No-Pats,
Earlier this year we shared with you a first look at Battlefield™ Portal - our love letter to Battlefield fans that allows you to define the experience you’ll have in Battlefield 2042. Alongside classic content from Battlefield™ 3, Battlefield Bad Company™ 2, and Battlefield™ 1942, you’re able to create new ways to play, whether that's recreating classic experiences on reimagined maps, or combining the world of 2042 with our past.
Today we showed you your first look at the Battle of the Bulge, El Alamein, Arica Harbor, Valparaiso, Noshahr Canals, and Caspian Border. Starting at launch, we’ll have default experiences live in-game that allow you to relive these classic maps, alongside their classic factions, equipped with the weapons, gadgets, and classes that brought them to life.
Within Battlefield Portal, you’ll be able to jump right into those modes from inside the game, or if you prefer, you can use these experiences as starting points that you can edit to create something more personal. You can make simple edits to weapon loadouts, tag in more maps to the rotation, or you can start to tweak things as finely detailed as bullet velocity, health regen rates, and if a player takes more damage when they’re hit in the head, or to the torso.
If you want to go all out, and start to create something truly unique, the Rules Editor will provide you the deepest level of control over the kind of Battlefield experience that you wish to create.
Let’s show you how it’s done.
The Battlefield Portal experience starts on the web. No matter what device you want to use, your phone, your tablet, your laptop or your PC - you can sign into an EA Account and get started creating your mode.
You won’t need to own Battlefield 2042 to access the website. If you have an EA Account that’s in good standing, you’ll be able to login and play around with our tools in full. You can later share the experience you create to friends via a share code, and if they’ve got the game, they can fire up a server to run the experience.
From the homepage, you’ll be able to see the experiences that you’ve created, as well as browse a range of pre-made experiences crafted by the teams at Ripple Effect. These modifiable templates provide a great starting point for the modes you wish to create and will allow you to move more quickly through the process of creating an experience.
The home page for The Builder - Our web hub for Battlefield Portal
If you’re someone who prefers to start fresh with a blank canvas, you can hit Create Something New, and get to work.
Your first choice is deciding what Game Mode you want to use as the basis of your experience. At launch, you can choose from:
Conquest Large, Conquest, and Rush can each be customized/tweaked using all of our inbuilt modifiers and toggles that you’ll learn about shortly. Free-For-All and Team Deathmatch are adjustable with the same tools, but can also be further built upon with the Rules Editor, our powerful visual programming tool that allows you to visually code something truly unique.
Selecting a Game Mode is the first step in establishing your Battlefield Portal experience.
The choices you make on this screen inform what you’ll be able to select in our next screen.
If you’re picking Conquest Large, you’ll be able to choose from all of our 128 player Maps in Battlefield 2042, and if you’re picking either Conquest or Rush, you’ll be able to also add any of Battlefield Portals classic maps into your rotations.
If you’re instead selecting one of our Rules Editor enabled templates of FFA, or TDM, you’ll also have the option to choose from predefined smaller variants of our existing maps, providing you with more variety, and more opportunity to find a map playstyle that best suits your vision.
Multiple layouts are available for choosing what Maps to add for your Map Rotation.
These maps are presented to you with a representation of the available playspace, with our smallest options being derived from existing maps, and helping to provide a more intimate play space for FFA and TDM style experiences, our medium maps being well scaled for a recommended maximum of 64 players (using the layouts otherwise available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), and our largest maps being suited for up to 128 players (only available to players on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S). Most importantly, we’re not defining that limit for you. If you want to take the Noshahr Canals: Container Area map, and crank it up to 128 players, have at it. We think you’re mad, but it's your Battlefield, and your rules!
Here’s a list of all different layouts of our maps that are accessible via Battlefield Portal at launch:
Small Maps
Medium Maps
Large Maps
Note: Large Maps are not available on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One editions of Battlefield 2042.
Before you get into applying your modifiers, the Core section of the Builder invites you to change the fundamental rules of your game mode. If you have your mode set on the Conquest ruleset, you can make adjustments to the maximum number of human players you want in your experience and simultaneously determine if you want that to be an asymmetrical experience or not. If you choose to keep that number below 128, you can later decide if you want to add in Bots to your mode up to the overall player limit.
What else you see on these screens will otherwise differ depending on your core ruleset.
In Rush and Conquest, you’ll be able to modify the Game Time, the Reinforcement Multiplier, the Reinforcements removed per kill, as well as the Per-Squad Character limit (up to a maximum of 4), and the rules for Squad Spawning.
Game Mode Details can be personalised to support the foundations of your experience.
In TDM, and FFA - you won’t need to edit all of the same options, so you’ll see a more streamlined set of sliders, toggles, and menus that focus on what makes the most sense for those modes. If you want to mix things up further, the Rules Editor will be the place to go, and you’ll find plenty more to tweak about the experience in the second stage of the Builder.
If you’re really keen to personalise the core ruleset, there are many options to choose from across the Modifiers section. Starting with Gameplay, you’ll find simple options that enable you to set on or off the following:
You can then adjust sliders, or type in custom values within our limits that enable you to change Multipliers for Projectile Speed, Global Damage, Headshot Damage, and Body Shot Damage. There’s also a final option that allows you to determine if a player's weapon and ammo drops, ammo only, or if nothing drops on a kill.
Gameplay Modifiers allow for values such as Damage, Projectile Speed to be raised or lowered.
All of these options can be made asymmetric as well, so if you’re looking to give one faction an advantage over the other, you can start to determine some of those effects here.
With the Core of the Gameplay designed, you can then start to manage the behaviour of Infantry on the servers. There are 9 on/off toggles at play here:
These options are great for helping to recreate some of the behaviours of our past titles, as well as allowing you to bring some of the more modern experiences to Battlefield games which never originally had some of these options.
Modifiable Multipliers are tweakable in the areas of Fall Damage, Move Speed, Maximum Health, Health Regeneration Rate, and Redeploy Delay.
The Man-Down type field will allow you to choose from Downed, Crawl (unique to Hazard Zone), and Instant Death.
If you want to change the way people move, heal, and revive, you can change this in Soldier Modifiers.
If your mode utilizes vehicles (which you’ll be able to further define later on), you can establish the behaviours of them here.
There are On/Off toggles for Vehicle Health Regeneration, and whether or not a player can exit a vehicle once they’ve jumped in, as well as Multipliers for Vehicles Spawn Delay, its Maximum Health, and the Vehicle Health Regeneration Rate.
You’ll also have control over how it is that Combat Vehicles are spawned into the game. If you like call-ins in Conquest, and map spawns in Rush, you can leave this modifier alone and let the game mode determine how combat vehicles will spawn, otherwise you can select from:
If your mode is using Vehicles, be sure to check you’re happy with the Vehicle settings before publishing your mode.
A special note that if you’re choosing On-Foot Call-ins options from the drop down, this will work across all eras! If you want Battlefield 2042 to have vehicles spawned in the world, go for it. If you want 1942 Soldiers calling in air-dropped vehicles, fill your boots!
If you’re keen to control the amount of information that players have access to on screen, you can decide which teams are able to see which elements of the UI. On/Off Toggles are available for:
You can also make adjustments to the behaviour of our Ping system, using the 2042 default of Pinging Targets, or opting for the classic option of 3D Spotting. Alternatively, you can fully disable this system before leaving this screen.
The User Interface can be further modified for your experience using these settings, and can be applied to everyone on the server, or just for individual teams.
Depending on whether or not you maxed out the player count in earlier modes, you have the option here to determine how Bots can be leveraged to enhance the experience of your crafting.*
After deciding whether or not you want Bots active in your experience, you can then define if you want to set Bots as PvE, or PvP. Selecting PvE will ensure that the PVE AI Count stays locked in at the designated number, whereas if you set this option to PvP, Human players are able to take these slots away from Bots.
If you are using Bots, you’re able to either synchronise your settings with the options you’ve set for Human players previously, or you can separately define the behaviours using many of the same modifiers available for Human players you previously set.
* If at any point the gameplay experience goes above a total of 64 Human and AI, your game mode will not be accessible on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One editions of the game. Don’t worry though, we’ll keep track of the maths and flag this to you once you’ve gone beyond that limit.
AI can be customised to match, or differ from the settings you’ve applied for Human Players.
With the Core of your mode established, and your Modifiers set - you can now determine which Eras of Battlefield will compete in your experience.
If you’re looking to sustain variety, and have the factions change across your map rotations, you can select Map Defaults by clicking on the Battlefield Portal logo, left of the tile for Battlefield 2042. This means that if you’re playing on El Alamein, the faction will default to 1942, and then rotate to Battlefield 3 if the next map was Caspian Border.
If you go for this option, it will prevent you from determining any restrictions to Characters, Weapons, Attachments, Vehicles, or Gadgets. So if you’re looking to fine tune things, make sure to lock in a dedicated era specific team for use across all maps.
Select from Map Defaults, Battlefield 2042, Battlefield 3, Battlefield Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 1942 Factions.
Depending on what you chose in the previous section, you’ll then be able to deselect which classes (or 2042 Specialists) are playable. You’ll also have the options to denote which factions show up in-game. The UK, US, and German factions are available for 1942, with the game appropriate versions of the USA and Russia available for the rest.
Factions, Classes, and Specialists can be set per team, and allow you to set what can be chosen when players spawn.
In total, there are over 75 Weapons available across the entire experience of Battlefield Portal at launch. Now that you’ve chosen your factions, you’ll have the ability to manage what weapons are available. If both teams are from the same era, you can also make use of our unlink teams function to customize exactly which weapons each team is gaining access to.
Individually select which weapons will feature in your experience, or disable entire categories.
To make things easy, there are filters you can use to refine what's displayed, and global switches that enable quick deselection for each of the classes of Weapon. Disable all of the Weapons, and players will spawn with melee weapons instead.*
*Many of Battlefield 2042’s weapons unlock as you progress in rank, with many experiences in Battlefield Portal able to reward you with XP that help you level up, even when you’re not using 2042 Factions. If a player hasn’t unlocked a certain weapon that you’ve selected for use in your mode, you’ll also be required to select at least one default weapon so that new players can spawn with a weapon. All Battlefield Portal Weapons, Gadgets, and Attachments from our classic Battlefield games are otherwise unlocked from the start.
You’ve experienced a selection of Battlefield 2042’s attachments during our Open Beta and had an early glimpse of how many more there are to unlock through progression. If you’re keen to restrict any of those attachments, and keep to a specific style of weaponry, you can choose which attachments can be enabled in gameplay.
We’ve also worked to include a huge range of attachments for the weapons that we’ve carried forward from Battlefield 3, Bad Company 2, and 1942.
Weapon Attachments can be set, based upon the Eras represented in your experience, and the Weapons enabled.
Depending on what you selected in previous menus, the Plus Menu will also be accessible, though if you prefer this to be kept to a strictly classic experience, you can unset this option and ensure that attachments can only be changed on the Deploy Screen, or from Battlefield Portals Collection menu.
As with Weapons, we’ve ensured that you can deselect classifications of attachments en masse, and work through our filter system to get through to what you’re looking for, faster. You can also run asymmetric attachments in case you want to force one team to stick with Iron Sights, and have the other team dialed in at range with scopes.
Unless you’ve previously disabled Vehicles in a prior menu, you’ll now have the option to define which vehicles are restricted from the pre-selected Era’s chosen in the steps before, leveraging the same toolsets available when defining your Weapons, and Attachments.
If you’re using Vehicles in your mode, you can select which ones will be available as options.
Your final set of decisions now lie with deciding which Gadgets are equippable in your mode. Keen to keep it to launchers only? Fancy a Dynamite vs. Claymore face off? How about the David and Goliath setup of Launchers on Team 1, vs. Helicopters on Team 2?
Here’s where those dreams come alive.
Gadgets can be enabled, or disabled depending on your preference.
If you have selected a compatible Core ruleset, here’s where you can go wild.
Using the toolbar, you can start to build out the scripting that governs the conditions and behaviours of your Battlefield Portal Experience. Not sure what a function is, and can do? Right click on it, and choose Help. We’ll show you details about the behaviour of the function, and share insight on how to use it.
Helpful guidance is available inside the Rules Editor, allowing you to quickly reference how a particular selection should be utilised.
Need some inspiration? You can save the experience that you’ve built so far, and load up one of our Experience Templates from the main Hub of The Builder. Using those as a reference, you can Duplicate the templates to make them yours, then tweak or rebuild them to your heart's content.
Here is an example of what it looks like once you start building via the Rules Editor.
Looking for help? The URL that's active while viewing your experience is reflective of the current state of your Mode. Save your experience, and send the hyperlink to a friend, and they’re able to work on it independently of you. They can view your Experience and give you pointers, or Duplicate it themselves and make their own edits independent of your original Experience. Sharing URLs is very powerful -- it lets other players see your game and make a copy for themselves.
When you’re ready to publish your experience, you can create a title and description of the mode and generate an Experience Code. Use this in game, or share it with others so that they can start up servers that run your experience. On publish, we’ll help to validate that the server is good to go, and assign it a selection of appropriate tags.
The Experience Code that you create in The Builder is otherwise unique, and more importantly, it’s protected. Experience Codes won’t allow others to make modifications or changes to your mode (they’ll need the dedicated URL for that), so for those that seek it, they can establish themselves as leading creators in Battlefield Portal.
The tags that generate for your experience are your source of truth as a player, browsing through Battlefield Portal. If the tags say that an experience is asymmetrical, it's definitely asymmetrical! If you’re confused why that tag has appeared in your own Experience, this is your chance to quickly check back through your settings to see what slider, or toggle you’ve inadvertently set that could cause this. Otherwise as a player, you’re able to use these tags to learn some quick and easy information about the server, outside of its name and description.
If after sharing your Experience Code with the world, you start to get feedback that makes you consider updating your experience to a new version, your changes will be loaded up the next time someone uses your Code, so that players can jump right in!
Featured Experiences
If this all feels a little overwhelming, don’t worry. We’ll be regularly publishing, updating, and rotating featured experiences inside Battlefield Portal that you’ll be able to quickmatch directly into.
When you’re looking for something more bespoke, you can tab over to the Server Browser to search for the perfect Battlefield Portal server, and if you’re looking to check your loadouts across the classic Battlefield experiences, a bespoke set of Collection menus will allow you to setup your loadouts, similar to how you can in All-Out Warfare.
You can otherwise browse your experiences, or input an Experience Code to start your own server. These servers are free, and spool up relative to your locale.
Once loaded, you can manage your server via the Pause Menu, enabling you with the ability to execute the following commands:
Found a bad egg that’s spoiling the experience for others? You can Kick or Ban them from your server. Your banlist is persistent, and travels with you across Battlefield Portal, so if you’re concerned about them showing up when you load up a new server, please know that they won’t be able to join so long as the Ban is active.
We want Battlefield Portal to be the best destination for playing in fair and safe environments. If you discover servers that aren’t playing by our rules, make sure to use the available reporting functions to let us know, and we’ll take care of it.
The server will remain active so long as there’s one Human Player on the server. Once that’s no longer true, the server will shut down. Be sure to share your experiences to your friends if you’re keen to keep the server active and searchable for friends to join.
We hope that you’ve enjoyed this detailed look into the world of Battlefield Portal. We’re beyond excited to open up the experience to every Battlefield fan across the world, and can’t wait to see what you make with it. It’s been a dream of ours to establish this toolbox for you, our fans, and this is just the beginning of this journey.
Battlefield Portal will grow with Battlefield 2042, and we look forward to shaping it alongside you.
Not long to go now No-Pats. See you real soon.
The details listed in this article may change as we listen to community feedback and continue developing and evolving our Live Service & Content. We will always strive to keep our community as informed as possible. NO WEAPON, MILITARY VEHICLE OR GEAR MANUFACTURER IS AFFILIATED WITH OR HAS SPONSORED OR ENDORSED THIS GAME
NO WEAPON, MILITARY VEHICLE OR GEAR MANUFACTURER IS AFFILIATED WITH OR HAS SPONSORED OR ENDORSED THIS GAME.