Battlefield 6 technical director unveils the 'magic trick' for next-gen destruction

The Battlefield 6 technical director has revealed the 'magic trick' behind destructible environments, and it involves dropping support for old platforms.

Battlefield 6 technical director unveils the 'magic trick' for next-gen destruction
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Tech and Science Editor
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TL;DR: Battlefield 6's advanced in-game destruction is enabled by focusing solely on current-gen consoles and PC, allowing developers to leverage increased memory and CPU power. This approach, combined with extensive testing and the Frostbite engine, delivers highly detailed, fully destructible environments without previous-gen hardware limitations.

The release of Battlefield 6 is only a matter of hours away, and the technical director has revealed what could be considered the "magic trick" behind Battlefield 6's impressive in-game destruction.

In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Christian Buhl, the technical director on Battlefield 6, explained that what could be the "only magic trick" behind Battlefield 6's fully destructible environments is that developers weren't required to get the game to run on PS4 and the Xbox One.

Buhl said that by dropping the previous generation consoles, developers were given far more headroom when it comes to memory and CPU speed, essentially raising the performance floor of the game, enabling better performance in general, and giving the developers access to a wider variety of destructible environments.

"Maybe the only magic trick is that we're not on the PS4 or Xbox One any more. So we've kind of raised the floor of what we have in terms of memory and CPU speed, and so obviously raising that floor helps with improving performance overall," said Buhl

EA and Battlefield Studios deciding not to design Battlefield 6 around the limitations of previous generation consoles enabled the developers to create a much more graphically and technically impressive title for current-gen platforms and PC, as they weren't constrained by the performance envelope of those previous generation consoles, which is hardware that is more than 10 years old.

This is sort of a double edged sword as there are still many gamers on the PS4 and Xbox One platforms, but ultimately, it's probably the right call as we are nearing the end of the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S era, meaning many of those PS4/Xbox One gamers are moving up to PS5/Xbox Series, and eventually, the PS6/Next Xbox console when it releases. Rumors currently indicate the PS6 is slated for the end of 2027.

"It's the testing, it's testing destruction, it's optimising different areas," Buhl continues. "We're using the Frostbite engine, of course, and the Frostbite engine was sort of built for Battlefield. It was built for destruction. And those pieces are core parts of the engine." Adding he "doesn't think there was a magic bullet" it "was just a lot of testing, a lot of iteration, a lot of work."