In his Battlefield Portal preview, Brendy already saw some of the fun you can have with Portal - such as taking tiny maps and throwing 128 players on them, handing everyone RPGs, or changing player run speed to have everyone zooming around. But there’s so much more. Like, so, so much. For starters, Dice say when the game launches, they’ll have a bunch of pre-made classic maps ready and waiting for you. You can choose to play these as-is, tweak them further to your personal tastes, or add in some wacky rules (like making goading messages pop up on-screen when one team is losing). To start making your Battlefield Portal mode, you’ll need to head to its dedicated website (once the game is out). Here you can browse that pre-made stuff, or go straight in and start designing from scratch. First, you’ll choose from a selection of game modes, including Conquest Large, Conquest, Rush, Free-For-All and Team Deathmatch. Then you’ll pick one of 33 map layouts (from 2042 and the old Battlefields), before getting into the nitty-gritty stuff. You’ll be able to choose rulesets and modifiers, decide on whether you want extreme weather, friendly fire, aim assist or more. There’ll be sliders for headshot damage, bodyshot damage, projectile speed, as well as an option to determine whether a player will drop their weapons and ammo on death. On top of that, you’ll be able to use vehicles, weapons and gadgets from old games, even mixing and matching stuff from different eras. Portal will also let you decide if you want bots to fill in player spots in PvP modes, or just exist for PvE. You’ll be able to change AI rules so bots have different modifiers to your human players too. I highly reccommend reading the full blog post to get a sense of just how much you can change. I’ve said it before, but I’ve never been big on Battlefield. However, reading all this? Man, maybe I wanna mess around with some maps! Battlefield 2042 is set to arrive on November 19th. The developers recently released a trailer showing off DLSS and ray tracing, if you’re interested in the tech.
