Battlefield Is Doomed

[Opinion Piece] You'll never be the best copycat

Those who follow me on Notes will know that for the past month I’ve been having some fun with Sony’s PlayStation 5. Now, I don’t own it myself, rather it’s my brother’s and takes up residence in the living room and each day we swap the controller back and forth, putting in an hour or two on The Last Of Us 2’s No Return mode and more importantly, EA’s new Battlefield 6.

At first, all was well: in a multiplayer shooter landscape dominated by hyper-stimulating, rapidly paced shooters like Call Of Duty, hyper-competitive, E-sports oriented shooters like Overwatch and extraction/battle royale experiences like ARC Raiders, it was refreshing to play something with a bit of a slower pace and an emphasis on combined-arms rather than pure infantry.

I have over 1000 hours in Bohemia Interactive’s seminal mil-sim: Arma 3 and while I’m not about to compare Battlefield to that kind of complexity, I do feel a lot more at home pointing out enemy armour, setting up trophy systems and engaging in long-range firefights in Battlefield than I do playing Call Of Duty, where I’m disadvantaged by my lack of Ritalin.

But as the days and weeks have rolled by and we’ve sunk more time into this game, I’ve become more and more convinced that Battlefield 6 is destined for a poor reputation and worse: that the series doesn’t have much of a future.

In today’s post, I’m going to explain why.

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Why Did We Love Battlefield?

Let’s cast our minds back to the early 2010’s: to Battlefield 3 and 4 where the series really escaped the PC and hit mainstream gaming. What was it that Battlefield provided that neither Halo nor Call Of Duty could?

Was it scale and combined arms? Battlefield has always had the largest team sizes and maps out of any mainstream multiplayer shooter: Battlefield 3 had 12 vs 12 matches on consoles (32 vs 32 on PC and in future console Battlefields) compared to the measly 6 vs 6 Team Deathmatches in Call Of Duty and the 8 vs 8 Big Team Battle mode in Halo. While Halo had a handful of vehicles sprinkled about in its larger maps: generally a Warthog for team play, Mongeese for rapid travel, some air options and maybe a Scorpion or Wraith for both sides to contest, they were always just another option to rack up more kills instead of a vital pillar of team play like in Battlefield; Call Of Duty has never really bothered with them altogether.

Loading screen art for Seine Crossing: one of my favourite Battlefield 3 maps back in the day.

Was it the variety? Battlefield 3 was my gateway drug into the world of military equipment and real life warfare. There were so many guns in 3 and 4 and the exclusive weapons for each of the 3 main factions: the USA, Russia and China all functioned fairly similarly and yet possessed their own unique design language and characteristics, it got me reading a lot. This extended to gadgets, vehicles and even camouflages, which were real life patterns like Marpat and Chocolate Chip instead of infantile skins or generic olive drab.

Camouflage selection menu in Battlefield 4.

Was it the community and team play? Battlefield marketing often focuses on those ‘only in Battlefield’ moments like sniping a fighter jet pilot or suicide bombing an enemy tank but these moments are facilitated best when among friends: when working and communicating with teammates. In Battlefield 3 and 4, classes were pretty strictly bound to their specific weapons and roles, this meant that players had to be chatting and coordinating to stand much of a chance at victory.

The real answer is that it was a combination of all these things that made Battlefields 3 and 4: the golden duo so beloved and fondly remembered but what I think especially sold people on Battlefield is that it felt real. Battlefield was a slimmed down, entry level to mil-sim and more realistic shooters for those who desired something more cerebral than the average military shooter but weren’t up to the demands of Arma or Operation Flashpoint’s 10 minute walks and instant deaths from enemies resembling grey-green blobs on a distant hill.

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Where Did It Go Wrong?

The goal of Battlefield 6 was always going to be a return to form, rather than a new step forward for the franchise, so how did Battlefield fall from grace in the first place?

The interesting thing about this series is that the fall from grace wasn’t a slow, meandering march to the grave like Halo, neither was it a prolonged wringing dry of every last drop of creative juice like modern Call Of Duty, rather, it was a sudden and violent collapse following a string of minor controversies.

Battlefield 1 wasn’t quite as good as 3 or 4 but still kept the franchise cruising well.

In terms of sales, Battlefield has never been a serious competitor to Call Of Duty but in the cultural sphere of gaming they are often considered rivals and after a few years of side-eye the two series entered direct competition in the second half of the 2020’s. In 2016 we got Battlefield 1, then in 2017 Call Of Duty WW2 launched and the year after that in 2018 Battlefield 5 arrived. Battlefield won this skirmish with the CoD giant, putting out 2 superior games in the eyes of the world but in doing so the series had waded into another war… the Culture War.

A black man serving as a sniper in the armed forces of Imperial Germany in the European theatre.

I know this is a sensitive issue: the kind of issue I’m not particularly qualified to address and tend to avoid like the plague but I’ll do my best. If I offend anyone then… get a grip? It’s words on a page.

The armies of the various empires who participated in the First World War absolutely were ethnically diverse: the British Empire made extensive use of India’s virtually limitless pool of manpower which in turn brought a plethora of faiths to war, the German Empire had black soldiers who fought in their colonies, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had virtually every ethnic group from the Balkan Peninsula serving in their armed forces, the list goes on, however… the integration of Black, Asian and other soldiers into the game did leave a lot to be desired.

There were no black German soldiers in Europe in real life, just in the colonies and DICE forcing certain races onto certain classes (instead of letting the player choose if they wanted to play, for example, an Indian Assault) left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. There were plenty of maps added in various theatres of combat, it would have been best to force players into certain ethnic backgrounds there, if it had to happen.

Like I said before, one of the biggest appeals of Battlefield is that it always felt authentic: Battlefield looked and felt like a real war, even if it played nothing like one, so things that break the immersion damage Battlefield more than they would in another series.

But this was small fry, the real controversy came with Battlefield 5.

Battlefield 5 seemed hell-bent on pushing female soldiers.

Battlefield 5’s marketing heavily featured female soldiers and this is where all pretences of immersion and accuracy fall apart. Yes, the USSR had a veritable legion of female snipers and one of them: Lyudmila Pavlichenko killed as many as 300 German soldiers and the famous ‘Night Witches’ were an all-female bomber unit but here’s the thing… Battlefield 5 is a World War 2 game that doesn’t even bother to include the Eastern Front where more than three quarters of all German casualties were sustained.

Veering off topic, just look at the stupid face paint and outfits as well, a German sniper would be practically moaning with glee to see you so willingly make yourself a target.

Anyway, most of World War 2 is missing, female soldiers in the Allied powers despite women being instrumental to the war effort by providing industrial labour and a campaign mission that rewrites military history by having an operation in Norway that was carried out by a small team of heroic commandos with air support instead be completed by a lone Norwegian woman. And EA’s response? If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.

Battlefield 5 sold about half that of Battlefield 4, I guess gamers got the message.

World War 2 matters more than any other historical conflict depicted in video games, not just because of the impact and scale of death it wrought but because many of its veterans are still alive. You have to approach the Second World War with more tact than say, Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s Hussite Wars because you’re depicted the lived experiences of people who are still with us; you don’t get to misrepresent the collective trauma of a generation because you don’t want Gen Z and Gen Alpha upset that they can’t play as a woman in their disposable entertainment.

Number 5 tarnished what was a pretty flawless reputation and then Battlefield 2042 took that slightly bruised image and put it through a shredder; this was the game that really prompted a return to form in this first place. 2042 Came out recently enough that I don’t think we need a full recap but if you’re out of the loop? Operators instead of normal soldiers, CoD-esque, fast-paced gameplay and a launch so horrifically buggy that it took months and months to fix. There wasn’t even a traditional scoreboard in the multiplayer.

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A Return To Form But A Rejection Of Legacy

Let’s cut to the chase: Battlefield 6 is a good game, arguably a great one, in fact.

The progression and customisation are rewarding and push you to play classes you might have overlooked, the graphics and polish are up to the appropriate standard you’d expect from a big-budget Triple-A release in 2025, vehicles are fun yet challenging to pilot, weapons feel great to use and we’re back to playing faceless grunts again… but it’s in everything that makes Battlefield feel like itself that number 6 fails.

The campaign: usually centred around a rogue faction within a foreign power trying to kick off a confrontation with the West instead centres around an unbelievably implausible global conflict between NATO and a PMC called Pax Armata and features such ridiculous scenarios as a large scale battle in Gibraltar.

British people in Spain and Gibraltar look a bit like this, I don’t fancy our chances.

More importantly though, the gunplay and map design is distinctly un-Battlefield.

Within days, players had realised that the META for this game was to equip the attachments and weapons that facilitated the highest rate of fire and lowest spread possible: just like Call Of Duty. Instead of practising good positioning and steadying for accurate fire, players slide about and jump up in the air at the first sign of danger.

Every map is too small, full stop. Jets have no room to fly, conflict is funnelled into a few narrow lanes and there is rarely more than one way to get to a point in Conquest… sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Furthermore, for the second time in the past few years I’ve been rug-pulled by a videogame.

In January 2024, Tekken 8 launched with no Battle Pass, zero microtransactions and a season pass that guaranteed access to all upcoming content; it only took 6 months for maps to not be included, the ‘Fight Pass’ to be put in along with heaps of garbage microtransactions. Well, it’s happened again here. Battlefield 6’s season 1 launched with DEDSEC: the most boring battle royale I’ve ever played, Gauntlet: a series of objective-based game mode’s in tiny maps and they filled the game with obnoxious skins while fixing none of the (admittedly minor) issues the community have been experiencing since launch such as balance issues and a frustrating missile bug that makes playing in the air absolutely futile.

Battlefield 6 is clearly trying to capture a refugee audience that is sick to death with modern Call Of Duty and the trouble with that is it only takes next year’s CoD to be good for BF6 to become chopped liver and since it retains very little of what made the series great in the first place, I can’t imagine old Battlefield heads will stick around either.

Squad offers what Battlefield used to provide, Arma is on consoles now and you will never outplay CoD at its own game, especially delivering campaigns as shit as this one. In a world where the barrier between consoles and PC has all but faded, Battlefield is powerless to resist the competition: its more casual players would rather play the real Call Of Duty than a fake and its more hardcore audience can simply move on to games like Arma Reforger, Insurgency or to Squad on PC.

This franchise will not recover.

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