and it’s giving me that advantage of applying my creativity. So it’s a complex space, but it’s also the most rewarding part and what sets Battlefield apart from a lot of other experiences.
IGN: You came out this season with two reimaginings of pretty classic Battlefield maps, Railway to Golmud and Cairo Bazaar. There are a lot of maps that people like Caspian Border, Operation Locker, Operation Metro. So, why these two?
Ariel Giovannetti: So first of all, we wanted an immense map. We knew from the start that getting an immense map was a top priority. It was a top priority for us even when we released the game and we heard that feedback from the community. We were like, okay, good. We’re on the right track because we already started working.
Also, we have a lot of fans of the map in our team, people that worked on it in the past, but also new blood that played it, that wanted that big, massive vehicle mayhem that Golmud provides. And Bazaar was the opposite of that. We didn’t want the whole season to be about large vehicles because then a lot of infantry players that really enjoyed the minutiae of infantry play were going to feel left out. Season 3 was for all of our players. We wanted to come up strong, showing our dedication to them.
So we also did some changes to the maps and that was also important on a creative level for us. We didn’t want to just repeat the maps from the past. We wanted to do Battlefield 6 versions of the maps because that way we can provide more value to our players.
It wasn’t just repeating the success from the past, it was, let’s get that bar to be higher. So when we looked at Golmud, we identified that vehicle action was awesome, but infantry play was really hard. We knew that traversing from point to point, the lack of cover [was an issue]. So that was a big item for us.
Let’s make sure infantry play is satisfying so that people don’t feel that the only way to enjoy the map is through vehicles. So that was the first very high level requirement that came for us. We did a lot of playtesting just to make sure that that piece was perfect because we wanted the map to be enjoyed by everybody, not just vehicle fans.
The other thing that was critical for us on Golmud was getting the train. We made some changes to the behavior of the train with the train moving forward towards the enemy instead of backwards because that makes that area so dynamic. It also adds that back and forth of you taking control, but then it gets harder and harder for you to take that control. And then the other team pulls back and then there’s always some dynamic action going with the train.
We look at the strength of the map. We look at the emotions that the map provided in the past, how did you feel playing? We get that and we [make it] better, if that makes sense. Sometimes getting that better is hard, but that’s a testament to how good our designers and the team working on the maps were.
For Cairo Bazaar, we were also coming from the space of we want Grand Bazaar, but we don’t want the old Grand Bazaar. We want Battlefield 6 Grand Bazaar that will make better use of our kit and of the destruction. We wanted to set the expectation that this is not just Grand Bazaar, this is Cairo Bazaar.
We also saw an opportunity to revisit Cairo from the ending of the single-player story. The story has been evolving over the seasons and we felt like it was a good moment to go back to Cairo to show how that area evolved. So we felt like it was a good combination of the two things that we wanted to revisit for the season and we’re very happy with Cairo Bazaar. We also felt like that map is a great opportunity for us to have smaller, more tactical combat.
IGN: You also added some quality-of-life changes this season. I think one of the biggest is player visibility. Everybody has their own preferences, and some people I saw were a little upset because it defeats the purpose of camouflage. Are you happy with where you’ve landed on visibility? Is there work to go with that?
Ariel Giovannetti: Yes, there’s always work. We’ll continue improving everything. For us, I know that it defeats the fantasy of camouflage. I would still argue that some camos are still very effective even with the visibility changes, but this is addressing a concern that was frustrating a large part of our audience. They would get killed without knowing what killed them or they would get killed with the enemy in front of them without having the time to react because cognitively it was taking a little bit more time [to register] just because of the lighting conditions.
And this [change] was night and day. It’s funny, it’s a light feature and I’m using light and day, but it was light and day for those players. You can see the before and after that it’s still subtle because it’s not like they have a spotlight in their head, but it greatly separates the character from the background and it improves the competitive quality of the game because we don’t want players to get killed feeling like, “Oh, there was no way for me to know that this was going to happen.”
And I think this greatly improves fairness, but yeah, it’s one of those things that I know that some camo players will find it like “Ugh.”
IGN: How would you define the health of Battlefield 6 right now? Are you satisfied with where you’ve landed with Season 3? Are you looking to grow the game more, especially as we’re entering a very competitive second half of the year? Although you’re not launching a new game, you’re sustaining a game. So I’m curious how you are feeling right now with the state of the game.
Ariel Giovannetti: We’re very happy with Season 3, mostly because with Season 3, our goal was to reach out to our fans, was to reach out to our current players, show them that we care, show them that the future is bright, that we are going to be applying a lot of changes, that we’re going to be doing a lot of things, that is what the community wants and we’re very happy with that.
For example, in Season 3, we are starting our BF Labs initiative for competitive play, which is also a building block for the future, and it’s about allowing our community to figure out the best of Battlefield. That is a very deep aspirational desire of finding meaning in the community. This is to show how we care about our community, how we are willing to invest in making sure that we can grow it, that we can set the seeds for it to be even bigger.
I think the reception for Season 3 was really good. We knew that we had something special because when we were showing the new features on our playtesting, we were thinking like, “Oh, when this goes live, it’s going to be awesome!” We have a lot of other features that I can’t share, but we are having the same reaction. It’s like, “Oh, when’s the next play test, because this is very exciting?” And I know that the community will also enjoy them.
IGN: Night filters were added through Battlefield Portal and the community’s been having a lot of fun with that, and the original version of Bazaar had rain in Battlefield 3. I’m curious if you want to experiment more with both times of day and weather in the future.
Ariel Giovannetti: Yes. We did the winter event [in December] where we added snow. That is a part of the creative lens that we look through. There are times of days that are also very interesting that are not necessarily day or night. You have dusk and you have situations like wind where cover moves around. There’s so many things that we are exploring, and always when we add something to our sandbox, we look for that to be extended through Portal.
So with the community doing night versions of the maps, that’s exactly what we want. That’s the aspirational use of Portal that we were dreaming of when we released Portal. We want our community to feel free to find what works for them because what works for them is what works for us. We want to grow Battlefield as a community, not necessarily as a product, but as a community that has us as devs and the players working together to find what’s the best Battlefield that we can get.
So Portal is critical for that and for sure we are taking inspiration for Portal, but also we are extending our inspiration into Portal. So they have more tools and more ways to modify the sandbox that Battlefield is.
IGN: The interesting thing about live service to me is the game you release on day one is not going to be the game that you have in two years. It evolves and changes. Fortnite came out and it was a tower defense game and now it’s a battle royale. It’s completely different. To you, how has the game changed from launch to now? Is it still within the vision you imagined or is it like, “Wow, this is completely different from where our trajectory was based on player feedback?”
Ariel Giovannetti: I think that the game is trending in the direction we thought it would. A lot of our leadership and a lot of our dev team members are fans. They’ve been playing for 20 years or more in some cases. So when we see the feedback from the community and we feel excited because it’s tied to the feedback that we get internally, it’s tied to the plans that we have for the future.
There’s a lot of micro changes that are done based on the feedback that we get so we can align the implementation of what we are doing. But the roadmap, I feel like we’re all feeling pretty confident because what we enjoy of Battlefield is what our community enjoys about Battlefield. And there’s a line where we try new things and there’s a line where we go to the classics, but how we move, it comes in a more fluid way because we are a live service.
But yeah, we are excited. One thing that we used to say when we sit down to discuss new features is [that the game is] unapologetically Battlefield, we are proud of being Battlefield. How can we get this to be more sandbox? How can we get this to be more? I think Season 3 is showing that and overall the feedback that we got from the community is like, yes. And that’s the thing that we care the most about hearing!
Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN’s news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.
