I'm not remotely what one would call...what's the word..."competent" at competitive shooters, but I do enjoy some with friends and Battlefield is one of those. I've played every entry in the series to varying degrees. They've almost all had awful launches, but eventually found their legs and became quite enjoyable. Seriously, if you hated 2042 at launch--and I don't blame you--check it out now, it's pretty solid!
Since EA seems allergic to instant success and doesn't want to give us another Bad Company, they've decided to go back to present day warfare with Battlefield 6. After bringing in Vince Zampella to right the franchise's ship, all signs were pointing to strong confidence on EA's part. Press impressions were good, they had early closed tests (that I sadly missed) where a lot of feedback was acted upon and now, we have the first public beta. It's months ahead of release, they specifically said it's not a "marketing beta", that they'll make further changes based on feedback and it's not locked behind pre-orders. I've been observing the industry long enough to know that these are all signs they're feeling good about this one.
In the spirit of offering feedback that they've asked for, I've got some impressions after about three and a half hours of playing in a full friends squad on PC.
I won't much time on the technical bits other than to say, the beta runs like buttered glass. I do have a 9800X3D CPU and a 9070 XT GPU so my PC's no slouch, but even with everything completely maxed at 1440p, it never dipped below 115fps and more shockingly, it never used more than 10GB of VRAM, while looking stunning the whole time. They've also said they're aiming for it to be able to perform on a variety of hardware. When the Frostbite Engine is used by people who truly know it inside and out, it can work miracles. Or perhaps more pointedly, it further shows what a bloated, unoptimized mess Unreal Engine 5 is. I only had a couple of netcode hiccups, mostly related to our squad occasionally not returning to the menu together and that's despite the tsunami of users who were hitting the servers all day. From a technical angle, fantastic job folks!
As for game play, I'm optimistic, but cautiously so. Explaining why needs a little bit of history. Vince Zampella is one of the original co-founders of Infinity Ward and co-creator of Call of Duty. Almost everything we now see as normal features in competitive shooters can be credited to what he and Jason West created with Call of Duty and especially, Modern Warfare, which was also the last Call of Duty who multiplayer I enjoyed. Zampella then went on to form Respawn Entertainment, creators of the criminally underappreciated Titanfall series, a little thing called Apex Legends, and also two well regarded Star Wars games.
I give you that history for two reasons. First, this is a guy with a ton of experience and caché who is uniquely qualified to take on the challenge of fixing and re-energizing Battlefield. But he's also one of the guys who created an iconic series that doesn't play like Battlefield at all. That influence is on display here and it's where my worries come in.
There's three maps in the beta I played, with multiple variants tuned to the four historical game modes available: Conquest, Breakthrough, King of the Hill and Domination. There will be eight modes and nine maps at launch. All three of the available maps just don't feel like Battlefield maps. They're smaller, have far fewer open spaces and are designed to funnel teams into rapid, frequently close quarters encounters, despite modes like Conquest still supporting 64 players. One of the things my friends and I love about Battlefield is how the large maps let you go off the beaten path to take more stealthy or unexpected approaches towards encampments and control points to surprise the other team. That didn't feel nearly as doable in the maps we played.
A couple of the maps do have vehicles and aircraft available but smaller maps mean they traverse them much quicker. When I would watch the jets in particular, it seemed almost comical how slowly they had to fly to not leave the boundary in only a few seconds. On one hand, it's nice to load up a vehicle and not have to wait to get the front lines, but it also seems that people aren't treating them with as much value as they did in other games because the stakes are lower. If you get blown up, just grab another one and get back into it quickly. Vehicles in Battlefield are traditionally high risk but high reward and these maps trivialize that somewhat.
What I've heard is that not all the maps will be designed this way and that more of the traditional, giant maps will be in the final game. If so, that's good news, but it's not the only concern.
Player movement speed has also been substantially increased and feels much more Call of Duty-like. I love fast shooters and adore the renaissance of boomer shooters because they remind me of when the genre didn't play like it was on downers. Battlefield never felt artificially slow like Halo does, it just felt like agile human kinetics. When you were in the thick of battle, you still had to think fast and move sharply, but it also didn't feel like the world was running at 1.5x speed. That's something Call of Duty has done for a long time now and fans of the series love it, but it's also why my friends and I don't play it and why we preferred Battlefield.
With this change, the time to kill (i.e. the average time between when you spawn and either kill or get killed) has plummeted in Battlefield 6 compared to prior games. Everyone in my party were getting frustrated because we would spend sometimes a minute or more trying to take more than a few steps before getting shot from nowhere. This constant cycle of spawn-die-wait-spawn-die-wait will get under your skin really fast and kill both your group's momentum and enthusiasm. It reminds me of prior Battlefield maps like Operation Métro, where there were always choke points that became meat grinders. The difference there was, you knew that's what you got from that map and you'd play it when you wanted that experience, it wasn't the default.
I know Call of Duty players like the loop its multiplayer offers and I'm not opposed to it as a whole. I loved the Titanfall games and we play a lot of The Finals, which is all about fast and creative traversal. But that's not what I come to Battlefield for. Fans associate the name with a particular experience that includes huge maps, creative approaches to combat and chaos on a grand scale. Everything this beta has shown me felt restrictive, sped up and like you had no time to even think about strategy because you're lucky to survive more than thirty seconds.
In this hyper-competitive, expensive to make genre where Call of Duty has ruled for so long, I get that they need to siphon players out of that series to make this one sustainable. I really do understand that bind. But it feels like they're trying to change Battlefield's identity to achieve that. Alienating the old audience who have stayed with the series despite the myriad botched launches and failures to listen to the community--at least prior to now–doesn't feel like the right path to me.
Rumour is they structured the beta this way to get the attention of that Call of Duty core and that the final game will be more well rounded and appeal to the old guard as well. I really hope that's true and if they can do that, I think they'll have a banger here, one I'll likely buy into even at its increased price. They've nailed the technology and they have everything they need to make a great package here. You guys are so damn close! I just beg you, please don't strip away what made Battlefield great to try to go toe-to-toe with Call of Duty. You may win a battle, but you'll never win the war that way.
