By Battlefield 6 was nearly too hardcore for Xbox – in terms of memory usage, anyway.
Speaking to Kotaku, EA technical director Christian Buhl thinks “the biggest thing we did that was a challenge for us” while developing Battlefield 6, due to launch on October 10, was wrangling the Xbox Series S. Compared to Microsoft‘s other, stronger current generation console, the Xbox Series X, Series S features more limited memory storage, as well as a lower target resolution, and, ultimately, price tag.
In fact, Battlefield 6 devs found that “Xbox Series S does have less memory than even our mid-spec PC,” Buhl says. “And so there was a point… Oh, I want to say, like, 6 to 12 months ago where we kind of realized that a lot of our levels were crashing on Xbox Series S.”
This led devs to devote another 60 days or so to resolving “all of our memory issues on Series S,” Buhl explains.
“We were doing so much testing… we were collecting all this data,” he recalls. The Xbox Series S necessitated tweaks to Battlefield 6’s memory usage that finally made the “whole game better and more stable,” Buhl adds, though devs had to make “specific optimizations” just for Series S, too.
“Once we kind of started running all our levels through it, and were able to see where the problems were,” Buhl concludes, and now any tension between Battlefield 6 and the Series S has been melted away. The game will apparently run on the console at a “smooth 60 frames per second,” he promises.