Not even a month after playing the Battlefield 6 beta, I’ve been jonesing to get back in the trenches for the large-scale chaos that only a Battlefield game can deliver. The full game releases in less than a month now, and all signs point to it being the biggest launch in the series’ history. Will it hit that insane 100 million player count EA has claimed it will? That remains to be seen, but I doubt it.
Overambitious player counts aside, it’s been a long time since the online community has rallied around a big multiplayer shooter like this. I imagine that is partly due to a bit of Call of Duty fatigue — although Black Ops 7 still has a chance to show off its stuff with its beta — and the fact that Battlefield Studios is really trying to win fans back by focusing on what makes Battlefield Battlefield.
I was lucky enough to get a few more hours with Battlefield 6 ahead of release to check out two of the biggest maps, and you know what? It’s still great, but not flawless.
Bigger isn’t always better
The two maps I got to experience were Mirak Valley and the returning Operation Firestorm from Battlefield 3. This was also a slightly newer version of Battlefield 6 with a couple tweaks and changes. Plenty of guns and aiming tweaks were implemented that I simply couldn’t detect, but the bigger deal was the changes to vehicles.
Vehicles now have a boost button, which is a little odd but something I welcomed in these maps, especially. Mirak Velly and Operation Firestorm are the two largest maps in Battlefield 6, and they certainly feel like it. They don’t go so far as to have any major stretches where it feels like there was space added just to have space like some Battlefield 2042 maps did, but I did encounter a couple of instances of having to hoof it for a minute or two to get back into the action.
There were also changes to how vehicles controlled but, I have to admit, I was always too embarrassed to try driving or piloting during the initial beta. I did give one helicopter a spin during this playsession…only to dump it 30 seconds into my flight.
Starting with the new map, Mirak Valley, I played a round of Conquest and Escalation — sadly not the Battle Royale mode. This felt like a more narrow map than most. Both teams felt funneled in towards the main focus point of the map, which was two opposing construction sites. This is a great battleground, and I can clearly see the design philosophy of Dice slotting in more traditional multiplayer maps within the larger ones. When both teams are occupying both incomplete buildings and exchanging fire from each floor, it almost gives the feeling of two pirate ships doing battle on the open sea.
The outside regions were a little messier, from my experience. Either side of this middle portion is heavily sloped and carved with trenches. That makes for exciting sprints through the mayhem, but I felt like the team with the high ground was always at a much greater advantage.
Escelation is a new mode and a twist on the classic Conquest mode. How it works is that both teams fight to capture all the points on the map, exactly like Conquest. All points are open from the start, but these points will be removed as the match goes on, forcing the fighting into more focused areas. This mode worked great on Mirak Velly in particular when the final points were almost nose-to-nose in those aforementioned buildings.
I never played Battlefield 3, so Operation Firestorm is essentially new to me. Taking place in and around an oil rig, this absolutely felt like a classic Battlefield map. The rig area is complex and dynamic thanks to the long pipes and catwalks, plus it offers a ton of vertical spaces on high spires. The depots around the perimeter ensured I was never too far from a point of interest, despite how large the map itself was.
These two maps do feel right on the cusp of being too big. It wasn’t often, but when I didn’t have a squadmate to spawn on and there were no vehicles at the closest spawn point to the action, I would have to spend about a minute just sprinting through the map. That does just feel like the cost of doing business on maps like this, though.
Escelation’s popularity is likely going to depend much more heavily on the map. The idea of funneling a typical all-out warzone down to a single friction point is cool, but it is a fine line between a huge brawl and two teams throwing bodies at the other side. I really enjoyed it on both these maps, but I only got one real match in on each and that was with a ton of bots filling the server.
There’s no point in rehashing how excellent Battlefield 6 is at recreating the feeling of these epic warzones. Sound design, visual effects, gun feel, and vehicles all create such dynamic and emergent moments that keep these long matches engaging throughout. However, that great illusion starts to fade fast once bots get involved.
Odds are none of you will experience games with 50% bots once the game comes out and tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of players flood the servers. But during this press event, we weren’t able to fill a full 64-person lobby and had to fill up the roster with bots. I’m about to sound very harsh here, but I don’t hold this part of the experience against Battlefield 6. Fighting with and against bots is not the intended way to play and I am fully able to appreciate these maps as excellent additions despite not getting the ideal experience.
That said, Battlefield 6 bots suck. I don’t even like them as a way to puff up my ego by letting me go on a huge kill streak. They’re so braindead and lack even the smallest semblance of self-preservation it isn’t even fun to gun them down. God forbid you end up in the passenger seat with one driving. Oh, and if you expect one of the five bots standing over your body to revive you, think again.
In the end, these two maps did nothing to change my opinion on Battlefield 6, which is great. Honestly, I’m not sure how much higher they could be — at least in terms of the multiplayer. I’m curious to see how Escelation holds up under the proper conditions, but I feel it has a ton of promise.
