In proper explosive Battlefield fashion, a large group of content creators and influencers, as well as a select pool of journalists, were invited to get the first official hands-on with EA DICE’s upcoming large-scale military FPS: Battlefield 6. Fighting right alongside Stonemountain64 and TheBurntPeanut, we went deep into the multiplayer across a small offering of modes and maps that will be a part of Battlefield 6’s launch later this year.
During a group Q&A session with questions taken from the pool of journalists and content creators, Battlefield 6 devs talked about how they wanted the destruction to feel chaotic yet not turn into chaos. While there’s a far greater emphasis on the destruction powered by the Frostbite Engine, the intent is to make the action feel deterministic. When free-aiming a rocket launcher into an apartment building, the destruction should look as you expect, with a hole being ripped through the architecture rather than bringing the entire building down. This could be EA DICE’s way of keeping the hardcore tournament players from feeling alienated with a destruction system that feels seemingly without order while still maintaining the spectacle that casual players will relish in the destruction in every match.
Movement in Battlefield 6 is much more than just boots on the ground. Dubbed the Kinesthetic Combat System, there’s a variety of new traversal mechanics to keep the flow of the match feeling dynamic without falling into the same routine sprinting and peeking around corners. For starters, players can now grab hold of a downed teammate and drag them to safety while reviving them, hopefully breaking the cycle of a well-placed sniper that’s just waiting to pick off enemy tickets. Weapons can also be mounted on low barricades or even up against walls with the right attachments, something that made my time trying to play a long-range Support class and snipe with an LMG a bit more manageable. The tactical approach to Battlefield 6 feels like a refreshing take on the series after Battlefield 2042’s run-and-gun focus took much away from the series’ signature feel. One other charming new addition that I couldn’t see for myself but was teased in the multiplayer reveal was the addition of multiple new mount points on vehicles, allowing players to hitch a ride on the outside of an armored vehicle for a lift from HQ onwards to the next objective.
Battlefield 6’s gunplay initially feels like there’s a significant advantage to playing on keyboard and mouse versus what I had done with being the odd man out and playing the preview event on PlayStation 5 Pro on controller (there does appear to be keyboard and mouse support available in the menus, however). The LMG that I was a fan of running on Medic/Support since the days of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam offered upgrades to turn it into a semi-auto rifle for longer-ranged incursions; trying to do the same in full-auto even with controlled bursts kicked the gun around so violently that it would be difficult to get a bead on an enemy soldier even if they’re standing perfectly still at 50 yards away. In much more intimate settings, it was the SMGs with a high rate of fire and the Assault’s signature shotgun that stole the show. The TTK (Time to Kill) felt varied enough on the different modes depending on the type of engagement you were getting into, but any of the small-scale maps came down to whoever could pull the trigger first, and gunfights barely lasted a fraction of a second.
In oh-so-many of our multiplayer matches during the four-hour run of the show, grenades and rocket launchers littered the landscape and leveled many a building face, opening up new vantage points while destroying cover that an enemy sniper might’ve been using to take pop shots at your squad. Nowhere in these claustrophobic maps felt safe, and it was even more evident in the larger mountain pass levels where only a few single or two-story buildings are all the cover you might get from tank fire. Matches showed the scars of war in such a short time, and even those faster-paced fifteen-minute matches left nothing but a wake of destruction and body counts in the dozens.
While Battlefield has relished in the massive maps where 64 players could test their mettle against one another, there’s a balanced emphasis in the multiplayer reveal event for much more intimate matches with only sixteen players racing for the most kills in a short time. These maps are smaller sections of the main offerings carved up and transformed into a tiny combat arena, often without room for vehicles. Some fans have been asking for EA to introduce blitz modes and Team Deathmatch for ages, and this is the way for Battlefield to answer the wishes of its most vocal fanbase.
Perhaps the other most welcome change for Battlefield 6 is the return of the classic Class System: Assault, Recon, Support, and Engineer. No more operators, no more hoops to jump through to get the skills you actually want to use. Building a class is a combination of selecting a primary and secondary weapon, passive and active class abilities, and throwable and deployable gadgets. Each of the four classes only had a small number of selections to choose from for class customization in the preview event, often only two or three options per primary and a single pistol type. For the Support class, this meant having a deployable ammo box that would also facilitate faster regeneration, while the Assault class got a grenade launcher that could launch either thermobaric or explosive ordinance. For the most intimate close quarters maps, Assault has probably the best skill set as they can also bring along a third weapon, whether it’s a shotgun or second primary weapon (and for smaller maps, you would be a fool not to pick up the shotgun as it’s currently in its most overpowered version with melting any soldier in one, if not two well placed shots (I wish I could’ve sampled trying to snipe with it using a 4.0x scope and slug rounds but that’s something I’m saving for the proper open beta).
In a lot of ways, Battlefield 6 is how DICE and Ripple Effect have listened to the feedback from fans and brought back the massive squad shooter in a proper return to form. Despite the mayhem of crumbling infrastructure, this is exactly what I’ve wanted out of Battlefield multiplayer since the days of Operation Metro and Strike at Karkand. Massive maps with the flow of infantry, tanks, and jets all coordinating in tandem, and the constant chatter of squadmates calling for revives or ammo packs. While I know what I’ve experienced during the multiplayer reveal event is only a small slice of the complete Battlefield 6 package, October 10th can’t come soon enough. We only went hands-on with four maps during our preview, but there will be an additional five maps coming at launch from Gibraltar and Manhattan to the title’s largest map, Kundara Valley, and even the return of Battlefield 3’s Operation Firestorm.
Battlefield 6 will be a culmination project across four Electronic Arts studios: DICE, Criterion, Motive, and Ripple Effect (formerly DICE LA). When it launches on October 10th, players can get their hands on Battlefield 6 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and PC (Epic Games Store, EA App, and Steam); a Nintendo Switch 2 version will not be available at launch as Electronic Arts stated they do not have any current plans to release Battlefield 6 on Nintendo’s latest platform.
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