Battlefield 6 Developers Say Bringing Back Fan-Favourite Maps is Hard Due to Players’ Expectations

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As the release of *Battlefield 6* on October 10th nears-just three weeks away-DICE’s design director and product owner, Sashank Uchil, has discussed the challenges of recreating popular, classic maps from past *Battlefield* games for the new version. In an interview with PCGamesN, Uchil explained that player expectations also contribute to the difficulty of bringing back these older maps.

Bringing back the Operation Firestorm map from *Battlefield 3* into *Battlefield 6* was surprisingly challenging,” Uchil explained. “Players have strong memories of the map and what they expect it to be like. It’s tough to meet those expectations, especially since people tend to remember things being better than they actually were.”

He explained that simply transferring the map’s existing elements to the new engine wasn’t enough. The real difficulty lay in adapting the map to work with new features like environmental destruction. Uchil also mentioned balancing the desire to preserve the map’s nostalgic appeal with the need to update its design to match modern shooter gameplay.

He explained that the real difficulty lies in making the map as destructible as all the others in the set. It’s also a challenge to ensure it works well with the weapons, which are different from those in *Battlefield 3*. It’s a surprisingly complex task, he added.

Although it wasn’t without its difficulties, the team at DICE found that Operation Firestorm was relatively easy to update. Producer Jeremy Chubb explained that they designed Firestorm with large-scale battles in mind – a key feature of the *Battlefield* series – which made it adaptable. “Bringing Firestorm back felt good,” Chubb said. “It’s still a really enjoyable map to play.”

Ultimately, the issue is that players are comparing the map to how they remember it from 14 years ago, and how much shooter games have changed since then.

It’s tricky because players have strong feelings about how the map should be,” explained Chubb. “They want it to feel authentic. However, we also need to update it with new ideas and features from the game, and we risk disappointing people if we don’t evolve it over time.

With the release of *Battlefield 6* for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S approaching, the four studios working on the game-DICE, Ripple Effect, Criterion, and Motive Studios-have been sharing more information. Technical director Christian Buhl recently explained that the game won’t launch with ray tracing, and there are currently no plans to add it later. This decision was made to prioritize delivering the best possible performance for players.

Buhl also stated that the development team is prioritizing making the game playable on lower-end computers, and a significant number of players in the open beta are using those types of PCs.

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2025-09-19 16:41