Despite Battlefield 6’s server browser utterly failing at its one job, good things are happening in Portal
When Battlefield 6 launched a month and a half ago, one of its most anticipated features basically didn’t work. The Portal server browser was a dumpster fire at first, hosting dozens upon dozens of lazy XP farms that clogged up EA’s servers so bad you couldn’t even start your own friend lobby.
Then, DICE nerfed XP farms into the ground. Folks complained, some who apparently only bought BF6 to shoot at bots demanded refunds, and many XP farming servers were taken offline.
To me, this is videogames. What I dig about Chaos Climb is how it flexes the one big thing that Portal has that comparable level editors don’t: scale. There are a crapload of vehicles raining down from the sky, some gliding gently down the 45-degree freeway as normal Earth physics dictate, while less fortunate tanks and jeeps contort and tumble through the play space at mach speed as if a black hole burst from their center. The variety of hazards is why I keep climbing up after getting knocked down, and why I’ve yet to reach the peak despite a full hour of attempts.
Two days in a row I’ve found a few dozen people playing Chaos Climb across several servers, which is pretty good for the middle of the day in North America (hardly peak active hours).
The other two custom games worth highlighting at the moment are Snipers VS Runners Duck Hunt (Portal code: yt6xx) and RPGs VS Golf Carts (Portal code: z85x9), both made by YouTuber Choanie. Both were released very recently, but Duck Hunt is the more popular mode for now.
Similar to the versions you might’ve played in Garry’s Mod, Halo, or Fortnite, Duck Hunt is an asymmetrical mode that challenges one team to climb a tower of obstacles while the other team snipes them from really far away. The course is laid out on a 2D plane with jumps that get harder as you climb. Fall off the map or get popped, and you’re watching the rest. Simple, intense, inevitably funny, and surprisingly fun to spectate once you’re knocked out.
I’ve played lots of Duck Hunt in Halo Infinite and, while that game’s floaty physics allow for better platforming, Battlefield’s bullet drop makes for a more interesting sniping challenge.
RPGs VS Golf Carts is more self explanatory. One team with unlimited RPGs stands on a central platform in an arena flanked by two wide ramps. The other team has golf carts. Team RPG only has one life each, but can win by surviving several minutes of assault from non-street legal vehicles. It rules.
This is all great. My only complaint is that I wish there were more stuff like it and that it were slightly more popular. Right now, the biggest servers on Portal are hardcore Conquest servers (cool that this is possible, but no thanks), vehicle only practice servers, and weirdly, still XP farms.
More folks need to know what else Portal can do, but I can’t blame anyone for ignoring the server browser entirely when it’s still so awful. The earliest FPS server browsers date back nearly 30 years, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at BF6’s clunky, horrendously laid out community tab. Filters are scarce, searching is slow, and joining servers doesn’t work half of the time. Once you’re in a custom game, the host can’t perform simple actions like evening teams or starting a map vote.
But the server browser’s worst sin, and maybe the single largest reason discoverability is nonexistent at the moment, is how hard it is to save anything anywhere. It’s possible to “Like” a mode or creator, but impossible to sort your trove of “experiences” into a single place. Don’t you dare leave a server before writing down the name or memorizing its unique experience code, or you’ll be hurled all the way back to the main menu.
At the very minimum, Battlefield 6 needs some sort of sharable folder system. Yes, I’m just describing Halo 3’s File Share, a system from 2007 that turned the FPS into a proto-social media platform where great user-made games, cool screenshots, and funny videos spread by word of mouth.
It also needs devs to take an actual interest in the games people are making in Portal. Battlefield Studios has also done a poor job of elevating custom games on its main menu, something it committed to doing before launch, but has since dedicated that real estate to ads for skins, battle passes, and battle royale modes instead.
That poor Community tab just keeps plummeting further down BF6’s grid of ugly squares, now situated below Redsec and above just the Campaign (which everybody uninstalled weeks ago) and Training Ground modes you can’t even play once you’ve leveled up a bit.
While my hopes that DICE and its cohorts will realize they’re strangling their own community are quickly fading, I’m enjoying the bright spots. Folks are making cool stuff, and people are playing it.
