MORGAN PARK, STAFF WRITER
This week: Got back to his 95-hour Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 playthrough and discovered there’s still a lot of main quest to go.
Before the quick match button, before the party system, before skill-based matchmaking, we had the server browser: A literal list of all active matches, neatly sorted by player count, ping, mode, and map. The age of server browsing wasn’t perfect, but the advantages were obvious: Like a saloon that never closed, players established “home” servers where they felt comfortable, made friends with other regulars, and voted on what to play next.
It’s only a little hyperbolic to suggest that Call of Duty killed the server browser. The advent of one-button automatic matchmaking began before the first Modern Warfare, but it was that game’s generational popularity that accelerated the humble server browser’s slide into obscurity.
By the 2010s, a new standard of official servers policed by strict skill-based matchmaking squashed any remaining hope for manual matchmaking merriment outside Valve games or obscure indie shooters, with one notable exception: Battlefield.
Server browser vs. Portal browser
Battlefield has a long history of letting players make their own matches. Server browsers were standard in the first PC-only Battlefields, and surprisingly, DICE stuck to its guns after it refocused on consoles. The PC versions of Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, and Battlefield 4 had server browsers with third-party server support. EA eventually dropped sever rentals in 2018’s Battlefield 5, but the server browser remained—allowing anyone to cherry-pick modes and maps as they pleased.
Battlefield Studios is talking up the return of the server browser in Battlefield 6, but longtime fans will need to be convinced that what it has in mind is a proper server browser, because at first blush, it sounds like a compromise.
Battlefield 6’s server browser will only let you join matches created in Portal, its Halo Forge-like custom games toolset that looks promising. Official matchmaking servers are not manually accessible. According to DICE lead producer David Sirland, this is because the studio doesn’t believe stuffing the Portal browser with matchmaking servers would be a good experience.
“Matchmaking servers spin up in seconds (get filled with players), and spin down after the game is over,” Sirland wrote in a thread on X last week. “That couple of seconds when servers lose a lot of players mid-game is the only time you can join, which makes it a tricky combination (and full of queuing to join issues).
“We think the current setup gives us the best of both worlds, as you can choose to spin up a server through regular matchmaking or find an existing server that is already running, or create your own as well.”
In other words, there aren’t really persistent matchmaking servers to join in the first place, just instances that come and go with the flow of players. Along with that, I reckon that matchmaking servers are siloed off to protect skill-based matchmaking. Battlefield 6 will factor skill into its equations—though Sirland says it’s “far down the list” of priorities—and letting anyone join an official server willy-nilly would funk up the balance.
Still, DICE insists the Portal browser will satisfy. It does have some qualities that simulate a classic server experience, like how you can earn full XP in Portal matches as long as the house rules closely resemble the vanilla ones. That should make it easy enough to only play the maps/modes I want (provided other people show up to my Portal session), but it’s unclear if Portal will have a crucial element of server browsers that make them special and useful: true persistence.
This is one that we still don’t have a clear answer on. In Battlefield 2042, Portal servers were “persistent” in the sense that you could play for hours without the lobby disbanding, but the server would only stay open as long as people remained in the lobby. Once it was empty, it’d shut down. That limitation, and the inability to sidestep DICE by renting a server that never shuts down, made it difficult for communities to take shape in Portal.
Sirland and producer Alexia Chrisofsi have both said that Portal servers are “persistent,” but that could just mean they’re more persistent than official matchmaking. No server rental program has been announced, but it’s possible one is in the works.
Here’s a simple test: If Battlefield 6 comes out and there isn’t an always-online server called “24/7 OPERATION FIRESTORM | CONQUEST/RUSH | NA WEST” then, well, you don’t have a real server browser.
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