Early playtesting of the next Battlefield game is now underway—there hasn't been an official announcement to that effect as far as I know, but we can tell because gameplay footage is flooding the internet.

The testing is taking place under the auspices of , the initiative announced in February that aims to ensure future Battlefield releases go better than Battlefield 2042, the most recent addition to the series, which did not make an especially good impression among fans. The Battlefield Labs announcement video concluded with a 10-second clip of pre-alpha gameplay showcasing environmental destructibility, and that's central to quite a bit of the leaked gameplay footage as well.

Interestingly, Charlie Intel said on that the playtest is under NDA and that leaked videos "are being taken down immediately by EA," but it's not clear whether that's actually the case. BobNetworkUK_, who posted a compilation of four clips totalling about eight minutes of gameplay, wrote that "it seems EA retracted the takedowns."

I don't know whether that's true, but there's no overlooking [[link]] the fact that these videos are still out there, and not hidden in some secret, dark corner of the internet: Charlie Intel has than five million [[link]] followers on X, so you can be quite sure EA knows it's sharing these videos.

If EA is letting it all slide, it means two things: One, that NDAs are meaningless when developers solicit testing from the general public; and two, that EA has enough confidence in where the next Battlefield game is currently at that it doesn't mind letting the world lay eyes on it.

That doesn't mean much at the pre-alpha stage of things, but on the whole I think it's more encouraging than a PR guy screaming "Don't look at it!" while desperately firing takedown orders like Animal Mother charging an enemy sniper.

To speculate further, if EA did decide to let the leaked gameplay stand, it may have been encouraged to do so by the reaction to it. There is understandable caution and obligatory negativity here and there, but the overall response to the early build's crumply destruction tech that, from a distance, looks on par with is very positive.

The audio in particular draws a lot of praise, but even though there are some glitches and oddities here and there, the whole thing looks pretty tight for a game that's supposedly still very early in development.

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Another point of "more excitement than you might expect": The scoreboard is back.

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(To be fair, Battlefield fans were really mad that EA dropped the traditional scoreboard from BF2042, to the point that they successfully bullied developers into .)

Electronic Arts has a lot of ground to make up here. Battlefield has always played second fiddle to the Call of Duty series, and BF2042 was a pretty significant misstep in the eyes of many long-time fans of the series: EA put in a lot of effort into turning BF2042 around and largely , but it needs the next [[link]] game in the series to come out very strong if it wants Battlefield to be taken seriously as a modern military contender. These gameplay leaks are a long way from that, but they do at least look like a big step in the right direction.