One of the most valuable things you can do for the health of an FPS is let people mess with maps and assemble their own servers. Battlefield 6 is checking both of those boxes at launch with Portal, a web tool and SDK that lets people fire up persistent custom games and create new game modes.
There is no more perfect day-one demonstration of what Portal can do than this surprisingly good remake of Call of Duty 4 Shipment by game dev Matavatar, who had a working version of the map up a day before Battlefield 6 was even live (EA released the Portal editor a bit early).
I played a few minutes of Matavatar’s Shipment in a server someone had going and, yep, they pretty much nailed it. Because of how Portal works at the moment, the map itself was actually suspended in the air somewhere in the skybox of Operation Firestorm, which is giving early Portal creations a Halo Forge-y feel (which I mean in a complimentary way).
It’s kind of wild that EA is letting people not only host custom maps from the jump, but even earn XP from playing in them. That means right now, you can hop in a Shipment 24/7 playlist (which already exists) and enjoy a mode that Call of Duty players usually have to beg Activision to put back in the game.
The same creator is also working on a version of Call of Duty’s Killhouse, and even managed to make a crude Star Destroyer out of concrete blocks. That spatial editor is pretty neat, if more obtuse than your average level editor built into the game.
You can find a few Shipment servers in Battlefield 6 right now by heading to the community tab and searching for the name. If you’d like to have or tweak the map for yourself, Matavatar published the map file for anyone to download.
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