We looked through everything else EA announced about the newly-announced Battlefield Labs, and it’s definitely saying all the right things

EA has delivered the big news we’ve been anticipating since September of last year, when the company shared the very first details about the next Battlefield, showed the first piece of concept art, and confirmed that some will be able to test it out early in 2025.

We are now at that point, and EA has announced what is, arguably, bigger than anyone expected. The classic Community Test Environment (CTE) is evolving into the more specialised Battlefield Labs, which will once again seek feedback from players during development.

Testing pre-released games with players obviously isn’t new, but the CTE was designed for post-launch content, and never used for the main game before its release. With Battlefield Labs, the massive team responsible for the next Battlefield – now collectively known as Battlefield Studios – will be soliciting feedback on specific areas of the project.

The announcement gives some examples, such as focusing on a specefic map/mode, testing the limits of a certain feature, or how well something works or doesn’t. Later, players will be able to offer feedback on things like weapon, vehicle and gadget balance, meaning it’s a lot more involved than the CTE was.

Battlefield Studios said the next game – which still doesn’t have an official title – is in its pre-alpha stage, which makes this particular build perfect for this sort of testing. Given the nature of this stage of development, participants will (unlike the CTE) be under NDA. In other words, no one outside those people and the developers will be able to see what they played.

Make no mistake, however, EA knows that impressions – and perhaps even gameplay – will leak out, which is necessary to build a groundswell of positive sentiments about Battlefield, after years of the beloved franchise going through the ringer.

A few things in the official announcement stood out to me, however. There’s a major emphasis on positioning destruction as a pillar of the series. Destruction has been a core component of the Battlefield experience since its introduction in the original Bad Company, but its quality – and the extend to which it affects gameplay, have varied widely from one game to the other.

Job postings in recent months suggested that bringing back destruction as a core element of gameplay is something the teams are keen on. And leaks have taken it a step further, saying that the system will be reactive to different bullet calibres, and offer more detail than we’re used to.

Indeed, in the brief gameplay clips we see towards the end of Battlefield Labs’ reveal, there’s a lot of destruction. The way buildings crumble reminds me of the destructible building facades found in many of Battlefield 3’s maps. The debris has seen some upgrades, however, looking more detailed and plentiful than older games.

Then there’s the mention of Conquest and Breakthrough as the two main modes of the game, and two that players will be testing. The post called them “the heart and soul of our all-out warfare experience.” Class gameplay, an element that was sorely missing from the original Battlefield 2042 launch (and later re-integrated) is another major point of focus for the tests, which means that this is indeed a return to the classic feel.

Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon are the four classes mentioned, further proof that the original flow of gameplay and class dependency won’t be thrown away in favour of player choice. We’ve obviously yet to learn how weapon class distribution is going to work, but that’s a topic for another time.

That small glimpse at gameplay, tucked away at the end of the announcement video, has everyone in the community starting to feel good about the next Battlefield. The bright colour tones evoke Bad Company 2; the Battlefield 3 soundtrack is overlaid; and the map itself looks to be a medley of Strike at Karkand and Arica Harbor.

Even looking at the soldier uniforms, we don’t get any hints of specialists – or really any designs that stand out from the rest. The two factions fighting appear to be wearing unique fatigues, and class-specific designs that make them easy to identify, though I’m not willing to bet that EA’s very Call of Duty-inspired plans for Battlefield won’t include soldier skins of every outlandish description. But can we at least keep them in the rumoured battle royale mode and away from traditional multiplayer, please?

We don’t yet know when the first test will begin, but considering the sign-up link was having some trouble last night, the fact there’s a queue to even log in, and how active the Battlefield Discord has become in just a few hours, I’m willing to guess we won’t be waiting too long to find out. And I’m here for it.