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Battlefield 6 hands-on: Four hours of play brings back the old days
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George Yang
“I see this game as a spiritual successor of Battlefield 3 and 4, right?” explained Ripple Effect Studios Creative Director Thomas Andersson in a Q&A session. “There’s over a decade between them and us, but there’s the same obsession about getting the pillars right, so tactical destruction is one of them, and we’re putting in a lot of effort in the classes.” For Battlefield 6, the developers are aiming to recapture the magic of Battlefield’s glory days by refining core multiplayer features.
Class is in session
Battlefield 6 will launch with the series' standard four classes: Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon. Each offers a unique mix of playstyles. Assault and Engineer focus on close-quarters and vehicle combat, respectively, while the Support and Recon provide helpful backup. The former can help resupply and revive teammates faster, while the latter can mark enemy positions.
“We want you to feel the classes. We want you guys to understand what your role is on the battlefield,” Andersson said. In particular, the Medic class felt the most impactful because it can revive teammates at a much faster rate than the other ones. In Battlefield 6, anyone can revive teammates, and you can even pull them to safety while you do so. In one instance, I was being bombarded with bullets and explosions while my teammate was downed. I was able to pull them behind cover away from harm and get them back up onto their feet.
The actual movement of dragging your teammate’s body is so incredibly satisfying, and I could feel the friction grinding against the ground through the DualSense controller. Every time I’d attempt to revive a teammate, it felt like a scene straight out of a movie. It’s seriously impressive, and it encouraged me to play less selfishly.
Another big change coming with Battlefield 6 is the open weapons versus closed weapons playlists. Traditionally, certain kinds of weapons were locked behind specific classes, such as the assault rifle paired with the Assault class or the sniper rifle with the Recon class. However, in the open weapons format, those restrictions are lifted. For example, a Medic can now spawn with a sniper rifle. It’s definitely a change of pace for the typical Battlefield experience and makes it a bit more like Call of Duty and its custom loadouts.
The concept caused a bit of a stir in the Battlefield community, and the developers noticed that when they announced it earlier this month. “We definitely put it out there that in the open beta that's coming very soon, that we wanted to get players a chance to play Battlefield the way that they'd like to play Battlefield,” explained Senior Integrated Communications Director Andy McNamara.
The separate playlists approach was a way to satisfy both types of players, especially the ones who still want the traditional Battlefield multiplayer. “That was a great answer to the very big and loud callback to having a more ‘locked in’ experience,” Andersson added.
Map it out
During my time with Battlefield 6’s multiplayer, I played on two big maps, Liberation Peak and Siege of Cairo, as well as two more compact ones, Iberian Offensive and Empire State. Liberation Peak is a mountainous area in Tajikistan with plenty of sandbag fortresses and ditches that feels like a classic warzone environment. Siege of Cairo is a broken-down and abandoned city with plenty of buildings to navigate through and use as cover.
In these two big maps, I mostly played the Conquest and Breakthrough game modes. These two are similar in that there are “tickets” that act as respawn chances. Once the counter reaches zero, the corresponding team has no more respawns left, and they lose. In Conquest, both teams start with 1000 tickets and must deplete the opposing side’s tickets to achieve victory.
Breakthrough was my favorite of the two, however. One side attacks, while the other defends. The frontline attacking side must push forward and take over the entire map in order to win. What makes this game mode interesting is that the defending side has unlimited tickets while the attacking side has 200. If the attacking side manages to take over certain sectors of the map, they can replenish their tickets. It’s a fun scramble that gets increasingly chaotic as the frontline captures more area and the defender’s remaining territory shrinks.
These are staple game modes that have stayed with Battlefield since its earliest entries. “It's 20 years of just phenomenal map design and incredible games, and we feel like we have to live up to that,” said DICE Lead Producer Jeremy Chubb.
“We know that there's massive expectations, which is terrifying, but then we kind of look back at the old maps,” he continued. “We look back at some of our favorite maps, and we just found ourselves being inspired by what's come before.” Some of the maps the development team were fond of were Battlefield 2’s Strike at Karkand and Battlefield 3’s Caspian Border.
Iberian Offensive and Empire State—inspired by Gibraltar and Brooklyn, respectively—are much tighter maps with sharp corners and hallways everywhere. These are much more fitting for smaller-scale game modes like Squad Deathmatch and Domination.
But even within the wider all-out-war maps, there are smaller spaces specifically carved out within them called Combat Zones. For example, Conquest’s version of Siege of Cairo includes the area used in the Team Deathmatch version of the map. “As you play Conquest or Breakthrough, you'll start to recognize these very, very highly tuned spaces,” Andersson explained. “Rather than retrofit those modes to existing Conquest or Breakthrough layouts, we create layouts for them and integrate them within the right map.”
He also teased that a new mode would be added called Escalation, and that Conquest fans will love it. It plays out similarly to Conquest, but starts bigger, with up to seven capture points. Two teams fight to capture these points, and as both teams expand their territory, fewer points remain, resulting in increasing shootouts and tension.
“We introduce a new score system, which gives us much more emphasis on turnarounds and clutch moments,” said Andersson. “We wanted to marry the all-out war experience with raising our game on classic shooter modes and classic Battlefield experiences.”
Escalation wasn’t playable at the hands-on event, but he said that it’s coming soon. While it’s currently unclear how exactly Escalation plays out, it certainly sounds exciting. Regardless, I can’t wait to play Battlefield 6 when it launches on Oct. 10.
You can wishlist Battlefield 6 on Epic Games Store right now.