Battlefield’s New Free-To-Play Mode Is The Best Way In
Something for everyone.
Battlefield 6 is coming for the multiplayer throne. Just weeks after launching to rave reviews for its traditional multiplayer experience, Battlefield Studios launched the free-to-play RedSec, its take on the battle royale. While certainly a departure from what fans would expect from the series, RedSec has proven to be decent fun for those not getting their fix from kings of the genre like Fortnite and Warzone.
Now, just a few weeks later, the team is already expanding its free-to-play offering with a newer style of play called Gauntlet. It’s a round-based, tournament-style mode that has eight squads of four fighting to be the last crew standing. Each of the five rounds has teams competing in one of eight randomized, objective-based game types, all contained in smaller sections of RedSec’s Fort Lyndon map. It’s a genuine test of a squad’s ability to work together in a variety of different scenarios, and according to Battlefield 6 Senior Game Designer Isabel Conde, a perfect gateway to the larger, premium Battlefield experience.
“For players who are interested in trying out Battlefield 6 but aren’t into battle royales, that’s totally cool because Gauntlet is for that player,” Conde told Inverse. “We knew we wanted to have a mode that wasn't one life, that had respawning, and was a little bit more accessible in that way. And I think it fulfills that role really well.”
Accessibility was the key to making Gauntlet work. As popular as Battlefield 6 has proven to be, selling over 7 million copies in its first three days, it isn’t nearly as familiar as its biggest competitors in the online shooter space. For one, the last Battlefield game came out in 2021, a lifetime ago in the age of live service games that constantly evolve. Battlefield is also fairly complex, with players assuming specific roles that can be the difference between glorious victory and devastating defeat.
Conde says Gauntlet is all about narrowing the focus for these newer players, and for those who don’t always want to jump into the drawn-out chaos of the main game. In Gauntlet, squads are made up of four players instead of six. The spaces players are fighting in are significantly smaller. Scaled-down objectives mean clashing with fewer players at a time. All of this makes Battlefield’s new mode less punishing and a little easier to understand.
“Even the classes are the same,” Battlefield Studios Creative Director Thomas Andersson said. “In [Battle Royale], we tweaked the classes to better fit that type of game mode. Whereas if you’re coming into Battlefield 6 for free, wanting to know what these classes are all about, they are identical between Gauntlet and multiplayer. That’s a major bridge we have here.”
Gauntlet mode works as a more focused taste of what Battlefield 6’s larger scale skirmishes are all about.
While the DNA is the same, the team says they were careful not to create too much overlap with the core Battlefield multiplayer experience. Don’t expect to get into dogfights in a fighter jet or to be storming a building alongside 31 of your allies in hopes of capturing an objective.
“Those big Conquest moments, those are exclusive to multiplayer, and we want to make sure that we're not treading on that ground in Gauntlet,” Conde said.
Despite its recent release, Gauntlet mode was in the works for two years leading up to its release, Conde said. It was one of the few parts of the game that wasn’t being tested in Battlefield Labs by the series’ most hardcore fans. It was built to add dimension for players who download RedSec.
“We had a lot of confidence in the formula pretty early on from internal testing and closed testing with external play testers,” she said. “It went through a lot of iterations.”
A Winterized version of the main game’s Empire State map will come to Gauntlet later this year.
Now that the mode is out and being embraced by the community, the team is looking to the future of the mode. Gauntlet will soon be featured on a winter variant of the Brooklyn-based map Empire State, marking the first time RedSec content will incorporate maps from the main game. Conde said that this map will feature a set series of three missions “with a little bit of story overlaid on top of them.”
When asked if the team is planning to change up the core aspects of what Gauntlet is now, such as larger squad sizes, or perhaps doubles and triples, she only confirmed that the mode was built to be modular in its rule sets.
“There’s a lot of rich design space there and in what you're suggesting as well,” she said. “And that's all stuff that we're aware of. I'm really excited and looking forward to what we can do with it in the future.
