While Battlefield 6 might still be a couple of weeks away, it looks like Battlefield Studios and EA have pushed up the pre-loading to happen earlier than first thought. As caught by Mp1st, the pre-loads were originally slated to start across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 8. However, the companies have now set up pre-loads to start on October 3.
It is worth noting that Xbox Series X/S players don’t have to be particularly worried about pre-load dates since they can start it the moment the files become available through the Xbox’s servers.
Interestingly, while the PC and console versions of Battlefield 6 will be coming out on the same day, and will also include cross-platform multiplayer, the versions were developed separately but simultaneously. In an interview from earlier this month, Ripple Effect technical director Christian Buhl spoke about making sure that a decision was made to not follow the tradition of first making a PC version of the game and then porting it to consoles.
“I think in the past, Battlefield’s approach has been: we build a PC game and then we port it to console,” Buhl explained. “The answer this time is we made a deliberate decision very early on that this wasn’t going to be a port. This was going to be something we built at the same time. And there were a couple of things we did for that.”
While development may have been separate between the versions, they were still ultimately made alongside each other. To do this, Buhl noted that the developers always had controllers at their desks to make sure that playtesting could happen across different control schemes.
“But also, we made sure that all of our developers had controllers at their desks. It’s obviously more convenient for me to playtest on my PC when we’re distributing builds, but I playtest with a controller, and we made sure that every developer at their home or in the office has a controller at their desk so that they’re kind of playtesting that controller experience.”
Buhl has also spoken about how Battlefield Studios is cracking down on cheating and hacking on not only the PC release, but the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of Battlefield 6 as well. To do this, the group of four studios – Ripple Effect, DICE, Criterion and Motive Studios – worked with Sony and Microsoft. Buhl noted that emphasis was placed on catching the use of devices like the Cronus Zen, which could give some console players unfair advantages over others.
“Yeah, it’s unfortunate that cheating has become a problem within the console space, especially with Cronus Zen machines and everything,” said Buhl. “So we’ve partnered with PlayStation and Microsoft in this regard to kind of do detection. We actually have our own level of macro detection and everything.”
On the PC side of things, EA and Battlefield Studios had already outlined the use of Javelin Anticheat, as well as other features like Secure Boot and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) needing to be enabled for the game to run.
Battlefield 6 is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 10. For more details about the upcoming shooter, here is everything you need to know. Also check out some of the details behind its single-player campaign.
