Let’s go over some fundamentals. The rule #1 of any closed game testing session is that NDAs come before anything. The second rule is that the speed limit for NDA violation is causality, ie information cannot travel faster than light.

With that in mind, it is unsurprising that Battlefield players managed to get secret information out faster than War Thunder fans share restricted military documents to settle forum arguments.

The big wigs at Battlefield Studios and at Electronic Arts might be angry or disappointed to see this go out so fast, but fans are practically worshipping the leakers.

This excitement is more than justified, as the few minutes of multiplayer gameplay footage are the first to make anyone say “hell yeah” about a Battlefield game in over a decade.

What’s In The Battlefield Leaks?

On top of a few screenshots here and there, the bulk of leaks is approximately five minutes of fresh footage. The recording comes from a busy Conquest multiplayer round in the Abbasid map, which clearly represents a large Middle Eastern city.

The direct inspiration for the map is unclear, but some fans believe it to replicate the suburbs of Baghdad, founded during the Abbasid Caliphate by the caliph al-Mansur in 762 AD.

The gameplay footage adds some imagery to the intangible features mentioned during a Battlefield Labs dev blog released earlier today.

Titled ‘Gunplay & Movement’, the report (which you can read in full here) discussed the desire to make running and gunning more intuitive, with a clear and smooth feedback loop between how you move and how you shoot. All of this would result in a combat experience which is both realistic and engaging.

The full leaked video (re-uploaded on Reddit) shows a grounded combat approach with real weapons and vehicles. The player spends most of the match firing an AR-15 pattern rifle with an EOTech holographic optic, staples of modern equipment worldwide.

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Among the vehicles, you can clearly see an untextured but seemingly fully functional French Leclerc tank. To take armored beasts out, the player uses the good old RPG-7, but you can also see a TOW launcher on the sidewalk at one point.

There are some classic Battlefield mechanics there, like medics running with defibrilators trying to pick up downed teammates, supply points, and a team helmet cam reminiscent of the Battlefield 4 one.

What stands out the most though is the visceral nature of the combat. Firing a rocket into a building can make it come crashing down, throwing around a cloud of dust and debris.

The sounds have a weight to them that sends flashbacks to the times of Battlefield 3. Time-to-kill, for the first time in ages, feels short enough to make bullets feel like deadly objects again.

Battlefield Labs is running at a pre-alpha stage, of course, and there is a lot that needs validation and tweaking. For the first time in ages though, there is a Battlefield release worth looking forward to in the horizon.

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