My pick? Portal. Not because I dislike Portal itself, but because of what it replaced.
Portal basically became DICE/EA's approved alternative to traditional community servers, while the main Battlefield experience moved toward matchmaking on official servers. And I think that came with a lot of downsides.
A ton of development time clearly went into building Portal, especially in BF6, and the tools they've made are genuinely impressive. The problem is that most Battlefield players just want to play regular Battlefield. Because Portal exists separately from the main multiplayer experience, discoverability for community servers and alternative modes became much worse. Modes like Hardcore that could've simply existed as popular community-server presets instead became something you had to actively seek out in Portal, and many of them eventually became almost extinct.
XP farms are another problem that arguably only exists because of Portal. Bots themselves aren't the issue. If bots were just used to fill empty slots in official servers, that's perfectly fine. But combine bots, progression, and highly customizable rules and suddenly you've created an XP-farming problem that needs restrictions and constant policing.
With BF6's expanded Portal tools, I also feel like Battlefield is increasingly trying to become a platform rather than a game. And I actually respect what they've built. The level editor and scripting/customization tools are getting almost ArmA-like in scope. But ArmA is fundamentally designed as a military sandbox, Battlefield isn't, and I don't think most Battlefield players ever wanted creation tools this deep.
Most user-generated content isn't going to be particularly good, either. That's just the nature of UGC. Back in BFV, community servers could change things like map rotations, ticket counts and damage values, and honestly that covered most of we needed. Give us that plus BF6's class and movement options and I think the vast majority of players would've been happy, specially if the community servers were displayed along side official servers which were also persistent.
So... am I against Portal as a concept? Not at all. I just don't like its implementation as part of the main Battlefield game.
Honestly, I think Portal could've been much more interesting as its own free-to-play Battlefield game, completely detached from the current mainline title. Think something along the lines of Battlefield Heroes in the sense of being a separate BF project, except entirely focused on community creation.
Then the Portal team could go absolutely wild with the tools without having to worry as much about how they affect the core game. It could basically become a Battlefield test bed: people make maps, modes and other experiences, the best ones rise to the top, and DICE could even license or buy particularly good community creations and bring them into the current main Battlefield game with a DICE seal of approval. Sort of like Valve's relationship with community-created content in Counter-Strike, where maps and skins are voted to be added in the game, and their creators get paid for them.
I considered picking Battle Royale instead because it shares some of the same issues, but I think there's an important difference. RedSec can exist largely separate from Battlefield's core multiplayer, but Portal fundamentally changed how community servers fit into Battlefield itself. The only real issue with Red Sec is just the development resources spent on it, which is not really an issue for EA, which in my opinion is the main culprit here, I doubt DICE would've changed something that worked in the franchise for two decades out of their own volition, but this is just speculation.
So, what would your pick be? What feature you think Battlefield would've been better off never adding?
fremelon - NA nights
I take the dead hours.
