When I sat down to chat with Ripple Effect studio design director Justin Wiebe last week, we’d planned to talk RedSec. Wiebe helped lead the charge on Battlefield 6’s battle royale mode developed primarily at the Los Angeles-based Ripple Effect, but on the day, we ended up chatting more about Portal—its expansive feature set, boundless potential, and why Battlefield Studios isn’t currently doing enough to elevate community creations.
It was immediately clear that Wiebe loves Portal. He worked on the first iteration of Battlefield 6’s level editing/publishing platform during Battlefield 2042 development, back when the toolset was, in his words, “more like a Battlefield builder than anything.”
In that game, Portal was squarely focused on mashing up different eras of Battlefield. You could pit futuristic jets versus WW2 planes, summon bots, and tweak rules to your heart’s content, but without complex scripting or the ability to place new geometry, its creative ceiling was low.
“The people were phenomenal at stretching what we had built to do some amazing things, but they had to really work hard,” Wiebe told PC Gamer.
Its other big limitation was the lack of persistent servers. “If I created an experience, I had to be online hosting that experience when people logged in, or they would not be able to play,” he said. “So there was almost zero chance for something to go viral.”
Those are the big two problems that Battlefield Studios strived to solve in Battlefield 6 Portal. Wiebe’s eyes lit up as he described the neat level editor nestled in the free Godot game engine, the web-based custom UI tool, and persistent server functionality that Battlefield 6 shipped with.
Portal is seriously impressive, but it’s gotten off to a rocky start. At launch, the Portal browser was inundated with XP farms that clogged up all the server space. That’s been cleared up, and now folks are finally exploring the toolset with the sort of map remixes and goofy minigames that flourished in shooters of an earlier era (and to a lesser degree, still do in the likes of Fortnite and Roblox). But of the million-plus people playing Battlefield 6 daily, not very many of them are in Portal servers, which Wiebe considers a current failure of the feature.
“What we’re not doing a good enough job of right now is surfacing [Portal experiences] for the rest of the community to play,” he said. “And there’s actually one technical issue we’ve been waiting to fix in order to be able to do that, which is painful, right? I just want these community creations to be shared. I want them to go wide. And so I’ve just been checking in every day asking ‘Is it done yet? Is it done yet?’ Because we really want to roll this stuff out, because the creations are fantastic.”
(Image credit: EA)
Wiebe didn’t specify what technical issue is holding Portal back at the moment, but part of the discoverability problem is obvious upon loading the Battlefield 6 main menu.
Players have not held back their extremely negative feedback of Battlefield’s current menus, and one of the biggest losers of its ugly, slow, Netflix-y UI is Portal. Couched waaaaaay down a bloated list of playlist bundles, just above the Campaign that everybody uninstalled two months ago, is the Community tab where Portal lives. Assuming you’ve scrolled down far enough to know it’s there, you might notice the one or two recommended Portal modes, but you’re more likely to just get confused by the obtuse “browse experience” screen before retreating back to Conquest.
The belittled Portal section is a far cry from the core pillar of Battlefield 6 that BF Studios sold it as ahead of launch. People are still finding and making cool stuff despite all the noise, but Wiebe says it’s important that the studio course corrects soon.
“I believe that we have the right ingredients,” Wiebe said. “So fingers crossed that we get that resolved really quickly here and start to help Portal thrive for the community.”
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