Fighter jets scream above the snow-capped mountains of Tajikistan as the armored strike vehicles weave up the dirt paths, kicking up dust and debris in their wake. The objective is to take the small encampment at the base of the ridge ahead, which should be simple enough with three squads of four infantrymen. Should being the key term.
The muffled radio chatter reports a sniper in the area, but it barely registers before the glint of the shooter’s scope spells death for the rooftop gunner. Then come the RPGs, which don’t cripple the vehicle, but have enough impact to send the engineers in the backseat into a frenzy, desperately whipping out their blowtorches to repair what they can. As the now-driverless transport rolls to a stop just shy from the end zone, the remaining troops slump onto the floor, crawling prone to avoid suppressive fire. The beleaguered cries for medics are quickly drowned out by the tank’s treads as the specter of defeat draws near.
They never do take that ridge.
But this isn’t a real war, it’s Battlefield, and the next move is to swap to a different class, respawn, and rethink the approach. Unlike its contemporary Call of Duty, Battlefield 6 (out Oct. 10), is less of an action-movie fantasy and more of a methodical battle of attrition where playing smart and sticking to your small role is the key to victory. For publisher Electronic Arts, strategic attrition might just be their winning path, too; after rejiggering their military shooter formula for over a decade to little avail, Battlefield 6 is shaping up to be a breakthrough amid the perpetual dominance of endless Call of Duty releases.
Based on the current open beta test (running for two weekends, Aug. 9 to 10 and 14 to 17), the latest entry in the Battlefield series is a strong return to form for its once-beloved multiplayer modes and could be the action game to beat this fall. Here’s why.
In the early 2000s to 2010s, Battlefield was a big deal. Beginning with 2002’s Battlefield 1942 and its then-modern day sequel Battlefield 2 (2005), the series made a splash for depicting large-scale infantry combat that was unprecedented at the time, and stood in contrast to its competitors that mostly focused on smaller team-based multiplayer. While other shooters only let users compete in tight corridors or modest open era maps on foot, Battlefield was all about scope — allowing up to 64 players to compete across sprawling fields of war, fully traversable by trucks, tanks, and planes.
With 64 players, combat can be chaotic, but rather than emphasizing one-man heroics and gratuitous kill-to-death ratios, Battlefield has always been more of a team effort. Instead of straight death matches, the goal is usually to gain control of specific areas of a map, throwing waves of bodies at the problem, with the best group tactics generally winning out.
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A huge factor in those tactics is the series’ class-based system, wherein players can select distinct roles like Assault, Engineer, Medic, and Recon each with their own individual purpose. In Battlefield 6, Assault units can lead the charge with rapid-fire gunplay and the ability to restock their allies’ ammo, while Recon is a tried-and-true sniper. It’s the Engineer and Medic classes that are often the most valuable (although snipers remain a perpetual headache). Engineers can fix vehicles and equipment lockers, and are often seen dangling outside the back of Humvees and chasing tanks to keep heavy-hitting artillery units in the fight. Medics can drop healing kits to bolster infantry, as well as instantly revive downed players before their life is fully spent.
Veteran players know the importance of these two roles, but their necessity can be lost on newer ones — an issue that quickly cropped up in the first weekend of the open beta test. Whether it’s because they’re newcomers weaned on the Schwarzenegger-style bravado of Call of Duty or just selfish folks looking for higher kill counts, many players in the game’s first public session tend to leave wounded fighters down rather than healing them (something any class can do, not just medics).
Worse still, users of all class designations are choosing to instantly end their lives when downed, rather than wait for the ticker to run out while a nearby ally races in to save them. This presents two issues: First, it dwindles the overall infantry count for a team that serves as its shared life pool. Second, it reduces the number of available bodies tackling any given objective, as well as the spawn points they provide for people getting back in the game. Without people following the basic rules of cooperative healing, it can be difficult to make any headway, with team respawns falling further away from the objectives over time.
To mitigate the notion that any one class is less fun to play than others, Battlefield 6 implements an “open” class system, meaning that any unit can use whichever weapons they want rather than being relegated to a core kit. Previously, people may have wanted to play Engineer, but might not have liked being bound to small caliber sub-machine gun. Now, you can pick whatever gun you want, which should be incentive enough to do the damned job.
The class system is likely something that newcomers will figure out in time, but once a game gets going where everyone’s on the same page, there really isn’t anything else like Battlefield. With 64 combatants on the field, it can be extremely hectic — especially in urban environments where the verticality of buildings can divide the warzone up into dozens of micro-arenas. But even when a sniper’s nest has taken root in the third-floor walkup, there’s always a solution: just level it all.
Whereas the first few Battlefield games introduced and perfected open area warfare where fighter jets and tanks presented a boss-tier threat, it was the Bad Company spin-off games that presented the concept of absolute environmental destruction — a mechanic that’s carried over in the new game. While taking cover is essential to surviving a hail of gunfire, camping out can only last so long before a well-placed RPG or C4 takes out a building front to expose you, or worse, knocks out a load-bearing beam and brings the entire structure crumbling down.
The multifaceted nature of Battlefield 6 matches rewards improvisation and often borderline ludicrous thinking. When trying to take control of an objective point, your first inclination might be to stroll in on foot or behind the wheel of an armored truck, but the best bet might just be laying down of the rear of a tank, letting the behemoth take the brunt of the damage while engineers frantically keep the machine’s life meter in the green. Or maybe it’s inching forward in a crouched position with a row of medics, all dropping defensive ballistic plates like a phalanx squad, with a single trooper maniacally hitting the defibrillator paddles to constantly resurrect their human shield allies.
Or you can just commandeer and kamikaze and entire fighter jet into the town square. That one’s a classic.
The litany of ways to play Battlefield is what keeps the game feeling fresh during marathon sessions. In any one 30- to 40-minute match, there’s a good chance a player can brew up dozens of different ways to tackle a problem, and even with death lurking around every corner, it rarely feels like there isn’t some way to make meaningful progress — assuming the majority of folks are playing the game as intended.
Look, Call of Duty doesn’t really need defending. Despite releasing a new edition like clockwork every fall, Activision’s perennial action shooter is guaranteed to top the sales charts and, occasionally, do something surprisingly innovative to rejuvenate its fan base. But with its iron grip on the genre, there’s been very few competitors that offer something different. Some successful military shooters like The Division might periodically scratch the itch, but not since the early days of Battlefield has there been any meaningful alternative to the mindless run-and-gun antics of Black Ops.
At a time when all live-service games are living in the shadow of Fortnite, games like Call of Duty have mostly leaned into meme potential over any kind of strict creative vision or cohesive worldbuilding. And while it might be funny to step into death match dressed like Master Splinter to gun down Beavis and Butthead, there’s a contingent of players who want to get back to the core of what military shooter used to be. The developers of Battlefield know that, having addressed the issue directly earlier this summer in an interview with DBLTAP. “I don’t think it needs Nicki Minaj,” Battlefield 6 design director Shashank Uchil said. “Let’s keep it real, keep it grounded.”
The approach appears to be working, with this weekend’s open beta besting Call of Duty’s all-time active player count on platforms like Steam with over 500,000 users at once, which doesn’t even include those on consoles like PlayStation or Xbox. While it’s unclear if a free-to-play public test will translate to actual sales come launch time, it’s obvious that there’s a true appetite for more authentic, strategic, and serious action games these days. If EA can build on the momentum and mostly positive reception of Battlefield 6’s playtest, they might have just found the antidote to Call of Duty fatigue.
Battlefield 6 arrives Oct. 10 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
From Rolling Stone US
