Vince Zampella might use Battlefield 6's Portal creator to recruit amateur game devs

If your custom Battlefield 6 Portal content is good enough, you might land a job at DICE to work on the franchise.

DICE could use its Portal custom content creator to recruit new game devs. On paper, this sounds similar to how Bethesda will often hire top-tier Elder Scrolls and Fallout modders to help work on new projects; Elianora, for example, became part of Starfield's dedicated object-placement "clutter team" because of her work on previous mods.

"Remember, I come from a world of Quake mods, and how we'd hire people off of these amazing mods that they did on the internet. I have a secret desire to find the best of the best and target them for maybe working with us," Battlefield lead Vince Zampella said in a recent interview with Gamer Update's Jake Lucky.

Portal is very important to Battlefield's long-term business strategy, which sees players churning out user-created content to keep engagement up. It's not unlike the dedicated customs playlist that 343i rolled out in Halo MCC, and Portal could be seen as analogous to the powerful Halo Infinite Forge editor.

Gamers can modify tons of parameters in Portal, which is powered by a custom version of Godot, leading to chaotic inventions like fighting on a broken highway with vehicles crashing down the entire time, one-shot kill mods, closed weapons, and a multitude of other physics, weapon, and map-altering capabilities.

Elsewhere in the interview, DICE's Byron Beede reiterates the team's focus with Portal:

"We want to raise the profile of Portal. We've always thought it was just awesome to put that kind of power in the hands of a player's hands. They're so creative, it's such a great community. So that was the great effort, can we make Portal more powerful, can we give our players more tools.

"So the notion of the spatial editor, the UI scripting, the AI scripting...with these kinds of tools in our player's hands, who knows what they're going to come up with.

"The idea is to put Portal front and center, the idea that we've always had is that if people create awesome stuff, it goes right into the frontend UI next to the main conquest mode. We want to celebrate the creations of our players, and reward them with XP. Give people XP for playing these insane creations from our players. That's just as much fun as the other parts of the game, and we want to make sure people are getting progression.

"We've spent a lot of time thinking about how we can do Portal in a better way than it's ever been done before. There's crazy stuff that our team has put together, and I think our players are going to surprise us even more."