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Battlefield 6 review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin October 9, 2025

Battlefield 6 review
The new Battlefield is a tale as old as the FPS genre: a vapid military fable salvaged from total irrelevance by a robust albeit unsurprising multiplayer.

Developer: Battlefield Studios
Publisher: EA
Release: October 10th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store
Price: $70/£60/€70
Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

All hail the Battlefools! They fan out efficiently from spawn and are instantly massacred in a hail of rifle fire and grenades. Arguments erupt in the chat. Who’s watching the flanks? Were you watching the flanks? I’m not supposed to watch flanks, I’m an engineer – my two defining passions are blowing tanks up and fixing them, a clash of loyalties that routinely gets me run over. You’re a recon – shouldn’t you be reconnoitring? Blame gives way to frantic improvisation as the attackers turn defender. People switch classes, get cut down, switch classes again. Support players plant lines of barricades that somehow avail them nothing against the snipers. Squad leaders ping the objective icon furiously, like babies banging the arms of their prams. One squad tries crawling behind a line of parked cars and is promptly squished by hammer-wielding exterminators.

Then, it happens. A single friendly player gets the better of somebody holding a corner. That player hoots and hollers into the enemy base and scurries under a table like a naughty kitten. Somebody else spawns on the naughty kitten, skips down the hall and wastes three more with a shotgun. Viewed from the spawning lobby, the two infiltrators are flecks of blue hope upon the sullen red box of the objective. The swarm reacts. Bodies move or teleport into the breach. The other side grudgingly gives way.

This is Battlefield 6, a big team combined-arms shooter in which visibility is king and death comes from all angles, elevations and distances. A woozy cacophony in which you live for those moments when the gods of Brownian motion smile, and you somehow become part of a greater whole that has focus and direction. A return to the smoky azure-tangerine stylings and class setups of Battlefields 3 to 4, after the abortive hero-shootiness of Battlefield 2042. A comfortably furnished, very loud, basically unsurprising multiplayer sequel, encumbered by what could be the worst singleplayer FPS campaign I’ve ever sat through – an aggressively bland piece of war porn that fails to hurdle even the low bar set by previous Battlefields. We’ll circle back to the campaign. First, we have to take Bravo.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 6’s maps are places of meticulously petrified realism where the fires of history never gutter out. Each is an emblem of forever war with an undead soundtrack of baked-in artillery blasts and a generous, but noticeably selective budget of buildings that can be degraded or destroyed for tactical advantage.

Operation Firestorm – restored from Battlefield 3 – is a great, gleaming oilfield. Picture the workers in overalls and hard hats among the pipes, tapping dials and checking their clipboards. Picture the stooped elders walking between the red-capped houses of Tajikistan’s mountainsides, where you still find patterned carpets thrown over compound walls, and the remains of what could be walnut tree groves. In Gibraltar’s Old Town, you lurk behind ornamental fountains and sun-worn shutters, aiming at the heads among the hanging flower baskets. All these shows of location research come second, however, to the letters marking the map objectives. Glorious letters of tomb-grey or obstinate red, which need to be invaded and painted blue.

In Battlefield’s flagship Conquest mode, each objective is a map within the map that drains the other side’s respawn flags when you control enough of them. The objectives develop their own personalities as each match goes on. Here’s Alpha, the haven that never falls: opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the Brooklyn pier. There’s Bravo, the cosmopolitan heart of the war, switching sides at a reassuring, almost-seasonal cadence – a roomy marketplace of constant yet somehow judicious murder. There’s Charlie, the lost: a sunken abscess of recon diehards and anti-personnel mines. “We don’t go to Charlie anymore,” grizzled commanders ominously explain to the recruits joining mid-round. And then, of course, Delta, that filthy rat. That flip-flopping appeaser, trembling between loyalties with a half-full capture wheel, never quite conquered, never quite out of reach. “Pick a fucking colour, Delta,” both sides roar, as they charge into each other’s bullets.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Sometimes the letters are strewn all over, and we call this Conquest or Domination – the freest of the modes, where an awful player can often make a contribution (and earn some XP) by walking away from the more obvious explosions and locking down an objective everybody’s forgotten about. Sometimes they form a corridor, creating more desperate attrition across a palpable frontline, and we call this Rush or Breakthrough. Escalation is the new kid on the blockbuster: it’s Conquest, but when you capture enough objectives, the lethal twilight zone that surrounds every Battlefield mission area pulls closer. It’s an attempt to blend Battlefield with Fortnite, offering matches that segue from baggy tank and plane skirmishes into shellshocked close quarter mayhem. I think it works well enough, though I think the average round of Conquest offers much the same interplay of scales already, and less rigidly.

And then there are the garden variety FPS modes – deathmatch, team deathmatch, king of the hill. Battlefield 6 does a fair job of them, but they remain Call of Duty’s turf. Certain classes, like the slow-shooting, vehicle-painting recon troops, simply make less sense in these cramped and spiralling, figure-of-eight engagements, however much you tinker with loadouts. In general, it’s always intriguing to follow Battlefield’s attempts to grab some of the “it’s 5.30pm and I fancy a cheeky killstreak” audience, while clinging onto its identity as a game for people who put sustained teamwork ahead of personal gratification. This extends to the limber, but not too agile movement, which (depending on the heft of your equipment) offers just enough leeway to Keanu Reeves your way out of an ambush by means of spasmodic ducking and sliding.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

The same existential struggle to be, and not to be COD is found in the classes and loadouts. Battlefield 2042’s Operator customisation is gone, and the four broad class archetypes from previous Battlefields are back. The key thing to know about the classes is that they are all bastards. The engineer is that bastard firing the MG turret on the tank coming up the road. You score a very palpable hit on the tank with your launcher, and the engineer slinks out like a spider and fixes it with a magic blowtorch, while the tank driver puts an armour-piercing shell through your ear.

The recon is that bastard somewhere above you who won’t let you stand or run in a straight line. You head to the rooftop to even the odds, and the recon spies you climbing the ladder through an inch-wide gap and swats you back down into rubble. You try some mindgames, doubling back behind cover to throw the sniper off, but the fucker appears to be psychic – either that, or you’re being discreetly monitored through a drone or deployable camera. The support is that bastard behind the self-deployed barricade who just resurrected four guys with her electric paddles, and is currently power-washing your position with mounted LMG fire. The assault is that bastard who just came through the window care of a creatively deployed sloping ladder. You shoot her three times but only in the legs, and she pirouettes irritably and murders you where you lie.

If you’re a returning Battlefield pervert, you may sneer at me for this display of my evident skill deficit. Bad news, General Patton – EA want 100 million people to play this, according to reports, which means you have to let the dirty casuals in. You have to make room in your elite tactical snuffbox for the folks with two left hands who react to the fall of a pin by bouncing a frag off the wall they’re hiding behind and galloping out into the sights of a helicopter.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Let me digress into guide writer territory and offer some advice to the greenhorns. My top tip is to unlock the weapon stocks that lessen recoil, as soon as you can. Also, stop trying to shoot people and focus on playing the objective and using your gadgets. If you’re an engineer, chuck down mines at every junction. If you’re support, get used to playing rearguard and laying on your lightning hands. Even if you’re not a support, prioritise reviving people – in Battlefield 6, you can drag KO’d players into cover before stabbing them with your adrenaline pen, and in a shooter where lives are currency, this can be more impactful than taking the point yourself.

It varies by the mode, but all nonlethal actions earn XP and ensure you have toys to pick from when you decide it’s time to give those bunny-hopping streamers a run for their subscriber money. It’s hard to judge off the back of around six hours in EA-organised pre-launch multiplayer sessions, but I think Battlefield 6’s progression and customisation strike a decent balance between the omni-tinkering of COD and the vegetables-before-pudding, know-your-role strictness of the older Battlefields. There are closed playlists that lock classes to certain guns, and open playlists that let you equip weapons to classes they are statistically less capable with. Each class also has a choice of skill paths that let you skew the emphasis slightly – making the support more offensively-inclined, for example, or the recon even harder to see.

The sole saving grace of the campaign – yes, I guess we should finally talk about the campaign – is that it’s an introduction to some of the boomsticks and boondoggles you’ll use in multiplayer. Every individual fight against scripted waves is bookended by crates of replacement weapons, gleaming in the dust of butchered houses like boxes of eggs freshly laid by some kind of Lockheed Martin chocobo. I estimate that at least 30% of my deaths came about while I was in the grip of choice paralysis – urgh, this laser-pointed SMG seems ideal for the tunnels ahead, but that scoped jobbie with the bipod isn’t without its charms. Mind you, it’s also true that I lingered too long over the guns because I had no interest in advancing the story, and no interest in killing the soldiers trying to kill me.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

To announce that a blockbuster military shooter has a terrible story mode is like saying that water is wet. Next you will tell me that it has a jump button! Next you will tell me that EA’s new owners in Saudi Arabia have a complicated relationship with the press! Fair enough, but I think Battlefield 6’s campaign is uniquely bad, and not just because it’s another fan letter to the US military with a couple of canned Thoughtful Moments. It’s bad because the concept is tedious, the characters have no character, the pacing is non-existent, and the writing is unbearable.

All hail the Battlefools! They fan efficiently out of their base in near-future Georgia, right into a hail of bullets and shells, and in a terrible stroke of misfortune, do not die immediately. The perpetrators this time are Pax Armata, a paramilitary group backed by a formless coalition of ex-NATO countries, who exclusively employ people in balaclavas save for one lairy Scottish badnik whose motivation never really evolves beyond being miffed that he was left behind in some other war. We know Pax Armata are the baddies because the 60-second prologue full of mashed-together TV broadcasts tells us they are, and that’s all the groundwork you’re getting, bucko, now please kill 100 Paxmen during the scripted jeep getaway.

This kind of disdain for dramatic build-up characterises Battlefield 6 throughout. Beyond the opening bash with Pax Armata, you’re whisked off to the house of a CIA agent who is being held hostage by some of the main soldier people. The gunfolk have questions about missions the spook sent them on, which supplies a basis for flashbacks that bounce you between operations. Somebody says “You don’t understand, intercepting that shipment of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs overrode all other priorities.” And then somebody bellows “THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAID IN SOUTHEND-ON-SEA,” so off we fuck back to Southend-on-Sea to drone-strike a million ice cream van drivers with terrorist sympathies.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

For clarity, Battlefield 6 doesn’t have a mission set in Southend-on-Sea – I am trying to avoid spoilers. But it wouldn’t be any the worse for it. The changes of scenery have no meaning because the premise and structure are so childish and brittle. They could set the campaign inside an IKEA store and it would be exactly as exotic, and probably more surprising. I’ll take the Gruen effect over this game’s torn-up, restitched playbook of two-note stealth, innumerable last stands and tank missions that feel like kiss-chase with Dodgems. I’ll definitely take it over saving the President yet again.

The story might get away with more if the writing and tone weren’t so smug. The thundering soundtrack has this inexplicable air of gloating bad-assedness that had me reaching out to give somebody, anybody a wedgie. The dialogue is half “INCOMING” and half smirk. “I don’t know what’s more impressive, the view or the firepower,” somebody announces on a clifftop, and alas, there is no option to immediately kick him into the sea, scream gibberish at his corpse and throw an exploding barrel after him for good measure. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Murph – you going to make us look like heroes?” somebody else yells, causing me to shoot him in the face for 30 seconds in the hope of persuading the game to register friendly fire.

The story theoretically deals in war trauma, but none of the cast are as psychologically twisty as they sometimes propose to be. There’s a character called Hemlock who is Battlefield 6’s equivalent for Modern Warfare’s mystery-man Ghost. He’s regarded as “crazy” by squadmates, because he says stuff like “this sure beats training”. At one point, a comrade loses his cool and shoots wildly at a dead sniper. It’s a brief, awkward effort at demonstrating that your otherwise Terminator-esque squad have souls, but then you’re handed some kind of robot firework and ordered to play whack-a-mole with the tanks up the road.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 6 sporadically queries its own taste for violence, but here as in many Call of Duties, these bursts of apologia have no real impact on the business of popping skulls like bubblewrap, and just feel like insulting disclaimers. One of the Gibraltar missions takes you through an underground WW2 museum, and gosh, the Strangelovely irony of blasting your way through a memorial to the last time the island was at war. “Seems like it never ends for these people,” somebody mourns later, as you rock the local villages with quadrotor bombs and C4.

Pissed-Off Scottish Badman dutifully ladles out a few moments of who’s-the-real-villain-here convolution towards the finish – a critique of the game’s oorah patriotism that is basically akin to dusting a tank with pistol fire. “Don’t you want to die for something real?” he asks, declining to share specifics. The greater failure is the overall characterisation of Pax Armata, who are literally described in-game as an omnipurposeful grab-bag of all the mercenary nutters and zealots who hate the United States and the NATO world order – a framing that usefully saves the developers from dealing with specific malcontents, and exploring their grievances.

You can set your watch to the script’s cliches. “Storm’s passed,” somebody says, and I had to fight the urge to unplug the PC before somebody else could say, “No, it’s just a break. The worse is still to come”. Helpfully, this turned out to be the end of the campaign. I’m partial to cliffhangers, but this one does feel rather abrupt. Battlefield 6’s singleplayer has reportedly been a troubled project, and it doesn’t seem impossible that what we’re playing is the scorched stump of a more expansive story. Assuming the numbers add up for now-private EA, Battlefield 6 is definitely getting a narrative sequel, or at least some story DLC.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 6’s campaign makes the most sense when you uninstall it, boot up the online again, and realise that the ensemble flashback story is essentially a very tedious argument over which multiplayer map to load up next. Multiplayer has always been the point here; the singleplayer is just a means of getting certain people through the door. That door swings both ways, however. Battlefield 2042 got it in the neck from some players for not having a singleplayer mode, but Battlefield 6 is evidence that often a singleplayer story is the worst thing you can inflict on a game that just wants to be a massive round of paintball.

The game’s online sandbox spaces have an eerie vitality in their mangling together of realism and colour-coded objective design. I am perennially fascinated by how the swarm thinks in Battlefield online, how that little pebble tumbling through a gap in the fortifications becomes an avalanche. Add a narrative component, however, and you create expectations of meaningful context, consequence and even introspection that the creators of military shooters are seldom able to fulfil.

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October 9, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Battlefield 6 Review – Battle Ready

by admin October 9, 2025

Following Battlefield 2042’s troubled launch, EA rallied the troops (DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect, and Motive), establishing a unified front with Battlefield Studios. Fortunately, the veteran task force hit the ground running with Battlefield 6, reintroducing the franchise’s tried-and-true traditions, such as an operator-less role system, a manageable 64-player limit, and an original single-player campaign. Most maps are dazzling sandboxes just waiting to be leveled, firearms feel impactful with detectable recoil patterns, and a bevy of demanding progression challenges keep the grind loop fresh. But like in most hard-fought victories, not every wartime decision yields a winning result.

Battlefield 6 pushes the limits of cinematic sensory overload to great effect, even in multiplayer. After narrowly escaping detection by an enemy squad, I sneak into a sniper’s lookout and pile-drive him into the ground with my sledgehammer. Rifle caked with blood, I peer out of a nearby window only to be met by the business end of a tank cannon. I dive, though it’s too late; the rocket pierces the building’s thin walls, and the floor caves beneath me. Suddenly, a brave medic drags my body out of the rubble to patch me up, bullets whizzing past us and cracking against the pavement. Adrenaline-pumping war stories like mine are commonplace, making heady firefights or daring escapes all the more personalized and unforgettable.

As a globetrotting soldier, you’ll battle in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, under Cairo’s scorching sun, and amid the ever-burning oil fields of Iran, among other arenas. For the most part, these locales are awe-inspiring, brimming with destructible, multi-floored structures, ranging from urban museums to remote construction yards. As a New Yorker, I was floored by the East River views I got from an attack chopper as Dumbo’s ritzy brownstones crumbled into dust below. Contrarily, Liberation Peak, with its mountain-side villages and military installations, and Iberian Offensive, a war-torn district in Gibraltar, failed to impress, featuring dreary, grayscale environments and unremarkable points of interest, like parking lots and rocky outcroppings.

But you’ll be hard-pressed to find a moment of solace to even take in such sights, because the action is so satisfyingly frenetic. Battlefield Studios’ newly implemented “Kinesthetic Combat System” smartly augments mobility and gunplay. When I missed my chance to spawn in a tank at match start, I grappled onto its backplate, avoiding the early-game marathon that previous entries in the series are notorious for. Wanting to drop on an unsuspecting enemy from an elevated vantage point, I recklessly leapt from the ledge and, with a perfectly-timed button press, rolled as I hit the ground, limiting fall damage and closing the distance for a melee takedown in seconds. Moreover, peeking/leaning as well as mounting weapons on practically any surface empowered me to make smarter rotations and prioritize optimal sightlines. I enjoyed contending with the mental gymnastics of mindlessly rounding corners or rushing chokepoints, giving every tactical decision the appropriate weight.

Classic modes like Conquest, Rush, and Breakthrough make a welcome return, offering the same high-octane, all-out warfare experiences that endeared fans to the Battlefield IP many moons ago. These awesome playlists remain fundamentally unchanged and for good reason: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, Battlefield 6 introduces a new way to play with Escalation, a territorial tug-of-war where two teams clash to control a smattering of points on a map until the number of contestable objectives dwindles. Escalation deftly redefines Conquest’s ruleset by funneling players toward one last, epic battle. Whenever a match neared its end, the electric medley of desperation and excitement was palpable.

Team Deathmatch, Domination, and King of the Hill offer small-scale options for troopers who prefer intimate engagements, especially with shotguns and SMGs. Saints Quarter, the infantry-only map made for these modes, might be the next great close-quarters arena akin to Battlefield 3’s spectacular Noshahr Canals, but spotty spawn points still give rise to cheap instadeaths. At least Portal’s return is slated to assuage my concerns with these less-enticing peripherals through detailed scripting tools that players can use to upload anything from custom horde modes to zany obstacle courses, which still astonishingly award experience. Like the upcoming battle royale mode, I didn’t get any hands-on time with the latest iteration of Portal, so it’s tough to gauge how successful it’ll be this go around, but giving the community game-editing capabilities is always an ambitious creative choice.

Teamplay remains essential to progression, and this is best exemplified by Battlefield 6’s overhauled class system. Each role – Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon – has its own signature trait (passive), weapon, gadget (tactical ability), and active ability (ultimate) that level the playing field. I appreciated having improved aim-down-sights speed with LMGs while playing Support, but Assault’s access to deployable ladders added newfound levels of verticality that led to more eliminations and, consequently, significant lead changes. Training Paths (specializations) also make role selection nuanced. The Engineer’s Anti-Armor path increased my rocket count by two, allowing me to handily turn armored motorcades into scrap metal, and when I opted for the stone-cold assassin approach with Recon, I benefited from the Sniper path, which incentivized landing headshots, as victims couldn’t be revived. I loved experimenting with each class, tinkering with gadgets and paths to help catalyze much-needed momentum swings.

Daily, weekly, and career challenges drip-feed unlockable rewards, including numerous attachments, dog tags, badges, and more. Even though Battlefield 6 touts lengthy progression systems, a swath of XP boosts and accessible tasks, like simply netting assists or traveling long distances, nicely balances legendary assignments like nailing a clip-worthy “rendezook” (destroying an enemy aircraft with an unguided rocket while exiting and reentering your own). A fresh assortment of vertical grips, charms, and playercards should make up for the battle scars, but don’t expect to look chic when running and gunning. Weapon, vehicle, and character cosmetics are shockingly uninspired, with several amounting to basic camo designs. At first glance, a whopping 30 woodland skins might seem enticing until you realize the minute differences between them. I know war is hell, but after many hours of exemplary service, I ought to look good while waging it.

Battlefield 6’s weakest link is its narrative. Alongside a hardened crew of Marine raiders supervised by a mysterious CIA liaison, I begrudgingly took the fight to private military company Pax Armata after it violently ousted NATO. In one mission, I hopped out of a transport plane, a thick bed of clouds giving way to a piercingly beautiful afternoon sun. However, the dazzling spectacle was short-lived, as I tried and failed to recall why I was even there in the first place. Major themes, namely, survivor’s guilt, embracing leadership, and expendability, are buried beneath weak dialogue, wooden cutscenes that often stripped control from me during the most exciting action sequences, and a frustratingly bland villain. Beyond completing challenges, there aren’t enough compelling reasons to endure the story. Having a curated single-player offering should add more breadth to the overall package, but this particular element is only puddle deep.

There’s nothing quite like trudging through slick mudfields, down metropolitan streets, and past eroded craters as shells lay waste to abandoned farmsteads, scorching the last vestiges of greenery. The latest entry in the Battlefield series is an amalgamation of immersive moments like this. I only wish some of the postwar rewards matched my many acts of valor and that the campaign reflected the grittiness of its multiplayer counterpart. Despite some military blunders, Battlefield 6 has successfully turned the tide.

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October 9, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Battlefield 6 review – the best entry in ages, when it’s actually being Battlefield

by admin October 9, 2025

Battlefield 6 delivers a thrilling multiplayer reset and a decent, if derivative single-player. But it still displays nagging doubts about what makes Battlefield special.

After the muddled innovations and watered-down warfare of Battlefield 2042, Battlefield 6 was pitched as a return to what made the series great. And it is that…mostly. Gone are the ponderous 128-player maps that stretched 2042’s action too thin, and the pseudo-futuristic setting with gimmicky hero shooter-like abilities. Back are the rollicking 64-player slugfests, the more grounded quartet of soldier classes, the lowercase modern warfare setting, and even the single-player campaign. All this infused with a fetching burned-orange aesthetic and a renewed emphasis on crumbling, billowing destruction.

Battlefield 6 review

When it’s firing on all cylinders, jets screaming overhead, rockets whizzing past your ear, building facades sloughing off their foundations before your eyes, Battlefield 6 is tremendous – undoubtedly the closest EA has got to the series’ heyday in a decade. Yet hidden beneath this confident surface is a series still wrestling with its identity. There’s a nervous desire to please everyone in Battlefield 6, visible in its oddly heavy catering to small and midsize maps and modes, the weird compromise between fixed classes and free weapon selection, and the peculiar sight of camo-clad soldiers who can knee-slide into battle and perform a 180 spin at the touch of a button.

In all of this and more, you can feel Call of Duty breathing down Battlefield’s neck. Luckily, this doesn’t detract from the experience too much, and even improves it in some areas. But it’s frustrating nonetheless, because Battlefield 6 is unquestionably at its best when it embraces its identity wholesale.

Battlefield 6’s marginally speculative setting pitches NATO forces against Pax Armata, a politically inoffensive pan-national private military company named like a deluxe wristwatch. Its globetrotting conflict transports players to Cairo, New York, Gibraltar, and Tajikistan, along with a slightly incongruous return to Iran in fan-favourite map Operation Firestorm.

Here’s a Battlefield 6 launch trailer.Watch on YouTube

Each location provides multiple themed maps for Battlefield’s centrepiece modes like Conquest, Rush and the newly introduced Escalation – which is basically Conquest with the added ability for teams to claim control points for good. While all wonderful to look at, only three of them use the full spectrum of Battlefield’s arsenal, giving you large expanses of terrain and a sky crisscrossed by both jets and helicopters.

From this trio, I’m primarily partial to Tajikistan’s Mirak Valley, which starts one team in an area that looks like No Man’s Land in World War 1, all scorched earth and blackened trees riven by muddy trenches. Its central area comprises two office buildings in construction, with a giant crane situated between them that players can bring crashing down. While not as map-changing as Battlefield 4’s “Levolution” scenes, it’s quite the sight nonetheless.

Elsewhere, the snowy valley of Liberation Peak isn’t quite as distinctive as Mirak Valley, but it’s still a rock-solid Conquest theatre, its craggy undulations riddled with military bases and deliciously destructible villages. Operation Firestorm, meanwhile, is Operation Firestorm, as fundamentally brilliant as it ever was.

Image 1: The campaign uses the desctruction tech to reasonable effect, though it still falls short of Bad Company 2. 2: You’ve got something stuck in your vest. Don’t worry, I’ll pull it out. 3: As well as looking consistently great, BF6 is also superbly optimised, with nary so much as a hitched frame even on my ancient, decrepit rig. 4: Vehicle wreckage quickly becomes a natural part of BF6’s landscape. | Image credit: Eurogamer / EA

All three maps eagerly facilitate Battlefield’s core appeal – that dynamic, open ended warfare that quite literally drops moments of emergent storytelling on you, usually with concussive force. The destruction tech elevates this. The way buildings collapse into rubble is mightily impressive, and blowing out walls to deny objective cover in Rush is every bit as satisfying as it was back in the early 2010s. Practically, it isn’t that much of a leap from Battlefield 3, however. More extensive and granular in its detail, perhaps, but otherwise it doesn’t feel wildly different.

Arguably more important is how BF6 rewards finding your place within the rumbling conflict. Mainly, I was drawn to the engineer role this time around, supporting vehicle assault on control points, taking out pockets of enemy cover with rocket-propelled grenades, sneaking up on enemy tanks and dropping mines beneath their armoured caboose, and sometimes rolling out in armour myself to give enemy positions a good drubbing. That said, medics feel slightly less essential than before, since any player can revive a downed comrade, and even drag them out of the line of fire to help them to their feet in cover.

In any case, those big haymaker maps deliver the goods, and the mid-sized maps mostly do too. These lack the jets and occasionally the helicopters, and are more prone to funnelling you through city streets rather than rolling countryside. New Sobek City is the most open of the mid-table with you battling around and through a cluster of apartment blocks as the Great Pyramids loom in the distance. But I nonetheless have time for the urban warfare of Siege of Cairo and, in particular, Manhattan Bridge, where you battle through New York’s gentrified brick high-rises beneath the vast iron bulk of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Image 1: It goes without saying at this point, but the audio design remains unparalleled. When stuff explodes in BF6, you’ll feel it in your liver. 2: Why play deathmatch when you can play a mode that rains helicopters? 3: Sometimes you’ve just gotta stop fighting and watch what’s going on above you. 4: You can skip this screenshot if you want. | Image credit: Eurogamer / EA

At the smaller scale, however, Battlefield 6 starts to feel defanged. Its infantry-only selection brings two bland flavours of deathmatch, rendering much of the game’s toolset redundant, alongside Domination, which is just Conquest without the vehicles, and King of the Hill, where teams compete to hold a single objective that rotates across the map every few minutes. I quite like King of the Hill. The constant switching between establishing and rooting out defensive positions suits Battlefield’s mode of play well. But I’d happily forgo it and all other infantry modes if it meant having more full-fat Battlefield to guzzle.

There are also a few other elements to BF6 that I’m not wholly sold on, such as that new large-scale mode, Escalation. The idea is that, as control points are wiped off the map by teams claiming them, the action is funnelled into fewer areas, thereby intensifying it. But in my experience, the action never escalated all that much, and these matches ultimately panned out as shorter, less satisfying rounds of Conquest.

I also question EA’s decision to let classes select whatever weapon they choose, rather than mandating they use a specific weapon-type. EA has tried to balance this by making each class proficient in certain guns—Engineers with SMGs, Recon players with sniper rifles, etc. But I’m not convinced this will stop BF6 from becoming Assault-rifle City on launch. Even in the review period—during which maps were heavily filled out by bots—I noticed a distinct lack of LMGs among player medics.

Image 1: Movement and aiming is incredibly slick, though sometimes it’s a little too acrobatic. 2: I think that’s a write off. 3: Don’t worry Mr President, I’ll be your human…Shield. I’ll see myself out. | Image credit: Eurogamer / EA

Then again, the open-weapon mechanic is less annoying than watching players knee-slide through BF6’s meticulously crafted warzones like schoolkids in a freshly varnished gym-hall. This forms part of BF6’s new “Kinesthetic Combat System”, which enables far more responsive movement. To be clear, this is a big improvement overall—mantling over objects has never been slicker. But it strays into being too arcade-y at times. EA has already toned the knee-sliding down in the runup to launch, but frankly, they should remove it entirely. Even in a game where everyone carries a parachute, it feels incongruous and obnoxious, like if Tom Hanks whipped out a skateboard and did a nosegrind along a tank trap in Saving Private Ryan.

It’s worth noting that the modes that were testable during review don’t represent the full suite of options. Battlefield Portal, which allows players to create their own game modes and customise maps, wasn’t available to test prior to launch, while the highly anticipated Battle Royale mode won’t be available until later in the year. What BF6 does have, of course, is a single-player campaign, which sees you play as NATO special forces unit Dagger 13 as they search for the shadowy leadership behind Pax Armata.

This represents the first proper single-player offering BF6 has had in a long time, after the scattershot efforts of BF1 and BFV, and the absence of single-player in 2042. I’m in two minds about it. On the one hand, it does a decent job of using the game’s various locales to create interesting missions. Highlights include a dramatic HALO drop onto the rock of Gibraltar, and a gnarly scramble through New York City as you strive to protect the President (played with admirable sincerity by Benito Martinez) from repeated assassination attempts by drone, by car, and then by massive assault on the shore of the east river.

The campaign delivers lavish first-person cutscenes almost as often as it delivers explosions. They’re a bit annoying, to be honest. | Image credit: Eurogamer / EA

Not every mission is a winner. The level prior to this starts with an inferior rerun of Modern Warfare 2019’s ‘Clean House’—another example of Battlefield 6 aping CoD with dubious results. The obligatory open-world mission also falls weirdly flat, and I actually preferred the campaign when it channelled BF6’s dynamic firefights and explosive destruction through more linear set-pieces. Indeed, the final mission is phenomenal, pulling out all the stops in a way that just about legitimises the whole endeavour. It recalls the older style of cinematic military shooter campaigning, which threw you into a vast, sensorially overloading meat-grinder, and I like to see more of this from both Battlefield and Call of Duty in their single-player offerings.

Battlefield 6 accessibility options

Menu narration toggle, subtitles toggle and various settings. Tinitus SFX and relief frequency sliders. Various colour profiles, camera effect settings. Various hold/toggle settings for controls. Controller vibration toggle and intensity slider. Text-to-speech settings for chat. Menu tutorials, in-game tutorials and reset tutorial toggles. Hint toggles for controls/actions.

The way the campaign ties these missions together is less convincing. It starts with a disconcertingly timely inciting event, namely NATO failing to adequately respond to Pax Armata incursion in eastern Europe. But it quickly devolves into another entry in the adventures of Spec-Ops Man and the Tier 1 Troopers, all falling over one another to be the most patriotic, self-sacrificing psychopaths in military history. It also constantly futzes with timelines and flashbacks and playable characters in a way that makes the story difficult to follow, culminating in a limp ending that presumptuously sets things up for a sequel (or possibly some additional campaign DLC—it wouldn’t be the first time EA has pulled that trick).

Ultimately though, Battlefield 6 clearly understands what makes the series special, even if it occasionally seems reluctant to accept it. Unlike 2042, the fun is easy to find from the outset, and what problems it has are much simpler to fix. It could be more ambitious, and I’d like more of those larger sandboxes to play in, but overall Battlefield 6 is a reliable reset – and, crucially, a very strong foundation for EA to build upon.

A copy of Battlefield 6 was provided for this review by EA.

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October 9, 2025 0 comments

Turns out Battlefield 6 won't have PlayStation and Xbox crossplay without PC players after all

Game Reviews

Battlefield 6 physical copies are content complete and require no initial install, according to early copy holders

by admin October 8, 2025

Physical copies of Battlefield 6 are in people’s hands early, ahead of the official launch date of the 10th October. As such, it’s been revealed the physical PS5 version of the game is entirely contained on the disk itself. No download required.

This was stated by Reddit User Grecea_Vlad, who posted their early copy of Battlefield 6 online and answered a few questions from the community. They confirmed that no download was required to boot up Battlefield 6 days ahead of launch.

This makes Battlefield 6 a bit of an irregularity. Other large AAA games have required additional content downloads once a disc is inserted due to the hefty file size of these games. It’s also so these games can load faster, as it’s faster for a console to load files from its internal storage than from the inserted disc.

Here’s the Battlefield 6 multiplayer trailer!Watch on YouTube

What this means for Battlefield 6 players who buy a physical version is you’ll simply be able to slap in your physical copy and get straight to playing, which is a bit of a rarity these days.

Other info was revealed about the game courtesy of Grecea’s early copy, including the online servers being up-and-running already. Apparently there are even a few people already online and playing, which is fun.

EA and Battlefield Studios recently revealed the post-launch content plan for Battlefield 6, which will start coming to the game on the 28th October. New modes, new maps, weapons and more will be added to the game entirely for free.

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October 8, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

EA promises largest ever post-launch content for Battlefield 6, teases naval combat, and maybe even the return of the Little Bird

by admin October 7, 2025

We’re mere days away now from the launch of one of the most-anticipated games of 2025. Battlefield 6 arrives this Friday to (hopefully) satiate excitement from longtime series fans, and anyone who checked out its wildly successful beta.

And to offer prospective buyers some assurance that the game is going to have a long tail, EA has started talking about what players can expect in the months following launch.

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The game’s first season was recently revealed to much praise from fans, and it arrives pretty quickly, too, just 18 days after launch. But there’s a lot more beyond that, which Battlefield Studios has officially started teasing.

In the latest Community Update, the developer mainly touched on data from the beta, as well as the various Battlefield Labs tests held before and since. After over 30 sessions and over 92 million hours of beta gameplay, the developer found that class pick rates were varied and had a healthy spread.

Whichever class was more popular essentially depended on the map, with more close-quarters maps favouring Support, and maps with longer ranges going towards Recon. Interestingly, Open and Closed Weapons playlists had barely any difference on class pick rates between them.

Another thing that the two playlists didn’t affect is kills per hour, though they saw a small variance in match length, with Closed Weapons playlists having slightly higher match durations.

Image credit: Battlefield Studios, EA.

Closed Weapons playlists also saw a 3% higher revive rate in Breakthrough, and 2% for Conquest, meaning players stuck to their roles regardless of the weapons they were using. In terms of time spent in combat, both playlists had about the same percentage.

Perhaps the most unsurprising reveal from the blog post, however, is that most players picked the weapons they wanted in Open Weapon playlists, rather than sticking with their class’ Signature Weapons and benefiting from the bonus that comes with that. Except for Recon players, who favoured sniper rifles regardless of playlist.

That said, the developer revealed that there was no dominant weapon archetype, which is a little surprising considering the versatility of some over others. Indeed, that is one thing that will undoubtedly change as the game evolves at launch and beyond.

It also sounds like players didn’t see the value of Open vs Closed Weapons playlists, as “the vast majority of players” stuck with the former after trying the latter. This is misleading, as Closed playlists were buried deeper in the menus and you had to know they a) existed, and b) where to find them.

Regardless, both playlist options will be in the launch build, and Closed Weapons will itself remain a modifier in Portal for custom experiences.

Watch on YouTube

Looking to the future, the developer said that Battlefield 6’s seasons “will have more content than ever before in a Battlefield game,” which is quite the claim. More details will apparently be revealed soon.

Finally, the post teased the return of naval warfare, as well as the Little Bird helicopter – two highly-requested additions that are strangely missing from the launch package. Platoons, essentially Battlefield’s clans feature, was also teased.

You can check out the full blog post at the link at the top for a recap of what the game’s day one patch is going to change. The Battlefield 6 pre-load is now available across all platforms, with the game to go live on October 10 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

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October 7, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

You can’t type “Arc Raiders” into Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 beta’s in-game chat, but you are allowed to talk about Battlefield 6

by admin October 6, 2025

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 players hopping into the beta right now are taking in all the sights of Activision’s upcoming AAA FPS, though one thing they won’t be able to see is the name of another massive release coming out this year. That’s because the words: “Arc Raiders” are censored in the game’s chat function.

Censoring words in-game isn’t anything new, and is usually used to block out profanity, toxic terminology, and other potentially offensive words from multiplayer lobbies. Blocking out game names is a strange one though, especially given the fact that Black Ops 7’s biggest competitor this year Battlefield 6 is not censored. It’s worth noting the words “Arc” and “Raiders” on their own don’t get censored, it’s only when you put them both together where censoring occurs.

Here’s Arc Raiders censored, and strangely enough Battlefield 6 uncensored. | Image credit: Eurogamer

A clip of this censorship in-action has been circulating online, and Eurogamer confirmed that the term Arc Raiders is starred out in the Black Ops 7 beta. Funnily enough, Arc Raiders players found the term “Arc Raiders” also got automatically censored from the EA App chat feature, while other game names like Call of Duty did not. This was quickly patched out once publicised.

Check out the pre-order trailer for Arc Raiders here.Watch on YouTube

Aside from this small, peculiar quirk, the Call of Duty beta seems to be going down rather well. Over the weekend new tweaks and game modes were added to the game to the joy of its community, and while there were initial reports of cheaters running rampant, Activision has claimed the vast majority of them have been dealt with.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is set to release on the 14th November, so this early taste of the game is meant to test features out and tide the ravenous FPS community over until next month. Arc Raiders, on the other hand, is set to release on the 30th October, and has an open beta on the weekend starting the 17th October. It’s brilliant fun and well worth trying out, at least if the first beta was any indication of quality.

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October 6, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Battlefield Studios on bringing squad play to the Battlefield 6 campaign, fulfilling class fantasies with missions, and whether we can expect a Warzone-like ongoing narrative

by admin October 3, 2025

I have not played the entirety of the Battlefield 6 single-player campaign yet, but I played enough to have a solid guess as to what the high-level goals for it were. It wasn’t until I got a chance to speak to some of the people behind it that my suspicions were validated.

It’s also very easy to guess that some of the same people who get excited about playing the campaign mode in yearly Call of Duty releases likely won’t be moved by what Battlefield 6 is offering there, and perhaps that’s fine.

After playing three missions of the Battlefield 6 campaign, I caught up with Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director at DICE, and Fasahat Salim, design director at Criterion. Much like the rest of the game, the single-player campaign is also the result of work by various teams under the Battlefield Studios banner – and DICE and Criterion are certainly among them.

Our chat mainly focused on the narrative elements of the game, but I was also curious about how such a big team split across different parts of the world and different time zones can come together in this fashion to create a major game like Battlefield 6.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

VG247: The narrative of the campaign is pretty topical. I think it plays on some very real fears that people have in the world right now about NATO and the state of alliances that we once believed were ironclad. Did you intend for this?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: Battlefield has always tried to be, as much as possible, an extremely grounded military experience. When we talk about what Battlefield is, kind of in its core DNA; it is grounded. It is realistic. It is looking at the world through the lens of a soldier on the ground stuck in a much wider conflict, right?

So as we’re trying to determine what the story should be, we were very, very influenced by earlier Battlefield games like Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4. That took in the world as it was at the time that those games were made. And we’ve tried to do that here, too. We’ve done an immense amount of research into the older Battlefield games, topical films, documentaries, talking to current and former service members to try and understand how to create a conflict that is entirely fictional, but feels realistic, feels plausible, feels grounded, and feels really interesting for the player to be experiencing in our modern setting. So, obviously it’s set in a world that feels as realistic as possible, but we’re not trying to copy anything directly that’s going on, whilst also making it feel like it could potentially be realistic.

VG247: You mentioned some inspirations. Can you name some of them?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: Absolutely. Like I said, our biggest inspirations: some of our older titles, but we’ve been watching – there are so many good, really grounded military films and television shows. Now, some of the ones that we had mentioned previously that were big touchstones for us were the film Civil War, the television show Lioness. We’ve looked at the television show Slow Horses quite a lot as well. Basically, anything that hits that place of reality, of looking at the people who are actually stuck in the conflict, not the ones who are driving it. We also watched countless documentaries and footage from conflicts around the world. Again, just to understand what it really feels like to be stuck in that kind of place.

Image credit: EA, Battlefield Studios.

VG247: So can you tell me – this is more of a logistical question – but I am curious who’s leading the campaign development. I know Motive – and please correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like Motive is at the top and then there’s an effort from the other two studios, Criterion and DICE (as the caretakers of the franchise). How does this split work? Is there one team leading and then people are contributing certain elements?

Fasahat Salim, design director, Criterion: It’s actually a far broader thing than each studio takes its own thing. We’re all kind of contributing to pretty much the whole project, and obviously single-player multiplayer are just two components, there’s a lot more as well in this whole package. We’ve got people in Criterion, DICE, Motive, Ripple Effect all contributing to all of it in some way shape or form.

For example, I’ve been responsible for campaign missions, but I know I’m working with people who are actually also working on multiplayer, meta and all of these other parts. So it’s such a huge project across the board. Inevitably, having all four studios come together and share resources, knowledge and tech is something that we had to do for something of this scale.

So having everyone’s expertise contributing wherever it’s needed has been super vital for us trying to get this over the line. Of course there’s been a lot of knowledge, learning and knowledge sharing between studios. Obviously, like you said, DICE obviously have the most amount of experience with it, so how can we kind of bring that ethos of what makes Battlefield Battlefield and make sure that all the other studios are ensuring that that’s part of what they’re thinking about when they’re making the content or the stuff that they’re working on.

But yeah, it’s been a shared endeavor. We’ve got people across the board, across time zones working on this thing. We’re all involved in everything pretty much.

VG247: I was surprised by some of the dialogue in some of the missions. Very early on in the New York mission, there’s a conversation between Lopez and Gecko, where he’s grousing about people being upset there’s military action in their backyard. Gecko basically responds that freedom sometimes means disagreeing with the government.

I thought that was a very relevant line. It was more nuanced than I expected in a military shooter, and I just wanted to understand: was this a conscious choice to have your characters make these relevant statements? Are we going to see some of that again in the rest of the campaign?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: So kind of like I was speaking to earlier: Battlefield has always tried to be a really realistic game. When we made the choice to set this contemporary, in order for that to feel really good and feel grounded and hit that fantasy for players, we have to bring some things that feel real to our world. Our characters have to feel like they’re connected to the world that they live in, and they’ve lived through the type of world that we have all been in.

Of course they’re going to have different perspectives, and you should see that, and you should hear that from them. That’s exactly how real military personnel would talk to one another as they’re going into a mission, they comment on it, they’re interested in knowing how everyone else that they’re fighting alongside feels about it, because you need to know that you trust that person next to you with your very life in all of those instances.

So yeah, I think that for players who are coming in, who are very up-to-date on the news and have done anywhere near the amount of research that we’ve done on what’s going on with the world so that we could create a really interesting fictional setting. Of course, they’re going to see things that they might resonate with, some things that they might agree with, some things that they might disagree with, some things that might make them think, some things that they’re going to ignore completely and will just fade into the background.

I think a lot of how you process this story is probably going to be based on how you come into it, but I hope that our players will have fun. Maybe think a little bit and walk away going, ‘I feel like I had the experience of military personnel on the ground in this kind of situation’ if something like this were to happen, but I don’t think it would, but it might.

VG247: I’m based in the UAE, and recently there was – let’s say military action – on a neighboring country; two US allies [involved]. When I got into the game, I wasn’t expecting it to be this prescient. I would imagine that the research that goes into it maybe gave you a little bit of an insight into how a potential course of action might take place.

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: We’re going for grounded. But yeah, most of this story was written multiple years ago. So if they’re extremely close to things happening right now, of course, we’re not directly referencing that. What we’re trying to do is provide something that feels grounded and like a good story.

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VG247: Are you working on a narrative element for multiplayer/BR? Can we expect a narrative element to the multiplayer modes once we’re done with the story of the campaign?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: Yes, yes, absolutely you can. So the multiplayer maps and everything that we’re releasing for the core product of Battlefield 6 is set in one universe, one conflict. The multiplayer maps are in some of the same general locations as the single-player maps. You’ll see the other side of the city or another side of the town, other side of the mountain, for example. Most of them take place either concurrently with the single-player campaign moments, or days to weeks afterwards. Essentially, what we want you to feel here is that fantasy of being that boots-on-the-ground personnel.

Between the campaign and the multiplayer maps, you can see different sides of these fronts, basically. You can feel much of the time – in the campaign – what it’s like to be some of the military personnel who are there early in the conflict, or maybe even the ones kicking things off. And then in multiplayer, it’s more… weeks later, things have continued to evolve or devolve. What’s it like now?

VG247: Are we going to see any input from these characters? Are they even gonna show up, am I gonna be able to play as Gecko, for example, in multiplayer?

So Dagger 1-3 is not currently in the multiplayer experience. However, there are characters in the multiplayer experience who are featured as NPCs and squad members throughout the campaign. So there is a direct connection with some characters between the two.

VG247: So, for the narrative content for multiplayer – obviously some of this is based on what other games have done. CoD: Warzone, for example, will have a cutscene that will set up something, can we expect more from Battlefield? To bring that narrative together? Can we expect something more to go along with the new season launching beyond just – here’s a two-minute cutscene and then that’s it, and we never hear from these people again?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: So again, we’re not gonna be talking about the live season stuff today, but I can tell you in context of what we have in the multiplayer launch. Again, these are kind of different sides of the same biomes. So very similar types of buildings and understanding.

If you really look at the environmental storytelling of what’s gone on with this conflict. Like I mentioned, some of the same characters that you see in the campaign will be playable in multiplayer as well. Even when it comes to things like potential customisation items and such, it all ties back into that same narrative. That this group of people is living through this conflict together.

Image credit: Battlefield Studios, EA.

VG247: In terms of the structure of the campaign, we only played three missions, but the Tajikistan one is different because it was completely open. You could tackle the objectives in any order you want.

The new New York mission is the highlight for me. It pretty much showed the full spectrum of [gameplay]. There were open-ish areas, sections where you can command your squad. There were tight sections in there, there was a chase. So almost like it’s a good vertical slice of what the campaign can offer. I think that mission in particular is gonna be a lot of people’s favourite.

Can you tell me what the sort of split is for the campaign? How much of it is gonna be open-ish environments versus very tight, very scripted missions?

Fasahat Salim, design director, Criterion: It’s actually a good mix. I think Tajikistan is probably the most open mission. So that’s why, just for the sake of variety, I think you got to play that at the end. Generally, across the whole campaign, there’s a good mix of exactly what you just described; that traditional Battlefield single-player campaign that you expect to really feel the big action moments, you know, over the top spectacle.

The thing that kind of is a consistent throughline through all of the campaign – including the three missions that that you’ve played – is trying to give the player that feeling of classes, and what it means to play in different roles within a squad. In each of those [missions], you’re playing as a different class, and that’s entirely intentional.

In [Gibraltar], you’re playing as an Engineer, therefore you’re supporting the vehicle. You’ve got your blowtorch. You’re trying to keep the tank alive. There’s a lot of focus on what it means to be an engineer class. Then obviously in the New York mission, you are very much front and center Assault, right?

You’ve got close combat, you’re going through the houses, you’re shooting guys through walls, they’re shooting back at you. Everything is is very much right at the frontline. So you’ve got your shotgun, you’re doing a lot of damage. There’s grenade launchers, like you said, there’s a whole spectrum of things happening.

And then obviously in [Tajikistan] it is a much bigger mission, but it also lends itself to the Recon class, which is what we’re treating as the fantasy for that mission. So you’re playing with the sniper rifle, and again, you’ve also got a drone as your gadget, so you’ve got an eye in the sky. You can use that to recon ahead.

So all of these are trying to give the player that fantasy of the different classes, and that’s very intentional. Because as you know, Battlefield is about classes. Even when you play multiplayer, it’s about fulfilling that role within a much larger conflict.

For example, you talked about squad orders. Squad orders is a big part of fulfilling that squad-based fantasy. You are a part of this squad. Your squad has specific skillsets that could help you solve the problem at hand, so use them. Depending on who you are playing as, some squad orders won’t be available to you. For example, in [Tajikistan], you’re playing the Recon. There aren’t any Recon squad orders when you open up the wheel. That’s because you are the Recon.

VG247: Do you think some people will prefer to have that sort of solo fantasy instead of the squad fantasy? I wouldn’t mistake this campaign for being part of any other shooter franchise, but I’m also aware that Call of Duty and other games tend to focus on singular individuals instead of just having the full squad. Do you think some people would’ve wanted that from Battlefield 6 and maybe aren’t fans of [the squad] element from BF4 coming back?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: I think that’s exactly what we’re going for. But yeah, we were just trying to make the best Battlefield campaign we possibly could, and Battlefield has always, always been about being one of the little guys. It’s not about being in the SAS, it’s not about being in Delta Force or Seal Team Six.

It’s about being an enlisted soldier, trying to survive a really s**t situation with your mates, right? And to get your objectives done and survive and get out. That’s Battlefield. It’s a cover shooter. There are moments in our campaign where you have a smaller squad available. There are moments where it’s all four of you.

So I think there are opportunities for players – especially some of them who are really skilled, if they wanna lean into that run-and-gun fantasy – there are moments they can do it, but that’s not absolutely core to our Battlefield DNA the way that the squad play is. So that’s not the main fantasy that we’ve tried to provide in the single-player campaign.

Battlefield 6 launches October 10 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Battlefield 6 Pre-Loading On Xbox Is Live Now

by admin October 1, 2025

Battlefield 6 isn’t getting an early-access release, but Xbox players can get a jump ahead by pre-loading the game right now. However, PC and PlayStation 5 owners are going to have to wait a few days longer.

For the base game, MP, and campaign only, the Battlefield 6 file size is under 41GB on Xbox Series X and 39.10 GB on Xbox Series S. However, the game gives players the option as to whether they want to install the HD packs, both of which significantly change the size. The MP HD pack is 25.6GB, while the Multiplayer HD Marker is 23.8GB.

According to the fan-run Battlefield Bulletin account, PlayStation 5 and PC owners will be able to pre-load Battlefield 6 on October 3. The game will launch on all three platforms on October 10, with the global rollout starting at 8 AM PT / 11 AM ET, which is also 4 PM BST.

Looking ahead, EA and DICE have announced that Battlefield 6 Season 1 will begin on October 28, and unfold over three phases. This will be a free update for all players.

EA recently hyped up Battlefield 6 with a live-action trailer that mocks rival franchise Call of Duty’s celebrity operators. However, industry experts still expect Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to outperform Battlefield 6 in terms of sales. But if you’d like to change that, you could always preorder Battlefield 6 now and pass the word on to your friends.

Battlefield 6 will be the first AAA game released EA since the company announced plans to sell itself to Saudi Arabia’s PIF, Affinity Partners, and private equity company Silver Lake for $55 billion.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Battlefield 6’s first season arrives just 18 days after launch and over two weeks before Black Ops 7

by admin October 1, 2025

As a multiplayer game releasing in the year 2025 – and one that’s very much modelled after Call of Duty – there was very little chance Battlefield 6 wasn’t going to adopt the now-standard live service content pipeline.

But sometimes it’s good to get things in writing, which is what EA just did.

We’re about ten days away from the official launch of Battlefield 6, and this week, EA announced what its Battlefield Studios squad will deliver post launch – at least the first batch. The developer detailed Season 1, which will kick off October 28 – only 18 days post launch.

The season’s content rollout has somewhat of an unusual structure, but it’s one that looks to guarantee something new every month. Season 1 is split across three stages, each adding new content to the game.

Rogue Ops is the first one, arriving with the season’s kick-off on October 28. This phase adds a new large-scale map called Blackwell Fields, which EA says will support land, and air vehicles. The map is set in/around an airbase in the California badlands.

We’re also getting Strikepoint, a new 4v4 mode where each player gets a single life. Rogue Ops will expand the game’s content further with three weapons – the SOR-300 carbine, Mini Fix sniper rifle, and GGH-22 sidearm – as well as a new APC.

Another unusual thing about Battlefield 6’s seasons is the fact that they’re going to add new attachments for use with its weapons. In the first phase of Season 1, we’re getting the Rail Cover, and the Low Powered Variable Optic (LPVO).

Image credit: Battlefield Studios, EA.

California Resistance takes over on November 18 with another new map, Eastwood. This is another large map, though it only supports land vehicles, and helicopters. Eastwood is another California-set map located around a suburb and a golf course.

The new mode in this phase is Sabotage, an 8v8 affair where teams race to destroy as many sites as they can before time runs out. Teams alternate between attacking and defending each round.

California Resistance introduces the Battle Pickups feature to Battlefield 6, which are superpowered weapons anyone can pick up and use. They’re often scattered around the maps in fixed locations, but come with limited ammo.

Speaking of weapons, you can look forward to another two new arrivals: the DB-12 shotgun, and the M327 Trait revolver sidearm. The attachment pool grows with the Troy Angled grip, too.

Image credit: Battlefield Studios, EA.

The last stage of Season 1 arrives December 9 with Winter Offensive, which has the least amount of content compared to the other two. Rather than a new map, the game’s Empire State launch map is getting covered in ice for a limited time as part of the Ice Lock event.

The developer says the event will introduce a new mechanic called Freeze. It doesn’t explain how it’s going to work, but it does confirm that it’s a gameplay modifier, so presumably it will be available in Portal. Speaking of which, all the new content being added will also be available for use in Portal experiences.

The only weapon getting added with that last phase is the Ice Climbing Axe, which joins the game’s melee weapons roster.

More details about Season 1 will arrive closer to launch, but it’s safe to say this is a nice salvo of content to kick-start the game’s live service journey. Battlefield 6 is out October 10 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Battlefield 6’s Roadmap Is Packed With New Maps And More

by admin October 1, 2025

EA has released a content roadmap for Battlefield 6 that outlines all the new goodies and free DLC players can expect during the online shooter’s first season.

Battlefield 6, EA’s next installment in the popular military sim series, is nearly here. The FPS arrives on October 10 on console and PC. But in 2025, games like Battlefield can’t just launch and be done. No, they need roadmaps! Promises of more content coming down the pipeline. And that’s just what’s been revealed, with BF6‘s season one roadmap confirming two new maps are arriving in BF6 before the end of the year, as well as new modes, guns, and more.

As seen in the new roadmap shared on September 29, season one of Battlefield 6 doesn’t start at launch. Instead, it begins on October 28, a few weeks later. The first season is being split into “phases” that will bring in new content every month for the rest of 2025.

Phase One of BF6‘s first season

The first Phase is Rogue Ops, and it adds a brand new map: Blackwell Fields. This is a big map set in the California badlands, and it will support all modes as well as land and air vehicles. The first phase also adds Strikepoint, a new 4v4 mode all about “intense, small team tactical” combat. Squads fight over an objective across multiple rounds, but only have one life each round. Sounds tense. Not sure it’s something I’ll play, but different strokes, etc.

Also being added in the first phase are an APC vehicle, a compact carbine rifle, a new sidearm, and some extra attachments for weapons.

Phase Two of BF6‘s first season

Phase two of BF6‘s first season kicks off on November 18 and adds a new map, Eastwood, which seems to be a bit smaller than Blackwell Fields. This new battlefield is also set in the United States and is located in a “sleepy, affluent suburb” next to a golf course. All modes supported, but it seems no jets will be available on this one, just helis. A new mode called Sabotage is being added in this phase, too. The new mode is another smaller one focused on 8v8 combat as teams try to destroy as many objectives as possible before time runs out. One team defends, the other attacks. Once again, not sure if this is what I want from Battlefield, but cool for folks who like it.

Also being added in phase two: Battle Pickups. This is a returning feature from some past Battlefield games. Players will be able to find powerful and advanced weapons that can be picked up and used until they run out of ammo or you die and drop them. I’m excited to see how this might change up some maps. A new double-barreled pump shotgun, revolver, and attachment is also being added during this phase.

Phase three of BF6‘s first season

Finally, on December 9, phase three of the season arrives. EA says this is the last phase of the season. This phase doesn’t add a new map, but instead changes up an existing map. BF6‘s Empire State map, set in NYC, will temporarily be covered in snow during this phase of the season. According to the roadmap, this won’t simply be a fun cosmetic change, but will actually affect gameplay. There will be a new “Freeze” mechanic introduced on the snow-covered map that EA describes as a “gameplay modifier.” No other details yet.

Meanwhile, the third and final phase will add an ice-climbing axe as a new melee weapon option, and a new limited-time “Ice Lock” even that will happen exclusively on the snowy Empire State map.

Phew! That’s a lot of content and all of it is, assuming nothing gets delayed, arriving in the game’s first few months. I’ll be curious to see how much content future seasons include. Can we expect two maps and multiple guns in every season? That seems like a lot. But if the devs can pull it off, Battlefield 6 might end up being one of the best entries in the series. And that might help distract people from the news that EA is being bought up by Saudi Arabia’s prince and Jared Kushner’s investment firm. Battlefield 6 is out on October 10 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments