Battlefield 6 Battle Royale Mode Gets Official Details; Testing Starts This Week on BF Labs

A few hours ago, the Battlefield 6 development team unveiled the long-rumored (and recently leaked) Battle Royale mode, which will begin testing this week via the Battlefield Labs platform. The goal is to infuse this highly popular game mode with Battlefield DNA, including destructible environments, classes, and more.

Unsurprisingly, the map has been designed specifically for the Battle Royale experience. It features a diverse array of tactical points of interest, each with a distinct layout and theme that offers unique gameplay opportunities. During a Battle Royale match, players can find common vehicles around the map and eventually unlock powerful armored vehicles. The goal is to provide users with more ways to traverse the map early in a match and create interesting combined arms action, again playing to the trademark strength of the Battlefield franchise.

Destruction will include anything from creating pathways through walls all the way to toppling whole buildings, which is definitely something other Battle Royale games don’t really have. The initial test will host a hundred players split into twenty-five squads of four, each vying to be the last squad standing. Communication tools include text, VoIP, and pings. To keep their squad alive, players can count on the Support class’s revives and the Mobile Redeploy option.

The Battle Royale subgenre’s defining feature is the ever-shrinking ‘circle’. In Battlefield’s twist, this will be a fire ring that instantly kills anything it touches, pushing players to always be inside it at a safe distance. In most other games of this kind, the circle merely damages players at a not-so-deadly rate, which players sometimes exploit to go around enemies and kill them.

Ahead of a Battlefield Battle Royale match, each squad selects the classes, another distinguishing feature compared to most games. The chosen class is not changeable during the matches. Players begin with two default gadgets from their class and level up during each match; XP is earned by defeating an opposing player or completing missions. Intel Cases will be a particularly juicy target since they provide experience to the whole squad. Leveling up a class provides access to new traits. For example, the Assault class can equip an armor plate faster.

Throughout a Battlefield Battle Royale match, players explore the map, complete missions, and battle for loot. There will be five rarity tiers of weapons to loot, as well as attachments, throwables, gadgets, strike packages, armor, upgrade kits, and custom drops of favorite weapons. These items can be found in general or class-specific loot crates, by unlocking armored trucks, through mission rewards, or by looting defeated enemies.

The game will constantly assign missions to squads, asking them to complete objectives that offer extra rewards, giving them a competitive edge over their opponents. Tasks range from unlocking high-value caches to planting explosives to eliminate mission-critical targets. Mission details will include the available rewards, such as a weapons cache, vehicle key, or mobile redeploy unit. Once the mission objective is complete, the rewards are airdropped in, which means other squads may swoop in and steal them if those who earned the rewards aren’t careful.

While the developers are focused on delivering the core Battlefield 6 experience first on October 10, it is clear that a well-received Battle Royale mode could make all the difference in reaching EA’s lofty goal of 100 million players. Once ready, this mode might be released as a standalone and free experience, just like Warzone is to Call of Duty, but it’s too early to say for sure at this stage.