Battlefield 6 confirms release date, open beta, maps, and multiplayer trailer
Thursday had two big reveal events, one being a new Nintendo Direct and the other the unveiling of Battlefield 6's multiplayer. However, the video game world being what it is, almost everything from both showcases had leaked out already and was known about long in advance.
Battlefield 6, in particular, seems to find it impossible to keep a secret, and has been leaking news ever since it was announced, with EA themselves accidentally revealing that its release date is October 10.
Gameplay footage has been appearing online for months now but there's been very little official video of the game, until now. Thanks to an hours long livestream the floodgates have been opened and not only can you now watch the game being played for real, but EA has confirmed concrete details about the multiplayer maps and modes.
Relatively little was shown about the story campaign, but EA has revealed it's set in the year 2027, when the world is 'on the edge of chaos'. Which will no doubt be a stark contrast to how it is in reality at the moment. As you can imagine, the plot is loath to paint the US in a bad light and instead portrays European countries as leaving NATO, while 'the US and its allies grapple with the fallout'.
The central bad guy is a private military corporation called Pax Armata, which is presumably looking to take over the world, or something.
Most fans don't care much about the story mode but they will be interested to learn about the headline new feature called the 'Kinesthetic Combat System'. Kinaesthetic, to use the UK spelling, refers to being aware of the position and movement of your body parts, and in Battlefield 6 the new system is an attempt to more realistically simulate controlling a virtual person.
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The examples given are mounting weapons in order to reduce recoil and pulling injured teammates out of the line of fire to heal them.
EA has also talked about a new and improved version of Portal, the mod-like tool introduced in Battlefield 2042, which allows you to create your own content that can later be accessed as 'Community Experiences'.
The class system in Battlefield 6 has been a matter of some concern for fans, since any class can now use any weapon, which seems to reduce the differences between each type.
For now, EA has confirmed that the four classes are Assault, Recon, Support, and Engineer – each with class-specific gadgets, weapons, and abilities.
Assault can carry an extra primary weapon; Engineers are the only ones that can repair vehicles, equipment, and weapon placements; Recon can use laser designators to guide missiles to a target; and Support can lay down cover and heal, as well as use a light machine gun.
Battlefield 6 will launch with nine multiplayer maps, set in five different theatres of war. All will make extensive use of destruction effects, as you can see in the gameplay footage. Siege of Cairo – an urban warfare map, focusing on infantry and tank battles.
Iberian Offensive – another infantry-orientated map, this one set on Gibraltar with a lot of winding streets.
Liberation Peak – set around a snowy mountain in Tajikistan, this one is set to be a favourite for aerial combat.
Empire State – an infantry-only map set in Brooklyn, New York. Spider-Man is probably not involved.
Operation Firestorm – the return of this classic Battlefield 3 map, set on a burning oil field, also leaked out before the reveal.
Saints Quarter – another infantry-only map, this one set in Gibraltar's Old Town.
New Sobek City – set in a construction yard in the suburbs of Cairo, this one features a lot of helicopter action.
Mirak Valley – the largest map, including every vehicle possible and lots of destruction.
Manhattan Bridge – another close quarters map, although you do get to use helicopters and witness some particularly spectacular destruction effects.
As well as the story mode and Portal, there are multiple multiplayer modes in Battlefield 6 at launch, including old favourites and one brand new one.
There's the signature Conquest mode, of course, as well as fan favourites Breakthrough and Rush. You also get the faster paced King of the Hill, Domination, and Payload for the smaller maps.
Also included are Team Deathmatch and Squad Deathmatch, while the new mode is called Escalation and has two teams trying to capture strategic control points.
Unlike the maps, EA has not been definitive about whether that's all the modes, so there may be others by the time you get to launch.
The beta details also leaked before the reveal but it's now confirmed that are two open betas in August. More Trending
The first runs from August 9 to 10, but you can start on August 7 if you get an invite by watching streamers on Twitch, who can give you a code (unless you signed up for Battlefield Labs before July 31, in which case you don't need one).
The second open beta runs from August 14 to 17 and that has no restrictions at all, with EA describing the whole thing as Battlefield's biggest open beta ever. There's more information here, including the PC specs required.
Battlefield 6 will launch on October 10 for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.
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The National
3 hours ago
- The National
I'm talking to two important Scottish artists today – here's why
The events of the world today make this more urgent than ever. I've probably quoted before in these columns the lines given to me by Sandy Moffat which formed the closing words of a speech by the distinguished German musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, delivered at a symposium held in May 1995 in the Hochschule der Kunste. They bear repeating. The conference was entitled May '45 – Remembrance and the Future – On the Representation of the Non-Representable in the Arts. Here's how Sandy introduced the context: 'The terms of the symposium were set out as follows: 'In a world plagued by social and ethnic conflict, by war and terrorism, schools of art and design and schools of music are confronted with the challenge to make a contribution toward peace among nations, not only through the work they each carry out in the fields of the arts and education, but also through international co-operation'. 'All of the speakers – from Russia, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Poland, Latvia, Estonia – offered outstanding papers. 'Some were moving, others gripping and some electrifying, especially On the Relationship of Music to Memory, which Eggenbrecht started thinking about on May 8, 1945, as he lay wounded in a prisoner of war camp, and most especially his closing words. And these are Eggebrecht's closing words: 'Compose, play, teach and contemplate music as devotedly as ever, but in the knowledge that war and Auschwitz did and do exist; and in the knowledge that nothing is more vital than art for the deepening, the honing, the sensitising of our awareness; but also in the knowledge that music can be ambiguous, that it can – yes, even the music of Beethoven, Liszt, and Bruckner – be used in the service of totalitarianism, war, genocide. 'Therefore, for all your devotion to art, do not lose sight of that which is the basis of everything: experience, which carrying with it as it does the consciousness of war and Auschwitz can be the defining authority for the active rejection of standardisation, intolerance and totalitarianism.' Now, here's the question. Can you show me a minister for the arts in ANY European country who would endorse that? When Sandy, Ruth Nicol and I foregather this afternoon, that will be our opening text. Do come if you can. But if you can't, another event will soon be taking place where such concerns will also be foregrounded. Scotland in Europe and the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics are organising a Festival of Hope at GalGael, 15 Fairley Street, Govan this coming Saturday to mark almost two years since the death of the poet Kenneth White. Alistair McIntosh and Norman Bissell will speak about him and show an excerpt from their film Expressing the Earth. There will be some traditional music, workshops and a stall. What connects these two events is the recognition that all the arts constitute the most vital component of human life – or let me put it this way, the arts are 'human existence come to life'. All the arts – literature and poetry, painting and sculpture, music of all kinds, architecture, and how we use the adult languages of communication to engage with the priorities of the arts – must be at the forefront of our concerns in an era where lies, misinformation, misdirection, confusion and disillusionment seem to be the steady practice of almost all mass media and almost all public-facing politicians and the faceless big business international corporations behind them. The situation is as dreadful today as it has ever been in terms of media saturation. The evidence of genocide, bloodshed, violence and power we can see and read about every day from the uncomfortable securities of our living rooms – safe for the time being perhaps – is merely evidence of how far so many in power have departed from such priorities. The arts are so important in this context because they connect humanity to reality immediately and in ways that nothing else can do. We can remind ourselves of those priorities and this connection with a poem by Kenneth White himself, A High Blue Day on Scalpay. Here it is, from his collection Open World, Collected Poems 1960-2000 (Polygon): this is the summit of contemplation, and no art can touch it blue, so blue, the far-out archipelago and the sea shimmering, shimmering no art can touch it, the mind can only try to become attuned to it to become quiet and space itself out, to become open and still, unworlded knowing itself in the diamond country, in the ultimate unlettered light. He says, 'no art can touch it' and repeats the phrase, and speaks of 'unlettered light' but this is a poem, letters are its matter, words are its medium, poetic form is its means of conveyance, and the 'touching' is right there on the page, between the words as we read them and the imagination realising the 'high clear day', which exists only in nature, in reality. By contrast, TV, film, radio, politicians' speeches, can sometimes evoke, occasionally illustrate or perhaps just refer to this connection but none of them can present it with the immediacy of a poem or a painting or a piece of music. Another way of approaching Kenneth White and the virtues of the arts is through the idea of 'geopoetics' which is associated with him so closely. Geopoetics in this understanding is a sensitivity, physical, spiritual and intellectual, outwardly enquiring. It isn't so far away from psychogeography, which is an understanding in the perceiving person, the singular mind at work. There are numerous books and essays and a long tradition of ecological thinking about and within literature and the arts. Louisa Gairn's book Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature (2008) and Monika Szuba's books, The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish [[Literature]] and Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World, discussing poets such as John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Robin Robertson and Kenneth White, are especially pertinent. Both were published in 2019. One of the closest readings of Kenneth White in the totality of his achievement and the extension of his legacy, is Norman Bissell's Living on an Island: Expressing the Earth (2024). This is an extraordinary compendium, an autobiographical account of Norman's accommodation with the ecology of his own experience of life on a small island, as he has lived on Luing in the Slate Islands for many years. The book delivers a growing understanding of a community of care and concern, but also an intellectual enquiry into the term 'geopoetics' itself: A way of living in what the American poet Charles Olson called a 'human universe' – an earth of actual value. But it's more than that. It's a meticulous literary exploration of the author's grateful relationship with Kenneth White, taking into full account White's long residence in Brittany and his experiences as a world-traveller, geographically and spiritually, an intellectual nomad, yet a poet grounded in glancing but profound realities, shorelines of understanding, coastal territories, tidal places. Bissell tells his own story of meeting White and then weaves into it their parting company and his search for, and reconnecting with White, years later. He includes a full exposition of White's writing, documenting his own growing comprehension of an earth increasingly under threat in a climate of political encroachment. Bissell deftly and fairly indicates some of White's own limitations as well as summarising the sometimes harsh and reflexive criticisms White has come in for. The book is a quest narrative. Bissell takes us into his confidence, and locates White, and himself, in the company of a wide range of other writers, ecologists and artists whose priorities are shared, sometimes exchanged and largely endorsed, including Nan Shepherd, Jessie Kesson, Katharine Stewart, Rachel Carson and Joan Eardley. His argument is that these women were in pursuit of similar or related and overlapping realisations in their respective works. White's writing may be masculinist in various obvious ways, but his concerns are not a male prerogative. In fact, one might argue, feminine principles are deeply ingrained in them, no matter how macho, or even, one might say, misogynist, he can sometimes be in his writings. Ultimately, Bissell's book is an affirmation of a world where truths can be accurately valued. And it's a moving history of a friendship. Here's his poem, Elegy for KW: It's hard to take in that he's gone the man who was such a big part of my life and thoughts for almost sixty years. I think back to those Jargon Group days when he opened my mind to so many ideas and more than ideas to the joy of life itself and how after we went our separate ways he to pursue a cultural revolution I to foment a social revolution I tracked him down at the Sorbonne and en Bretagne after twenty years. Reading his work this past year when writing my book about geopoetics I felt I got to know him even better and to tell my truth about how I found him. His books will live on to influence even more seekers of truth and to spread the good news of the creative expression of the Earth. That afternoon when I heard of his passing we walked along the shore and out in the bay the rigging on a white schooner clanged a death knell for the life of Kenneth White. And this is reminding me of those wonderful lines of Charles Olson: 'There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of' – which when I think of it now extends my own remit all the way around the world to New Zealand, where I spent 14 years of my own life, and I'm remembering the first book of my friend the artist and poet Gregory O'Brien, entitled, Location of the Least Person (1987). And this now draws me to my last point here about Kenneth White's legacy, that it stands as a permanent reminder and encouragement, so that we know that the world is in need, even of us, however damned and marginal we might seem to be. The legacy of White's work may not directly be the spread or escalation of 'geopoetics'. The poetic initiatives already being undertaken in the condition of global climate catastrophe have their own dynamics, and as Norman Bissell explains in his book, White described Geopoetics, but did not define or originate its meaning or purpose. Its practise predates him, overlaps with his contemporaries, and goes far beyond without reference to him. I'll come back to it. The legacy of his writing lies in the threefold identification of its genres: poetry, fictionalised travel journals, and skipping, skimming philosophical essays, referencing rich sources. Each genre is written lightly, some might say, superficially, glancing at great depths below, indicating other writers of far more difficulty, challenge and provocation, but embodying a spirit of enquiry and observation. He can be flat-footed, but never very ponderous. He can risk banality, pretentiousness and stridency, but is not over-wrought with anxiety or gestural ennui. What seems like innocence can be insouciance. This means that a sober critical account of his poetry is yet to be made. As Guy Davenport says in an essay on Ronald Johnson, 'A poem as it is generally understood is a metrical composition either lyric, dramatic, or pensive made by a poet whose spiritual dominion flows through his words like the wind through the leaves or the lark's song through twilight.' White's actual practice doesn't quite match that conventional romanticism. But if his legacy is a prioritisation of open enquiry, opposed to the closed mind of predestined conclusions, and that's no bad thing to be remembered for, and for future generations to take forward. And it's a lasting reminder that what always matters most is the reality all our arts are founded upon, draw themselves from, and, yes, can take forward – even against all the odds, vast as they seem at present.
Scottish Sun
13 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Iconic TV channel axe all UK production after almost three decades as it becomes latest casualty of streaming
END OF AN ERA Iconic TV channel axe all UK production after almost three decades as it becomes latest casualty of streaming I USED to love going to my best mate's house to watch MTV when I was a kid in the Nineties because my parents were too tight to pay for extra TV channels. But youngsters now won't be able to do the same, as I'm told MTV UK is the latest casualty of social media and streaming. 4 MTV UK is the latest casualty of social media and streaming Credit: Alamy 4 Stars including Emma Willis got their big breaks in telly thanks to the station Credit: Alamy 4 Cat Deeley presenting on the beloved channel 4 Kelly Brook appearing on MTV UK Credit: Supplied My insiders said the station has been axed in all but name after bosses quietly closed the UK production arm of the channel. MTV spin doctors insist the station 'will still have a presence', but concede they will no longer be making original music content. Instead, generic US shows will be aired alongside the usual rolling music videos. Notable cancellations include original series Gonzo and Fresh Out UK. As well as being a huge blow to British music, it's also a major loss to up-and-coming presenting talent. Stars including Kelly Brook, Emma Willis and Cat Deeley all got their big breaks in telly thanks to the station. READ MORE ON MTV NO SHOW MTV AXE two huge Geordie Shore spin-offs - leaving cast fuming Greg James and Joel Dommett also hosted on the channel earlier in their careers. My source said: 'Everyone at MTV is gutted. To say there has been a bloodbath of cuts would be an understatement. 'Staff have been left in tears as some have been there for decades. "Those that are left fear more doom and gloom could be around the corner.' It comes after the EMAs — the European answer to the famous VMAs — was axed for this year in another cost- saving measure. A spokesman said: 'MTV UK is sunsetting local series Gonzo and Fresh Out UK, beginning this month. 'We are deeply grateful to our hosts Jack Saunders and Becca Dudley, the talented artists who have been a part of these series, as well as the teams who brought them to life. Watch emotional moment Ozzy Osbourne speak about amazing life with Sharon in resurfaced moment from The Osbournes as rocker tragically dies 'Fans can continue to enjoy global music shows like the MTV VMAs, STANS and Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape From Now on MTV and Paramount+, alongside digital music content on our MTV UK social channels.' I know nothing can ever stay the way it was . . . but this just makes me want to go back to the Nineties.
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Scotsman
21 hours ago
- Scotsman
Where was Karen Pirie filmed? ITV locations
Karen Pirie has gone international for series 2 - but where did the filming take place? 👀 Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Karen Pirie is in its second season on ITV. Lauren Lyle is back as the titular character. But where was the show filmed this time around? Karen Pirie is back for its first season in nearly three years and the wait has certainly been worth it. The show has kept viewers on the edge of their seats throughout the final weeks of July. ITV will air the conclusion to the latest series this evening (August 3). It will bring to an end the investigation into the disappearance of Cat and Adam Grant. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The show is set in Scotland - however for its second series, it has also included some overseas locations. You might be wondering where exactly the filming took place. Lauren Lyle as Karen Pirie, Saskia Ashdown as DC Isla Ray and Chris Jenks as DC Jason Murray in Karen Pirie. | ITV Lauren Lyle once again stars as the titular character - based on the character from the Val McDermid books. The start time for the conclusion has been confirmed as well and there are no schedule shenanigans this week. Where was Karen Pirie filmed? The show is mostly set in Scotland, but the final episode will take the characters to some locations in southern Europe. It includes filming in: Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Kinghorn, Fife Luss Estate in Loch Lochmond The Citizen, Glasgow Glenrothes police station Outside Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom Caiplie Caves, Anstruther TimeOut also reports that filming took place in Malta. The southern European island is the setting for the climax to the season - and also serves as a stand-in for Italy. Filming took place in the capital of Malta, Valletta. It is a historic city which features many stunning buildings dating to the 16th century. Karen Pirie will be on ITV1/ STV at 8pm tonight (August 3). The full boxsets for both series 1 and 2 are already available on ITVX and STV Player. If you love TV, check out our Screen Babble podcast to get the latest in TV and film.
