Battlefield 6: Season 3 – Hands on with Railway to Golmud

Battlefield 6 burned brightly for its release at the end of last year. It struck a tone that many wanted and weren’t getting from Call of Duty, reviving that modern/near-future setting that Battlefield 2042 failed to do, and for a brief moment, it was my go-to game for chilling out and blasting. But then the teething troubles and nagging complaints started to come in, and it now feels like Battlefield 6: Season 3 needs to be a turning point for the game to bring series fans and players back on side.

We’ve been hands on with a preview build of Season 3 to check out the revamped Railway to Golmud map, but first, let’s recap the highlights of what this season will offer.

Golmud Railway’s remake will be joined, later in the season, with Cairo Bazaar, a remake of the Battlefield 3 map Grand Bazaar, with both maps being adapted to not just meet the modern graphical standards, but also fit into the Pax Armata storyline. There’s also a returning game mode, with Obliteration revived from Battlefield 4, and ranked mode emerging into the battle royale with Battlefield Studios looking to expand that to other modes in later seasons.

There’s a smattering of new guns as well, including the L115 bolt action sniper rifle, M16A4 assault rifle, RPK-74M light machine-gun, and the PP-19 submachine-gun.

And this season is just the start, as Season 4 promises water battles with a remake of series classic Wake Island and original map Tsuru Reef, working aircraft carriers, and broader features and quality of life improvements.

So, Railway to Golmud. How is it? Well, first things first, you’ll have to excuse my thoroughly rusty FPS play in the background. I was trying to use the M16A4 in its burst fire mode and getting thoroughly outclassed while doing so. The RPK-74M ended up being a bit more my style when I swapped classes and used that.

Railway to Golmud has taken the Battlefield 4 classic and reworked certain elements of it. Visually, it’s much more vibrantly colourful with more greenery, more colourful buildings, and generally being more visually appealing.

There’s still the same heavy focus on a line of objectives running through the middle of the map, but this remake really expands the sprawl of the village, stretching it down toward a walled-off group of buildings by the railway. Keep going south, past the train tracks and the communications tower now has a bunch of buildings around it, and the warehouse is now filled with more walkways, internal gantries and more. This all goes to providing more cover for infantry, so you could stay in the middle and really approach this as a more close quarters map in the northern half. while there’s a better middle ground of space and cover to the south, flanked by the solo objectives closer to each base.

And of course there’s the train, which still moves back and forth, going in and out of the manmade valley, and up onto a bridge. There’s more carriages here to try and give a little bit more cover, but the biggest change is that, instead of the train moving toward the base of whoever controls it, it will actually move towards the enemy base. It’s a simple tweak that makes it much more likely to change hands throughout the course of the battle, but can also make it an offensive launch pad for capturing those isolated control points.

I will say that I also felt some of the balance tweaks that had been made for vehicles in Season 3. Per DICE, the strength of anti-tank weapons and tools has been tuned to make them need three hits across the board, and made it more predictable with flanking and positional damage. You still need to play sensibly while in a tank, but there’s more ability to back off and save your heavy armour – the time until health regen has been extended to 12 seconds, but it’s now quicker up to 80%, and can recover from critical damage better. I think it’s a positive step, especially as we now have another major tank and vehicle warfare map to play on.

All in all, it’s great to have another map like this within Battlefield 6, as the game still has that leaning towards smaller, infantry-heavy maps. Of course, later this season we’ll get another of those with Grand Bazaar, but this is bringing much needed variety, and doing so in a fan-pleasing fashion.