Battlefield 6 has been a long time coming, arguably all the way back to when we assumed this was what Battlefield 2042 would be called. This is actually a return to what Battlefield has done best over the decades, with 64-player battles, a modern warfare setting, defined classes, and a steady sense of player progression that feels like the good old days. It’s as close to a modernised Battlefield 3 or 4 as you could hope for, and the franchise’s best shot to meaningfully challenge Call of Duty in almost a decade.
With a week of pre-release multiplayer sessions under my belt, it definitely strikes a lot of the right notes for me. At the heart of Battlefield 6 are series staple large scale game modes, with Conquest and Breakthrough leading the way – the first an open map with check points, the other pitting attackers against defenders to fight from one side of the map to the other. Rush, in this iteration, is more like a 12v12 shrunk down version of Breakthrough. Joining them is Escalation, which takes Conquest and ramps the stakes up over time. Starting with seven control points, you need to hold more than the other team to build up a meter to try and score a point, at which point the map shrinks by one objective and you go again, with more and heavier vehicles unlocking over time. The first to three points wins, but this can really swing back and forth, and it can be really rather fun.
The map rotation we experienced put a lot more emphasis on the city maps than those with more open spaces. Six of the nine maps are in towns or cities, and I’ll be honest, I was fine with that – I did partake in the occasional Operation Locker grindfest back in the day. These offer up mazes of buildings and rooms, letting infantry be the focus and showcasing this game’s take on destruction. There’s quite a good balance to this effect, giving the effect of destruction, both cosmetic and impactful, without letting you fully level a map in the style of Bad Company 2. While I enjoyed this, there is an imbalance here and the game does need more open maps. As popular as Operation Firestorm is, it’s going to do a lot of heavy lifting here alongside the mountainside battling on Liberation Peak, and the one other open level, Mirak Valley. There’s also an oddity with one map – Saints Quarter – which isn’t usable for any large modes.
The big modes are then joined by small scale modes TDM, Squad DM, Domination, King of the Hill, and it’s here that I really got to grips with weapon handling and the pace of battle. The time to kill can be very quick, and there’s a lot more sliding round corners these days, but this forced me to consider my approach a bit more, instead of just rushing headlong into the fray. That and the pre-launch lobbies needing a bit of help from bots to fill the player count did wonders for my K:D ratio.
There’s a traditional set of four character classes, which harks back to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 by combining medic, ammo supply and LMG into the Support class, which allows Assault to be a two-gun frontline soldier, Engineer to really focus on anti-vehicle gear, and Recon for sniping, spotting and sneaky spawn points. It is, I think, close to being a perfect blend of roles and duties, and while open gun choice does muddy the waters a little bit, I think the class bonuses for sticking to their particular signature weapon is enough, and there’s enough weapons within each bucket to let you lean in a different direction as well. The second LMG has a rapid 30-bullet clip that makes it more like an AR, for example, especially with foregrips enhancing your aim. I feel there’s been some positive changes since the beta here as well, so the Assault doesn’t have totally free reign with their second weapon choice, and they might consider a breaching charge instead double weapons to lean into the level destruction.
Progression is generally quite straightforward. Weapons and gear are unlocked as you rank up, and then attachments come via weapon mastery – using it lots, in other words. Feeding this is a slew of basic daily challenges to score with a particular class and weapon, such that open weapons are really useful, and then weekly challenges that can get more specific, as well as overarching challenges that grant specific XP boosts or cosmetic unlocks.
You’re rewarded mid-battle as well through Field Specs. Yes, you have your key gear and equipment, but you also gain class and role-specific buffs and boosts as you earn points in a round. Assault can passively get better movement speeds while aiming, Support the ability to share life and ammo with nearby allies, and so on. There’s only a couple Field Specs per class, so this feels like an area for DICE to expand on through future seasons.
This is, of course, a live service game, and after fluffing their lines for the last couple games, Season 1 for Battlefield 6 promises two new maps and a seasonal makeover through the end of this year, as well as half a dozen new weapons, a new vehicle, new mode and more. That’s a significant improvement, and it’s also before talking about the Battle Royale game mode that’s coming down the pipe. We don’t know precisely what the long term monetisation will look like at the moment, outside of there being a battle pass and expected cosmetics. The developers have repeatedly stated the intent to stick to grounded military looks, and that’s true of the base game, but with EA’s impending ownership change, you might wonder if a Cristiano Ronaldo skin will be unceremoniously shoved in eventually.
That will live alongside Portal, which puts sweeping editing tools in the hands of players to create custom levels and game modes. Playing on PS5, we don’t get to fiddle with these tools and they weren’t available pre-launch regardless, but there’s already officially created infantry-only versions of Breakthrough and Conquest, and a Hardcore mode from the off. They’re splintered off from the default game mode selections – just as the Closed Weapon playlist is hidden away – and they’ll have to do a lot to ensure that the best experiences are made discoverable, but it’s good that they’re there.
While multiplayer is obviously the main part of Battlefield 6, this game sees the return of a single player campaign, a side to the franchise that has swung between highs and lows since the first effort in Bad Company. In this case, it’s just too by the numbers, and lacking in polish.
NATO is under attack by a mysterious PMC known as Pax Armata, whose rise rapidly escalates from a territorial rivalry into all-out conflict through Gibraltar, New York, and beyond. There’s some fun highlights and grand spectacle, squeezing in some Battlefield staples, like repairing a tank through urban combat and open area missions later on, but it’s wrapped up in a largely uninteresting mystery and the presentation isn’t up to snuff.
There’s missing canned animations, there’s mission scripting that doesn’t trigger properly if you outpace your AI team or do things in atypical ways, and the enemy AI is just painfully dumb. Then there’s the story beats that don’t land because interpersonal relationships and conflict aren’t in the final game, there’s cutscenes that take take control away from you for highlight moments that you should 100% be playing, and which have so much shaky cam that even Jason Bourne would need a sit down.
This is the part of the game that really needed more time, and it’s a shame that Motive and Criterion, who led the campaign’s development, didn’t get it.
