[2021] Since there is a feeling that we know nothing about Portal, I thought I'd compile a comprehensive list of all that we do know

This is pretty much a list of every single official thing we know so far regarding Portal. Most of this info was compiled in July when I made a similar list for everything about 2042. Things usually can/will change during development but there has been no indication of that so far.
 

---

Battlefield 2042 Portal Trailer

Portal Gameplay Footage

---

 

WHAT IS PORTAL?

• Community driven experience that allows players to create and share custom games from multiple eras

• Create and host custom experiences using builder tools

• Website outside the game to create and share configs across all platforms

  • Portal being Web based allows devs to update it quickly without needing to patch the entire game
    
  • Share configs through URLs and Codes
    
  • players can choose to run those URLs or remix them (presumably depends on original creator's privacy settings)
    
  • Follow creators to stay up to date with their creations
    
  • You don't need a copy of 2042 to view and create configs (you will need an EA Account)
    
  • Popular and unique user created content will be featured in official curated playlists by DICE
    

• Maps, weapons, vehicles and gadgets available from 4 different games

  • Battlefield 1942
    
  • Battlefield Bad Company 2
    
  • Battlefield 3
    
  • Battelfield 2042
    

• Battlefield 2042 content will be playable in PORTAL

• Updated maps with destruction, with support for 128 players

• Progression will be enabled

• Visual scripting / logic editor for advanced users to make core changes to game modes and mechanics

• Some limitations such as not being able to make a Battle Royale (or play as penguins!)

• It's not a level editor

• Official guides and tutorials will be made available, with Wiki-like pages for info and database
   
   

LOGIC EDITOR

Scripting that enables deeper customization

• Create and edit:
  • Rules
    
  • Values
    
  • Variables
    
  • Subroutines
    
  • Literals
    
  • Control actions
    
  • Array
    
• You can use scripts to create in-game messages and notifications tied to in-game events, like a player joining.
   
   
  

SERVER MANAGEMENT
Create servers using DICE presets or make your own custom configs
 
Known Game Mode Templates so far

• Conquest Large
  
• Conquest Small
  
• Breakthrough
  
• Rush
  
• TDM
  
• Free For All
   
  

Create and host a server

• Set name/description/privacy and welcome messages
  
• Dedicated servers hosted by EA
  
• Enable/Disable AI Soldiers
  
• Server stays up as long as there are players on it. ('Follow' creators to keep track of the status of servers that you like)
  
• Admin tools and banlists will persist through the experiences that you create
  
• Minimum players required to start a match is ONE
  
• Depending on modifiers, tags will be assigned to servers to display what kind of server it is
  
• Use server browser and tags to find and join servers.
   
  

Some of the options confirmed so far

• Team ratios

  • Anything from 1v1 to 1v127 up to 128 players (64 player limit on old-gen consoles) or even free-for-all

• Factions (only 1 faction per side)

  • 1942 UK/US/GER
  • BC2 US/RU
  • BF3 US/RU
  • 2042 US/RU
  • Class system will depend on the faction

• Mobility
  Toggle and change between parameters such as

  • Aim Down sights
    
  • Prone
    
  • Slide
    
  • Sprint
    
  • Sprint strafing
    
  • Movement speed
    

• Maps

  • Select between 13 launch maps across 4 titles
    
  • Ability to choose 'map bubbles' to fight within specific areas of a map ('Gas Station only' on Caspian as an example)
    

• Classes and Gear

  • Disable/Restrict classes
    
  • Restrict weapons, gadgets, vehicles and attachments
    

• AI

  • Enable/Disable AI and the number of AI Soldiers
    
  • Run AI v AI matches
    
  • PvE matches
    
  • Change AI Difficulty
    

• Misc

  • Fall damage
    
  • Health regen
    
  • Friendly Fire
    
  • Squad Revive
    
  • Bullet damage and projectile speed
    
  • Headshot multipliers
    
  • Aim assist
    
  • Mag reload
    
  • Disable HUD
  • Disable compass
  • Disable pinging
    
  • Vehicle call-in
    
  • Weather
    

• If you don't want to deal with settings, there are official presets that you can apply. Some examples include:

  • Era specific battles
    
  • TTK and movement presets for each title
    

• Free for all 2042 players to create

 
 
6 REMASTERED MAPS
 
Battlefield 1942

• Battle of the Bulge

  
  : Set in The Ardennes, Belgium. The German Army has commenced a massive counterattack against a thin spot in the Allied front. Give it your all in the forests and fields of this vast, vehicle-focused map.
  • Destruction and weather effects enabled
    
  • Support for up to 128 players
  • Conquest Assault
    
  • Battlefield 1942 map layout as reference
    
    
    

• El Alamein

  
  : Set in El Alamein, Egypt. Fought in 1942, the Battle of El Alamein was a crucial clash between the weakened German forces and the resurgent British. Lay down as many mines as possible to greet the Panzer Division with an explosive surprise.
  • Destruction and weather enabled
    
  • Support for up to 128 players
    
  • Battlefield 1942 map layout as reference
    
    
    
  • El Alamein map size compared to 2042 maps
    
    
    

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

• Arica Harbor
  
  : Set in Arica, Chile. Once a busy port, Arica Harbor is now a lethal killzone located in the area of the world’s driest desert. Beware of enemies in the buildings and get ready for fast-paced infantry action and vehicular combat.
  
  • Larger version designed to support up to 128 players
    
  • Bad Company 2 Map Overview
    
    
    
• Valparaiso
  
  : Set in Valparaiso, Chile. As the second Russo-American war rages, a clash outside this Chilean coastal city becomes a key battle. Prepare for infantry action in the jungle and amphibious attacks on the coast.
  
  • Low-Tide variant to support up to 128 players
    
  • Bad Company 2 Map Overview
    

Battlefield 3

• Caspian Border
  
  : Set near Turkmen-Iranian border. A true Battlefield classic, set in the Turkmenistan side of the Iranian border where a recon Russian force has set up camp.
  • Support for up to 128 players
    
  • Caspian Tower levolution
    
  • Battlefield 3 Map overview
    
    
    
• Noshahr Canals
  
  : Set in Noshahr, Iran. U.S. marines launch a strike on a major harbor on the Iranian coast. Prepare for tight infantry combat as well as all-out warfare on this strategically important port.
  
  • Support for up to 128 Players
    

2042 maps will be available in PORTAL (even on modes like RUSH)
 
 

PORTAL VEHICLES

2042 vehicles will be available in Portal

	Battlefield 1942	Bad Company 2	Battlefield 3
Tanks	M4 Sherman/ M10 Wolverine / Panzer IV / Tiger-1	M1A2 / T90	M1A2 / T90
Transports	M3 Halftrack / Kubelwagen / WillysMB / KFZ 251 Halftrack	M1114 HMMWV / Quad Bike	M1114 / M1161 ITV / 3937 Vodnik / VDV Buggy / RHIB / AMTRAC
Light Armor		M3A3 Bradley	LAV-25 / BMP-2 / LAV-AD / Tunguska
Transport Helicopters		UH-60 Blackhawk	UH-60
Attack Helicopters			Apache / MI-28 HAVOC / AH-6J Little Bird / Z-11W
Aircraft	BF-109 / Spitfire / Stuka / B17 Bomber		F/A-18 / SU-35BM
Stationary	MG42 / FLAK 38 / M2 HMG / 40MM AA	UAV-1 / KORD HMG / 9M133 KORNET	9M133 KORNET / CENTURION / PANTSIR-S1 / M220 TOW

 
 

PORTAL WEAPONS

2042 weapons will be available in Portal

	Battlefield 1942	Bad Company 2	Battlefield 3
AR/CARBINE	STG-44 / BAR M1918	G3 / AN-94 / AKS-74U / M16A2 / M416 / XM8	ACW-R / G3A3 / M416 / A-91 / SCAR-H / AKS-74U / AN-94 / M16A3
SMG	Thompson / MP40	PP-2000 / XM8 Compact / Thompson	P90 / AS VAL / PP-2000
LMG		M60 / M240B / Type88 / XM8 LMG	Type88 LMG / M60E4
SNIPER	K98 / K98 Sniper / No.4 Sniper	M24 Sniper / GOL Magnum	M98B
DMR	M1 Garand	M1 Garand	M39 EMR / SVD
SHOTGUN		SPAS-12	DAO-12 / SPAS-12
SIDEARM	M1911 / P38	M93R / MP412 REX / MP443 / M1911 / Tracer Dart	M93R / MP412 REX / MP443

 
 

PORTAL GADGETS

2042 Gadgets will be available in Portal

Battlefield 1942	Bad Company 2	Battlefield 3
Panzerschreck / Bazooka ExpPack / Binoculars / Landmine / Medkit / Wrench / Grenade / Knife	Ammo Box / Repair Tool / Medkit / AT Mine / Defib / RPG-7 / Mortar Strike / M136 AT4 / C4 / Motion Sensor / Knife / Frag Grenade	SOFLAM / Claymore / Ammo Box / SMAW / Defib / FIM-92 Stinger / Medkit / SA-18 Igla / C4 / FGM-Javelin / Repair Tool / EOD Bot / AT Mine / T-UGS / RPG-7V2 / MAV / Knife / M67 Grenade

 
 

---

INTERVIEWS

Rob Donovan, a Senior Game Designer at Ripple Effect, was speaking to multiple outlets and had some interesting stuff to share!
 

• The intent of Portal is to have as few restrictions as possible.
  
  • "If we start to get crashes, we’ll be able to pull the plug on whatever the offending content is. I will say that we do have some basic validation for the logic editor, there will be some basic checks to make sure that you don’t really screw yourself in obvious and easily corrected ways.
     
    "But frankly, we have tried, certainly, from a game design perspective, this is my preference, we’ve tried to err on giving the creators as much power as possible and not trying to put too many guardrails on them from the start. It may be that we will have to do that if it gets really out of control, but the risk for us was if we try and put people into too narrow a box and we say, ‘No, you can’t do this, or no, you can’t do that’, without being 100% certain that it’s a bad thing, we might close off avenues of really interesting, weird game modes that we just haven’t thought about yet." - Well Played
    

 

• Stranger ideas have popped up (and tossed out) during development
  
  • "Very early on when we were brainstorming, Big Head Mode came up, Low Gravity came up. These are things that we discussed, but for launch we're not going that strange. We are expecting the community to get strange, but a lot of what we're trying to do is not change the experience of playing a Battlefield game. We want to stretch it, but not flip it over. Are all these things off the table? No, but we're not going to target them.” - AusGamers
    

 

• There are bigger restrictions around vehicles due to technical limitations
  
  • "There are a lot of technical hurdles around vehicles and players combined with vehicles. What we’re offering at launch is, you’ll get the full suite of vehicles for that team that you’re playing as, whatever that looks like. Battlefield 3 has a lot of vehicles, but 2042 has even more. So you can certainly restrict any of those vehicles if you don’t like them.
     
    "If you only want one side to have tanks you can turn everything else off and just have tanks. If you want the other side to have helicopters you can turn everything else off and give them helicopters. But what you can’t do unfortunately is add more vehicles on top of that. No, you can’t have 128 vehicles." - Digital Trends
    

 

• Reimagined maps aren't any bigger than their classic counterparts (Apart from BC2 Maps)
  
  • "These maps are not large enough really to accommodate the full All-Out Warfare experience. Like we said in the Q&A, you can put 128 players in a map designed for 64, it’s going to be crowded. Having played it I can tell you that people steal the vehicles much faster because there’s twice as many of them [players]. It’s a real challenge.
     
    "We didn’t want to double the size of the maps, we didn’t want to add new parts to the maps that weren’t there originally. So these Battlefield Portal classic maps, you’re going to be able to use them in Portal, but they’re kind of not suited as well for the All-Out Warfare for 2042." - Digital Trends
     
    
  • Accommodating higher player counts is where the Bad Company 2 map updates are focused. "Take a map like Valparaiso," [Christian] Grass continues, speaking of a map fondly remembered for its fishing village and lighthouse skirmishes. "You can choose to play a version of that map at low tide, an addition we made to better accommodate 128 players." - GamesRadar+
    

 

• Map Arenas are small bubbles that allow for battles on specific locations on a map
  
  • "The arenas, for instance, there are arena play spaces in these giant 2042 All-Out Warfare maps that sort of laser focus on one specific point of interest there. It adds sort of an interesting wrinkle to it, and of course, you can’t add your own things, but it will be a very different experience to play on, let’s say, Kaleidoscope in an arena than Valparaiso in an arena.
     
    "We’re hoping to give a variety of play spaces for players to create their own experiences within without opening the door to this sort of 3D spatial thing which isn’t really our intent." - Digital Trends
    

 

• OFFICIAL playlists will be a thing at launch
  
  • "So we will have control over what are the official experiences. So yes, at launch, we plan to do the 1942 set with both of the 1942 maps, and some settings that make it feel a little bit more like it did. And then a [Bad Company 2] version and Battlefield 3 version." Well Played
    

 

• There are around FIFTY different server settings that players can adjust without even touching the Logic Editor
  
  • "I think it’s somewhere in the order of 50 individual settings that we have that you can tinker with. Those are fairly simple, they’re on/off switches, they’re sliders, they’re drop-downs.
     
    "The power is still there, you can adjust them per team, as Justin showed in that video, and there are a lot of ways that you can change the default experience. I made myself a solo versus AI game where I made the AI pretty weak and I made myself really strong and I was getting one-shot kills all over the place. It did not feel like a Battlefield game really, it felt like some other bizarre mismatch thing.
     
    "So there is still a lot of potential to change the way that the game feels, even if you don’t feel like doing that logic editing and I get it, it can be a little bit intimidating and we don’t expect everybody to go through it." - Well Played
    

 

• The Logic Editor is built using an open-source program called Blockly
  
  • “One of the advantages of the tech that we're using with the logic editor is that it's built on a system called Blockly, and that's an open-source architecture that we built on top of. It's used in a few other places and some players might even have experience with it. The block nature of it tries to show you what can fit where. Rectangle blocks with a notch in them can fit into rectangle spaces with a notch in, circles can fit into circles. So, there's already an attempt to try and make it a little bit more intuitive baked in.” - AusGamers
    

 

• A developer has tried to create the Hotwire Mode from Hardline using the Logic Editor!
  
  • "Somebody on the team tried to build a sort of low-rent version of the Hotwire game mode from Battlefield Hardline using the logic editor and it wasn’t totally terrible! They got kind of the basic rules of it. I don’t know if somebody’s going to try it in the community after we launch and make it really good, I don’t know. We’re making all these blocks and things and some of them we’ve never tried to put together in that specific way. I hope somebody manages to make it better than I could even." - Digital Trends
    

 

• Ripple Effect wants Portal to be a platform where game modes of the future are first prototyped
  
  • “Ultimately the hope is that whatever comes after the battle royale craze, it can be prototyped in Portal, that’s the dream; that someone creates this new game mode for some other thing, but they started with us.” - The Loadout
    

 

• Post-Launch for portal will be community driven
  
  • "In terms of the classic content, the classic games, we’re not saying anything right now. We’re looking for the community to guide us because there are so many different ways we can go, right? Whether it’s more of that or it’s putting more time into the logic editor, or into more of our community administration tools … There’s just so many ways we can go and we’re not going to commit to any of them today." - Digital Trends
     
    "We're really hoping that the community tells us what they want. Is there a large contingent of Battlefield players that want Arcade game modes? Maybe, I don't know. We're going to need to get some of the data back. What we do know is that Battlefield players love Battlefield. They love the classes, the vehicles, the maps. We doubled down on the things that we knew were going to be well-received and left some of the more fringe stuff in the Logic Editor for players to invent on their own.” - AusGamers
    

 

---

This is all that we know so far in an official capacity. Hardly fair to claim 'we know nothing about portal' is it? We probably just need one more Portal trailer/overview before launch and that's about it.

External link →