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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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