NEED TO KNOW
What’s it The subsequent mainline Battlefield with a full marketing campaign and large-scale multiplayer
Launch date October 10, 2025
Count on to pay $70/£60
Writer Digital Arts
Developer Battlefield Studios
Reviewed on RTX 5090, Ryzen 7 9800X3D 4.7 GHz, 64GB RAM
Multiplayer As much as 64 gamers
Steam Deck Unsupported
Hyperlink Official site
It says one thing concerning the state of the FPS that the hype for Battlefield 6 is generally right down to the previous, not the brand new. Right here we’re, howling on the moon for decades-old modes, “grounded” character fashions, basic class setups, and a map from 2011. Sequence vets are gobbling up this sequel as if we’ve not eaten for weeks whereas patting DICE and its Battlefield Studios cohorts on the again for managing to execute a standard Battlefield sport.
DICE’s final effort tanked expectations, however that is not why Battlefield 6 has impressed me. It is the broader multiplayer tradition of 2025—wrung out by years of battle royale banality and meta-pilled ranked modes—that created the situations for an strange Battlefield to be essentially the most thrilling FPS of the 12 months.
Place your palm on the pavement, and you can feel the low rumble of a hobby yearning for what we loved 15 years ago: the spectacle of scale, the unserious chaos of vehicular warfare, pink grunts vs. blue grunts, the permission to make your own rules, and an setting the place the man obsessive about metas is having the least enjoyable.
That’s the pitch of Battlefield 6, and it is a bullseye.
At the very least, a bullseye the place it issues most. Battlefield 6 multiplayer will get two huge thumbs up, with caveats. A 64-player spherical of Conquest stays a religious expertise that no different collection can contact. My physique vibrates with anticipation each time I spawn right into a chopper within the warmth of battle, hit the deck to revive a squadmate in a smoke cloud, or nail a 100-meter headshot from the security of a mountain perch.
These are all finest skilled on Mirak Valley, the most important and finest map at launch, however as many anxious can be the case after the open beta, the remainder of the map pool cannot measure up. The Halo Forge-like Portal mode looks like a primary draft. Attachments are boring, development is simply too sluggish, and many weapons are locked behind grindy challenges that suck.
I am glad to have waited an additional week to totally evaluation Battlefield 6, as a result of these flaws weren’t detectable within the pre-launch interval. They’re thorns within the facet of what is in any other case essentially the most enjoyable I’ve had with a multiplayer FPS in years.
Good to be back
The greatest compliment I can pay to Battlefield 6 is that it’s the only game I want to play right now. I’ve spent every night this past week bouncing between Conquest, my one true love, and Escalation, a new Conquest variant that shrinks the map over time as it piles on vehicle spawns. I wake up in the morning and play through the previous night’s highlights in my head—the unlikely revives, the resilient tank runs, the 30-minute rounds that came down to a handful of tickets.
The greatest compliment I can pay to Battlefield 6 is that it’s the only game I want to play right now.
It’s a game where a single 25-minute round can spawn a dozen storylines: Two ace pilots dueling over control of the skies, the slippery engineer who makes tank drivers’ lives a living hell, the squad dedicated to locking down a single flag no matter what, the guy who keeps driving the EOD bot round determined to torch somebody (anybody!) to dying. Battlefield 6 confidently palms gamers a sandbox and lets us discover our personal enjoyable.
The prevailing purpose of territory management is the glue that retains the entire operation on the rails, however the magic of Battlefield is the power to vanish into the group—the liberty to play physician for people charging headfirst into the meat grinder, choose off snipers from a rooftop, or break off from the motion altogether to play tic-tac-toe with blowtorches.
Different shooters spend truckloads of cash on skyboxes and soundscapes that mimic the ambiance of a real, large-scale battle. Battlefield 6 would not must faux. The sound of a tank projectile shattering the sound barrier because it explodes eight ft behind me is sufficient to scare the camo off my soldier’s trousers. I nonetheless cannot recover from the unbelievable sound work of Battlefield 6 autos: from the ear-splitting scream of jets as they tear up the sky, right down to completely pointless particulars, just like the rattling of expended shells piling up in a gunner turret.
The chunk is as scary because the bark. It is exceedingly uncommon for an FPS to have autos in any respect, not to mention make them cornerstone energy weapons that may flip losses into victories. The opposite evening, I jumped into the gunner seat of an assault chopper with a pal piloting, and for 2 wonderful minutes, we have been gods amongst mortals:
When Name of Obligation followers say Battlefield may gain advantage from killstreaks, they neglect that Battlefield is about being the killstreak. Wanna carpet bomb your complete map? Be taught to fly. Need an all-seeing UAV scan? Play Recon, bounce in a dumpster, and distant pilot a flying drone.
Steadiness is imperfect, in fact, however not ruinous. Tanks are too flimsy towards engineers packing three-to-five RPGs of their pockets, and I submit that “land mine spam” is getting out of hand. However largely, the sacred infantry-armor-air hierarchy is as neatly thought-about as you’d hope after 20 years of those video games: tanks bully infantry, helicopters bully tanks, jets bully everybody, and infantry are persistent little roaches which might be straightforward to squash individually, however inconceivable to rid your self of fully.
Workshop
If Battlefield 6’s best quality is that it’s a lot like older Battlefields, the upgrade that justifies the new package is its gunplay. Gone are the moments in Battlefield 2042 where aiming directly at an enemy resulted in bullets landing just behind them—Battlefield 6’s guns are loud, frightening machines with lightning-quick ballistics.
Some of Battlefield 6’s design modifications come off as bending over backwards to lure a sort of participant who expects a billion weapons, a whole bunch of hours of grind, and smaller maps.
Up shut, weapons behave like hitscan weapons, with distance and drop solely coming into play if you happen to’re capturing at one thing a soccer subject away. Mixed with some usually wonderful sound work, brain-pleasing celebratory “clicks” on kills, and detailed reload animations, it is clear that Battlefield has lastly caught up with Name of Obligation within the subject of satisfying gun-shootin’.
The renewed emphasis on punchy, reactive firefights in shut quarters is an element of a bigger Battlefield 6 intention to out-Name of Obligation Activision. EA is making an attempt very onerous to carry a brand new viewers into the fold—so onerous that a few of Battlefield 6’s design modifications come off as bending over backwards to lure a sort of participant who expects a billion weapons, a whole bunch of hours of grind, and smaller maps. Battlefield 6 has Name of Obligation’s Gunsmith, its gunplay, its firing vary, and its vehicle-less modes.
Some modifications are in the end wins, however with others, Battlefield Studios has stumbled into the identical unhealthy habits. Battlefield has inherited CoD’s “each assault rifle is sort of the identical” drawback. The weapons display screen is a wall of brushed steel distinguished solely by stat variations, with the odd gun right here and there setting itself aside with its copious attachment choices or extremely low recoil.
The attachments themselves are boring: grips that decrease recoil, muzzles that decrease recoil, lasers that decrease unfold, shares that decrease recoil, and a dozen-or-so scopes. It is a novel concept to commerce arbitrary attachment limits for a pooled level system, however to hone in on an even bigger challenge, in 30 hours I’ve unlocked so few attachments that it hasn’t come into play.
It is an indictment of the entire system that car customization is far more fascinating regardless of fewer choices. I can equip tanks with different varieties of rockets with totally different specialties (air-controlled, guide, lock-on) and make a tricky alternative about which help instrument is finest—the smoke that additionally counters lock-on missiles is clutch, although a self-repair is arguably higher for survival.
Slow learner
Battlefield 6’s progression is slow. The first 20 levels are particularly grueling as you unlock gadgets and guns one rank at a time, unable to focus on your preferred class’ gear. That changes at rank 20, but also gets annoying in a new way: some guns and gadgets are tied to class-specific challenges that currently range from totally broken to mind-meltingly tedious. For the better part of a week, I’ve been working my tail off to unlock the KTS100 LMG (the gun that caused a stir through the beta for its extraordinarily low recoil) and my will to reside is slipping.
The problem requires a whopping 10,000 hipfire harm with LMGs—doable however not enjoyable—and 300 enemy suppressions with LMGs. What counts as enemy suppression? I am glad you requested, as a result of I have been compelled to develop into one thing of an skilled. Therapeutic is paused when you’re suppressed, however how you can set off such an impact on function is a black field. I’ve surmised that it’s a must to be far-off from the goal, the goal appears to should be injured, and unintuitively, it’s a must to miss your photographs.
Killing a man, arguably the final word type of suppression, doesn’t depend, so for the previous 5 nights I’ve begun gunfights by deliberately capturing round unhealthy guys, crossing my fingers {that a} “+10 suppression” bonus pops. Depressing stuff.
Battle fields
Mirak Valley, New Sobek City, and Operation Firestorm deliver the wider battlefields I craved in the open beta. I have qualms (especially with Sobek’s restrictive boundaries and bad spawns), but in Mirak and Firestorm especially, DICE flaunts its mastery of the format it created.
They’re slick, gorgeous landscapes with all the ingredients that make a map click—urban cover, rolling hills, open skies, room to breathe—while managing to feel natural and lived-in. DICE’s spaces stand in contrast to the maps offered in the Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 beta, whose strict three-lane structure makes every match feel like the same sitcom set with slightly different furniture.
The problem is that there simply isn’t enough peak Battlefield in Battlefield 6. The launch map pool of nine is overstuffed with maps that have drastically fewer vehicles and cramped bottlenecks that guarantee you’ll either kill or be killed every 10 seconds.
In Mirak and Firestorm especially, DICE flaunts its mastery of the format it created.
Iberian Offensive, Empire State, Saints Quarter, Siege of Cairo—they’re intense, they’re something different, and they can be a welcome side dish after a 30-minute blowout on Mirak Valley, but they don’t represent what Battlefield is best at, and it’s disappointing that they outnumber the maps that do. There are just some obvious wins for a shiny new Battlefield map pool that EA chose to ignore at launch. Naval warfare is a staple of the series responsible for beloved island maps like Wake Island, and somehow nothing like it exists at all in Battlefield 6. It’s coming someday, but not soon enough.
Thinking with Portal
At the top of my list of “disappointments that will probably get better at some point” is the server browser, initially billed as a convenient tool that lets us play Battlefield 6 however we want. The reality has been the opposite: nobody has been able to create new custom servers because of a “global server quota” caused, in part, by all the people grinding XP in bot matches.
I guess the promise that every Battlefield 6 owner would be entitled to one “persistent” server was a lie. Of course, EA wouldn’t need to overload its dedicated server clusters if it’d included a third-party server support or a proper rent-a-server program, but modern publishers would rather poorly mimic the decentralized server browsers we had 20 years ago than cede an ounce of control over where people play.
The light at the end of the community tab’s grim tunnel is Portal, Battlefield 6’s evolved toolset for modifying maps, creating game modes, and publishing them for anyone to play. In a surprising move for a 2025 videogame, the Portal editor comes packaged as a branch of the open source Godot game engine, complete with all the map files and assets needed to, for instance, recreate Call of Duty 4’s Shipment within a day, make a floating parkour course, or a zombie survival mode. Whereas Battlefield 6’s discoverability instruments are at the moment a multitude, the potential of Portal itself is unbelievable.
I do suppose it is a mistake to not embody a fundamental customized mode creator within the sport shopper itself—you may’t even throw collectively a fundamental personal match with out a net browser in the meanwhile—however once I see people doing absurd stuff like utilizing customized UI logic to run Snake, it will get simpler to tolerate its tough edges in addition to EA’s cringey rebranding of a stage editor as Portal and a customized mode as an expertise. Come off it, you corpo dorks.
Performance
DICE kept saying that Battlefield 6 is obsessively optimized, and by golly, it meant it. In a time when PC performance standards have taken a nosedive, it’s remarkable that an FPS that looks this good also runs this effortlessly. Much like Call of Duty, you can fire up Battlefield 6 and probably get by on whatever it defaults to.
I split my play time between two machines at 1080p (my monitors need some updating): One running an aging 2080 Super/i9 9900KS and another with a 5090/Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Each ran Battlefield 6 like a dream, and I used to be stunned at how delicate the enhancements have been at extremely vs. medium presets (with upscaling off!). It is onerous to make this sport look unhealthy regardless of the way you slice it, a feat achieved by foregoing costly techniques like raytracing and global illumination that are inclined to create extra issues than options.
As Andy mentioned in his full Battlefield 6 performance analysis: “It is really refreshing to check one thing that feels prefer it’s been designed from the bottom up with easy body charges in thoughts.”
Campaign: Don’t bother
It took me almost two weeks to complete Battlefield 6’s campaign, not because it’s long or particularly challenging, but because every mission is about as fun as chipping a tooth. I had low expectations for the pillar of Battlefield 6 that reportedly suffered the shakiest development period, however I nonetheless hoped for higher than this.
As an alternative of considering lengthy and onerous about how you can harness Battlefield’s particular components—lessons, huge areas, destruction, autos—right into a singleplayer context, Battlefield Studios as a substitute opted to repeat Fashionable Warfare’s homework (and nonetheless get the solutions improper). The adventures of spec ops unit Dagger13 play out in a gauntlet of linear, placid run-ins with Pax Armata goons damaged up by the drywall chatter of battle buddies who won’t ever be Captain Worth regardless of how onerous they fight.
It is as if the marketing campaign is not conscious that it exists in Battlefield, a sport with tanks, helicopters, and planes that you would be able to truly fly. One early mission has the squad escorting a tank by a city. At no level are you able to drive and even mount up within the turret—you simply run subsequent to it, sometimes hitting it with a restore torch.
A number of missions later, a helicopter picks up Dagger13 from a crumbling Brooklyn condo constructing, solely to drop them off 60 seconds in a while a bridge through cutscene. When you’re considered one of possibly 10 individuals primarily eyeing Battlefield 6 for its marketing campaign, I counsel you flip round and run.
Next gen
But Battlefield is a shared pastime at its core, and grading on that curve, Battlefield 6 is an imperfect success. It isn’t especially innovative or surprising if you’ve been here a while, but its refinements in gunplay are a major leap for a series that’s lagged behind where it matters most.
Battlefield 6 is also the strongest piece of evidence yet that the casual FPS is cool again—people want to curate, create, and modify their fun. They want community more than competition. Battlefield 6 understands that the best FPS is a place, not just a service. The execution isn’t perfect, but the heart is there.
