Battlefield Portal (Overview) General Gaming

[David76]

EA has released a ton of new info for Battlefield Portal — Battlefield 2042's mode where players can concoct their own playlists and more! Kicking things off, there's a Battlefield Portal new trailer that features Arica Harbor, El Alamein, and Battle of the Bulge!

Check it out in action, and then dive into the info-filled Battlefield Portal info dump where game modes, maps, customizations and more are revealed!



Battlefield Portal Overview:

Game Mode

Your first choice is deciding what Game Mode you want to use as the basis of your experience. At launch, you can choose from:

• Conquest Large
• Conquest
• Rush
• Free-For-All
• Team Deathmatch

Conquest Large, Conquest, and Rush can each be customized/tweaked using all of our inbuilt modifiers and toggles that you'll learn about shortly. Free-For-All and Team Deathmatch are adjustable with the same tools, but can also be further built upon with the Rules Editor, our powerful visual programming tool that allows you to visually code something truly unique.

Map Rotation

If you're picking Conquest Large, you'll be able to choose from all of our 128 player Maps in Battlefield 2042, and if you're picking either Conquest or Rush, you'll be able to also add any of Battlefield Portals classic maps into your rotations.

If you're instead selecting one of our Rules Editor enabled templates of FFA, or TDM, you'll also have the option to choose from predefined smaller variants of our existing maps, providing you with more variety, and more opportunity to find a map playstyle that best suits your vision

Game Mode Details

Before you get into applying your modifiers, the Core section of the Builder invites you to change the fundamental rules of your game mode. If you have your mode set on the Conquest ruleset, you can make adjustments to the maximum number of human players you want in your experience and simultaneously determine if you want that to be an asymmetrical experience or not. If you choose to keep that number below 128, you can later decide if you want to add in Bots to your mode up to the overall player limit.

What else you see on these screens will otherwise differ depending on your core ruleset.

In Rush and Conquest, you'll be able to modify the Game Time, the Reinforcement Multiplier, the Reinforcements removed per kill, as well as the Per-Squad Character limit (up to a maximum of 4), and the rules for Squad Spawning.

In TDM, and FFA – you won't need to edit all of the same options, so you'll see a more streamlined set of sliders, toggles, and menus that focus on what makes the most sense for those modes. If you want to mix things up further, the Rules Editor will be the place to go, and you'll find plenty more to tweak about the experience in the second stage of the Builder.

MODIFIERS

Gameplay

If you're really keen to personalise the core ruleset, there are many options to choose from across the Modifiers section. Starting with Gameplay, you'll find simple options that enable you to set on or off the following:

• Friendly Fire
• Extreme Weather Events (applicable maps only)
• Stationary Weapon Emplacements
• Classic Soldier Weapon Tuning
• Aim Assist
• Aim Assist Zoom Snap

You can then adjust sliders, or type in custom values within our limits that enable you to change Multipliers for Projectile Speed, Global Damage, Headshot Damage, and Body Shot Damage. There's also a final option that allows you to determine if a player's weapon and ammo drops, ammo only, or if nothing drops on a kill.

All of these options can be made asymmetric as well, so if you're looking to give one faction an advantage over the other, you can start to determine some of those effects here.

Soldier

With the Core of the Gameplay designed, you can then start to manage the behaviour of Infantry on the servers. There are 9 on/off toggles at play here:

• Prone
• Strafe while sprinting
• Sprint
• Aim Down Sights
• Health Regeneration
• Traversal Sprint
• Slide
• Squad Revive

These options are great for helping to recreate some of the behaviours of our past titles, as well as allowing you to bring some of the more modern experiences to Battlefield games that never originally had some of these options.

Modifiable Multipliers are tweakable in the areas of Fall Damage, Move Speed, Maximum Health, Health Regeneration Rate, and Redeploy Delay.

The Man-Down type field will allow you to choose from Downed, Crawl (unique to Hazard Zone), and Instant Death.

 

[David76]

Vehicle

If your mode utilizes vehicles (which you'll be able to further define later on), you can establish the behaviours of them here.

There are On/Off toggles for Vehicle Health Regeneration, and whether or not a player can exit a vehicle once they've jumped in, as well as Multipliers for Vehicles Spawn Delay, its Maximum Health, and the Vehicle Health Regeneration Rate.

You'll also have control over how it is that Combat Vehicles are spawned into the game. If you like call-ins in Conquest, and map spawns in Rush, you can leave this modifier alone and let the game mode determine how combat vehicles will spawn, otherwise you can select from:

• No Combat Vehicles
• On-Foot Call-ins Only
• Deploy Menu Only
• On-Foot Call-ins and Deploy Menu
• Spawn on Map

A special note that if you're choosing On-Foot Call-ins options from the drop down, this will work across all eras! If you want Battlefield 2042 to have vehicles spawned in the world, go for it. If you want 1942 Soldiers calling in air-dropped vehicles, fill your boots!

User Interface

If you're keen to control the amount of information that players have access to on screen, you can decide which teams are able to see which elements of the UI. On/Off Toggles are available for:

• Compass
• Minimap (including Big Map)
• HUD
• Soldier Weapon Modification Plus Menu
• Ally Identification

You can also make adjustments to the behaviour of our Ping system, using the 2042 default of Pinging Targets, or opting for the classic option of 3D Spotting. Alternatively, you can fully disable this system before leaving this screen.

AI

Depending on whether or not you maxed out the player count in earlier modes, you have the option here to determine how Bots can be leveraged to enhance the experience of your crafting.*

After deciding whether or not you want Bots active in your experience, you can then define if you want to set Bots as PvE, or PvP. Selecting PvE will ensure that the PVE AI Count stays locked in at the designated number, whereas if you set this option to PvP, Human players are able to take these slots away from Bots.

If you are using Bots, you're able to either synchronise your settings with the options you've set for Human players previously, or you can separately define the behaviours using many of the same modifiers available for Human players you previously set.

*If at any point the gameplay experience goes above a total of 64 Human and AI, your game mode will not be accessible on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One editions of the game. Don't worry though, we'll keep track of the maths and flag this to you once you've gone beyond that limit.

 

[David76]

RESTRICTIONS

Teams

With the Core of your mode established, and your Modifiers set – you can now determine which Eras of Battlefield will compete in your experience.

If you're looking to sustain variety, and have the factions change across your map rotations, you can select Map Defaults by clicking on the Battlefield Portal logo, left of the tile for Battlefield 2042. This means that if you're playing on El Alamein, the faction will default to 1942, and then rotate to Battlefield 3 if the next map was Caspian Border.

If you go for this option, it will prevent you from determining any restrictions to Characters, Weapons, Attachments, Vehicles, or Gadgets. So if you're looking to fine tune things, make sure to lock in a dedicated era specific team for use across all maps.

Characters

Depending on what you chose in the previous section, you'll then be able to deselect which classes (or 2042 Specialists) are playable. You'll also have the options to denote which factions show up in-game. The UK, US, and German factions are available for 1942, with the game appropriate versions of the USA and Russia available for the rest.

Weapons

In total, there are over 75 Weapons available across the entire experience of Battlefield Portal at launch. Now that you've chosen your factions, you'll have the ability to manage what weapons are available. If both teams are from the same era, you can also make use of our unlink teams function to customize exactly which weapons each team is gaining access to.

To make things easy, there are filters you can use to refine what's displayed, and global switches that enable quick deselection for each of the classes of Weapon. Disable all of the Weapons, and players will spawn with melee weapons instead.*

*Many of Battlefield 2042's weapons unlock as you progress in rank, with many experiences in Battlefield Portal able to reward you with XP that help you level up, even when you're not using 2042 Factions. If a player hasn't unlocked a certain weapon that you've selected for use in your mode, you'll also be required to select at least one default weapon so that new players can spawn with a weapon. All Battlefield Portal Weapons, Gadgets, and Attachments from our classic Battlefield games are otherwise unlocked from the start.

Attachments

You've experienced a selection of Battlefield 2042's attachments during our Open Beta and had an early glimpse of how many more there are to unlock through progression. If you're keen to restrict any of those attachments, and keep to a specific style of weaponry, you can choose which attachments can be enabled in gameplay.

We've also worked to include a huge range of attachments for the weapons that we've carried forward from Battlefield 3, Bad Company 2, and 1942.

Depending on what you selected in previous menus, the Plus Menu will also be accessible, though if you prefer this to be kept to a strictly classic experience, you can unset this option and ensure that attachments can only be changed on the Deploy Screen, or from Battlefield Portals Collection menu.

As with Weapons, we've ensured that you can deselect classifications of attachments en masse, and work through our filter system to get through to what you're looking for, faster. You can also run asymmetric attachments in case you want to force one team to stick with Iron Sights, and have the other team dialed in at range with scopes.

Vehicles

Unless you've previously disabled Vehicles in a prior menu, you'll now have the option to define which vehicles are restricted from the pre-selected Era's chosen in the steps before, leveraging the same toolsets available when defining your Weapons, and Attachments.

Gadgets

Your final set of decisions now lie with deciding which Gadgets are equippable in your mode. Keen to keep it to launchers only? Fancy a Dynamite vs. Claymore face off? How about the David and Goliath setup of Launchers on Team 1, vs. Helicopters on Team 2?

Here's where those dreams come alive.

If you want to read up on the rules editor, and other features (kicking players, etc.) you can do so, right here.