I Played Battlefield 6: Hands-On With the Return To Big Battle Warfare

CNET

a day ago

After a few hours playing the upcoming Battlefield 6, it's clear the game is designed to be a mea culpa to fans: Trust us, we're bringing back the Battlefield you remember. At a massive preview event in Los Angeles, I sat down to play a slice of the game's multiplayer mode -- and came off it suitably whelmed with a mix of raucous moments and tedious deaths. Ultimately, it feels like it will deliver the kind of big team battles players have been craving, with technical flourishes that amplify the gleeful chaos of a warzone.
Developer DICE has a lot to prove with Battlefield 6. Its predecessors, 2018's World War II-themed Battlefield V and 2021's near-future Battlefield 2042, made unpopular changes to the game's formula, but subsequent updates salvaged some goodwill. So there's a reason the developers emphasized that DICE's newest game drew from the wells of Battlefield 3 and 4, returning to a successful era of big, destructive battles and retreating from some of the more drastic deviations.
"We approached [this project] with this idea that not only do we want to draw inspiration from Battlefield 3 and 4, and sort of the best of the best in our series, we wanted to do it with our players," said Christian Grass, vice president and executive producer at DICE's Ripple Effect studios. "That was a big thing early on, get Battlefield Labs stood up, get [the game] out there, get players to play, and then start that conversation with them, listen to the feedback they're giving us and sort of build this game together."
With the Battlefield Labs feedback program DICE set up, it's clear the studio wants to head off any potentially unpopular changes to the core gameplay people have come to expect from Battlefield.
"With [Battlefield] Labs, everything that we're doing and communicating with our community early on, we want to make sure that we are landing it when [Battlefield 6] comes out," said Thomas "Tompen" Andersson, creative director at Ripple Effect. He noted that the team wants to "make sure that we don't have to counter some decisions that the community doesn't agree with."
Labs has already provided Battlefield 6's developers with a wealth of data, from weapon pick rates to map movement patterns, that's led developers to tune the guns and different game modes. Their attention zooms down to the level of destructibility in objects, gathering feedback on whether walls are too sturdy or fragile and how that affects the player experience.
"OK, maybe no one is using this lane, why aren't they using that? Oh, they feel like it's a kill zone, or there's not enough coverage," Andersson said. "We're taking that internally and testing and seeing if we can make that better."
Read more: How to Join the Battlefield 6 Open Beta: Early Access Sign Up and Weekend Dates
Balancing old and new Battlefield
Battlefield 6 isn't a full rejection of modernity to embrace tradition. For instance, the game offers "closed weapon" modes that only let classes field select weapon categories to reinforce roles, while "open weapon" modes give everyone access to the game's full arsenal. But for the most part, it's a return to the arcade-y modern military shooter days that the community remembers more fondly than DICE's more recent experiments.
The result, at least from the few hours of Battlefield 6 multiplayer I played, is a polished shooter with a lot of focus on making skirmishes exciting at any scale. Long-range sniper duels and tank battles felt as intense as close-quarters gunfights, all of which could be happening mere feet from each other on the same map.
There are enough modes, guns, tools and play styles to give players whatever experience they crave in a military shooter. Whether that's tight-knit squad fights in alleyways or large-scale clashes between platoons of dozens of players each, you can pick weapons and a kit to customize to your liking -- running and gunning, fixing up armored vehicles, sniping from afar or reviving teammates -- all strategies felt viable. I felt that I contributed to the victory even if I wasn't leading my team in kills, and had the freedom to play out my little medic or tank commander fantasies.
The preview didn't include any single-player content, leaving us in the dark about what's in store for the game's globe-trotting story campaign, which pitches a beleaguered NATO against the mysterious private military corporation, Pax Armata. But to be frank, single-player content is a nice extra -- it's far more important to evaluate the game's bones, which feel solid, if teetering on the edge of flooding players with complexity.
Maps, classes, kits and guns: Grappling with too many options
My Battlefield 6 preview rotated me between four modes, showing off different battle scales, goals and objectives. Conquest is the classic Battlefield experience, big maps split into multiple objective zones to capture, which fragments the fight into small areas with their own quirks and features. Breakthrough is still a big map, but you only play in thin sections of it at a time -- if the attacking team wins control of objective zones, the defenders retreat to the next slice of the map. Domination ditches vehicles for small-scale squad battles that rack up points with captured zones, king-of-the-hill style. Squad Deathmatch is a simple four-squad competition for who reaches the kill limit first.
Unsurprisingly, the maps are split according to size. The larger maps in the preview included Liberation Peak, which felt like the platonic ideal of a Battlefield map -- a mountainous desert with small bases to hold, rocky outcrops to perch behind while sniping, buildings to swarm and wide roads to race down with tanks and light armored vehicles, all while helicopters and jets race overhead. The other big map, Siege of Cairo, is an urban battlefield with plenty of wide shooting lanes for vehicles and tight buildings for alleyway combat.
The big maps captured my attention, but the smaller ones still held a lot of charm, particularly Iberian Offensive, where I held strong on several rounds of Domination, leaping between and on top of buildings to hold zones. Empire State was also in our rotation, a close-quarters slugfest with too many corners, I found myself getting smoked from behind frequently. While we didn't play them, our guide noted five other maps coming to the game at launch, including Operation Firestorm which is returning from Battlefield 3.
Through all this, players deploy with one of four classes: Assault, Engineer, Support and Recon. Each has its unique perks: Assault heals faster and has explosive gadgets like grenade launchers, Engineer has a vehicle-fixing blowtorch and auto-repairs vehicles they ride in, Support has a healing resupply pack they can throw to the ground and uses defibrillators to quickly revive teammates and Recon can call UAVs and use motion sensor gadgets. Each class has an active skill that I honestly forgot about in the heat of battle -- including Assault's ability to see outlines of enemies through walls if they're making enough noise.
EA DICE
You can sit with the pre-made weapon-and-gear loadouts and dive into the game or customize them. I found it satisfying to get just the right attachments on my guns, but that's as far as I took it. Gadgets, explosives, grenades and sidearms stack up so many options that I didn't bother with much beyond my main weapon.
Perhaps I could've gotten a better edge with all those extras, and Andersson described some truly novel gadgets coming in the main game like a sniper decoy that distracts enemies from far away and up close and personal laser devices that act as sniping rangefinders. But the quick time-to-kill made it feel like any moment I wasn't ready to snap my assault rifle to someone popping out of a corner would be a duel I'd lose.
I did okay -- heck, in a couple matches I was even near the top of the scoreboards -- but I never dominated. At the best moments, I was in tune with my squad, often using the new anyone-can-revive feature to put my teammates back on their feet (Support class does this faster). In the worst moments, I got shot in the back over and over as enemies seemingly came out of nowhere, with no time to shoot back. High highs and low lows abound.
It wasn't that the game felt unfair or that there was a skill cap I wasn't close to reaching (though obviously there were plenty of players even in my preview who had no trouble taking me down). It felt like it walked a tightrope balancing lethality, movement and slight tactical choices. That refinement feels like the result of all the aforementioned player feedback DICE is getting with Battlefield Labs -- including how to blow buildings up just right.
EA DICE
Nailing the right flavor of Battlefield-style map destruction
A staple of Battlefield games is environmental destruction -- how much of the map crumbles and explodes as it's peppered with tank shells and grenades over the course of a match. As I played these maps over and over again, I saw how certain high-traffic zones would get obliterated by the time the match ended, with buildings reduced to rubble and areas around objectives flattened. It's technically impressive, and if I believe what the developers say, potentially useful.
This is Battlefield's so-called Tactical Destruction, it's the idea that you can blow holes in walls or take out sniper nests to change the terrain. Through testing, the game's developers honed the destruction to reliably operate the same way every time -- something players can depend on to give them options in firefights.
"We know that people love when things blow up, but there needs to be substance to all of these things that you're doing, right? So that's why it's so central to me that it's deterministic -- that you can rely on 'if I nail this rocket right here in this house, then exactly this is going to happen'," Andersson said.
While DICE included visual language to communicate conditions to the players -- like cracks in the walls that are ready to shatter on the next explosion -- they don't expect folks to take advantage of Tactical Destruction at first. That comes from map knowledge gained over time, and players could eventually start seeing the logic in paving the way toward objectives with explosives. Then they can combine this with other items like the assault ladder gadget, which Andersson notes could give squads second-floor access to surprise enemies.
In my preview, I didn't even get close to destroying the environment to my advantage. But the explosions were impressively immersive. While hunkered down in a building in the Siege of Cairo map, tank shells and rockets turned our shelter into rubble as the roof caved in around us, flooding the room in dust and blinding us as we rushed out. Occasionally overwhelming and often distracting me from firefights, the game's destruction tech put me more firmly in my soldier's boots, escalating the chaos and locking me into skirmishes that ratcheted up in tension, with each boom echoing in my headphones.
In this, I felt DICE looking to recapture the controlled chaos that makes Battlefield games unique among the military shooters of today -- namely Call of Duty. But returning to the successful Battlefield titles from a decade ago means, hopefully, giving players a chance to recreate moments they loved. In that, it's looking like Battlefield 6 could be what those nostalgic gamers are waiting for.
"If you start with Battlefield 3 and 4 that we know is loved and [say] let's execute on those staples and pillars, I feel like this is almost like a cheat code -- this is what Battlefield should be," Andersson said.
Battlefield 6 launches on Oct. 10 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Free open beta weekends will run on Aug. 9-10 and Aug. 14-16.