Battlefield 6’s developers spoke to ComicBook about their approach to integrating elements like skins into the game. There has been much said over the last few years, but really the last few months about skins in video games. While Fortnite is essentially a toy box come to life where anything goes, people are far less receptive to seeing things like Roger from American Dad in Call of Duty. It’s a hot button issue for fans looking for something a bit more immersive and serious, as it can feel jarring to see cartoon characters in a war game. So, all eyes have turned to Battlefield 6 to see how they plan to handle these kinds of things.
At a recent preview event, I got to sit down with David Sirland, Senior Producer at DICE, and Alexia Christofi, Producer at DICE, to talk about Battlefield 6. For my very last question, I asked them pretty directly what their stance on skins will be. Will it be like Battlefield 2042 which was more tasteful and fitting or will it be like Call of Duty that has characters from Dune, Beavis and Butthead, and The Terminator all running around? According to them, they want to make sure things feel grounded and authentic to this game’s aesthetic.
“What I will say is what’s really important to us is that things feel grounded, and we want people to express themselves and to have cool skins and peacock in a way like ‘I look pretty cool and I have this great weapon skin,’” said Christofi. “But we want it to feel authentic to the franchise, that’s the approach we’re thinking.”
Sirland took it a step further and emphasized the importance of how characters look when it comes to classes. Players need to be able to identify who is who on the battlefield and the team has gone to great lengths to create identifiers on the models, so therefore, the skins need to fit their universe.
“That’s also part of the class identity, how you look, probably more how you think you look than how you actually see someone,” said Sirland. “We have this shoulder identifier [for classes], like with Recon, it’s three antennas [near their shoulder], similar to Battlefield 3.”
He continued to say certain aspects of different classes aren’t allowed to be interchangeable to avoid confusion.
“For example, there is a ghillie material on the Recon skins, and they’re not used on the other [classes] to really emphasize the differences,” he said. “There are some rules there, but it’s looser rules than ‘It’s always going to look like this.’ But it needs to feel like it fits the universe, because part of why I think we’re getting good feedback here is because it feels like 3 and 4, in a sense, where it fits. I think that’s really important.”
Having played 4 hours of Battlefield 6 already, I can tell you that there’s no way to fit in some of the more outlandish skins that other franchise have into this game without being totally jarring. It’s a very grounded and gritty shooter by design, something that I can’t imagine Battlefield Studios throwing out the window a month or two after launch. Of course, we’ll just have to wait and see what their plans are, but it sounds promising if they stick to this grounded approach.
Battlefield 6 launches on October 10th for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC.
