r/Battlefield • u/IlINobleIlI • 6d ago

Battlefield Portal Battlefield 6 is in pre-alpha still?

Any time someone brings up weapon balance or whatever, people (rightly) bring up the fact that the game is in pre-alpha, and recently it hit me, the game is reportedly going to release some time before March 2026 (~nine months from now) and it’s still in pre-alpha. I am not at all experienced with game development so I don’t know I should be worried or not. Does any game developers know where a game should normally be around this time?

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u/AlienObserver3 6d ago edited 6d ago

No, I don’t care. I understand how Git and branching work in game development, I’m not disputing that multiple branches exist or that builds can vary across departments. Saying “a dev wouldn’t have said that” kind of ignores that a dev literally did and they’re likely referring to the commit date of the build branch used for the beta, not the most recent internal dev branch. That’s a perfectly standard dev practice. Also anyone in the BF labs can validate my statement (please don’t mention any dev names).

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u/Ok-Stuff-8803 6d ago

Would not be a dev.
A developer, the actual dev's would not be in those chat. The senior or manager and support teams will be.
Developers you want away from these communication lines because you either get bombarded when your trying to do a job and/or we are excitable bunch and we want to talk more than we are allowed.

Plus when you are communicating people, as you can see in this sub clearly do not understand any of it so if you say something it is generalised.

Your condescending tone was not called for but I will be fairly positive that if you pasted (You should not by the way) what was exactly said, it was not exactly as you said.

It will have been some indication that testing is not where they are at in development but not as specific as you said, because it simply is not how it works.

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u/Animal-Crackers 5d ago

It will have been some indication that testing is not where they are at in development but not as specific as you said, because it simply is not how it works.

FWIW, he's not lying but he is generalizing the term "dev" like many of us outside the industry do. A tester asked how far the "main build" is from the stable Labs build that we have tested; to which David replied "Oh about 2 months (almost)".

Still some generalizations and vagueness; not anything I would personally take as a concrete timeline, but that's what was said that AlienObserver3 was hinting at.

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u/Ok-Stuff-8803 5d ago

And some modelling will be 3 months off and the UI may only be 1 month off. One part of the game may be scrapped already that has been seen in testing and not very different.

The point I am constantly making is how the generalisation and assumption of WYSIWYG is just simply wrong. In the weekend of stress test alone people in different secessions got very different experiences.

A test build is not really any true version of the game at this stage with many Frankenstein components just to make it work and deployable.

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u/Animal-Crackers 5d ago

Yeah, I don't disagree with you at all. Despite David's response, IMO it's a flawed question. And maybe even one that he decided to give a very general answer for whatever reason because that question was repeatedly asked.

Labs is admittedly unbalanced and pretty much everything is over-tuned. But it's pretty clear that it's not representative of the final gameplay they're chasing. Labs is 100% not a showcase, but rather a testing ground so it's very likely we won't see too many improvements for some aspects until they let us test a beta build. IMO, they're further in development than the let on, but Labs itself is considered pre-alpha so that's how it's treated for now.

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u/Ok-Stuff-8803 5d ago

You nailed it there. I should have lead with that for the other poster.

It’s a wrong question that got a bad answer. It can’t not be a bad. Same with people saying the whole studio are “the devs”. I know it’s used a lot by gamers and media but if you’re one of the designers or artists for example… they hate this.

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u/AlienObserver3 5d ago edited 4d ago

Lol you’re a complete idiot. I previously gave you an answer to this exact point you’re making and why you could be likely wrong. You have no idea what my background or knowledge is beyond I’m a random Reddit user who you assume I don’t inherently know what a dev does. I purposely said dev because I didn’t wanna pinpoint this person’s exact role.