EA have given us our first proper look at Battlefield 6‘s multiplayer, after revealing the game with a single player trailer last week. They’ve also confirmed the new shooter‘s release date – 10th October 2025 – and announced dates for a series of beta weekends in August.
The game they’re pitching is a return to the contemporary warring of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, after the mildly futuristic disappointments of Battlefield 2042. It’s got four familiar classes, the old Battlefield mode trinity of conquest, breakthrough and rush, and maps that incline towards close quarters combat or wide-open vehicular blasting or some blasphemous hybrid of the twain. It seems fine. And loud.
You’ve likely already heard about the returning classes, thanks to all those Battlefield Lab bulletins, but let’s give them a proper intro. Assault is your kamikaze jarhead, able to equip an extra primary weapon and armed with an adrenaline shot for those last-ditch offensives. The RPG-packing engineer is great at fragging vehicles or fixing them. The MG-toting support can heal and revive people and deploy cover. Recon, finally, is about sniping, spotting foes with a quadrotor drone, mining heavy armour and obstacles with C4, and guiding missiles safely home with a laser pointer.
The handling looks familiar – slower than Call Of Duty and Halo, but nippy enough to sustain a killstreak, with a mixture of familiar and novel moves. You can drag downed friendlies by the collar while reviving them, which I think is rather sweet – like yanking a dog away from a barbecue. You can lean and peek, and mount guns on walls for stability. You can roll on landing after a big jump to preserve your momentum, a spectral homage to Mirror’s Edge. You can also hitch a ride on tanks, so there will hopefully be fewer tantrums when six players all vie for the same gunner seat.
The game will have nine maps at launch, including a glossy restoration of Operation Firestorm from Battlefield 3. The Egypt map is built for infantry and land vehicles, while Gibraltar seems fairly claustrophobic, the kind of place where rocking an APC is seriously asking for it. Tajikistan is about big views and air war, and Brooklyn is designed to cater to every style. The maps are made up of different combat zones built with different modes in mind.
As for those modes, they are conquest, breakthrough, rush, team deathmatch, squad deathmatch, domination, king of the hill, and escalation. The latter sounds strongly like Battlefield 6’s rumoured battle royale mode, pushing the opposed parties towards a gruelling final encounter, though EA danced around the details in their presentation.
Needless to say, you will be able to perforate and demolish a lot of architecture. It’s hard to discern the granularity of the destruction physics from the reveal video’s montage of eviscerated apartment blocks, but individual playable scenarios include smashing through floors with a sledgehammer to ambush campers below, or rigging the ceiling to take out snipers above. It makes me wonder if the game’s developers – that’s DICE, Criterion, Motive, and Ripple Effect – have been playing a lot of Rainbow Six: Siege.
Last and maybe best, there’s a new version of Battlefield 2042’s Portal editor on the way, which lets you tinker with maps extravagantly and apply special rules such as one-shot-kills. The options include propping a motorway against a skyscraper and sliding a bunch of tanks down it, like roaring metal children made of bombs.
As ever with Battlefield multiplayer trailers, and FPS multiplayer trailers in general, it’s worth noting that the average match will look nothing like the balletic bloodshed and giddy demolition combos on display here. In my experience, the average match is going to be a mixture of dying immediately when you spawn, hiding forever in a basement while enemy artillery try to burrow through the roof like a giant with a ladle, commandeering a tank only to immediately wedge it under a bridge, and being vigorously told off by your squad leader when you go for a nice walk beyond the map perimeter. Oh, and there will doubtless be a few bugs.
Those betas? The first one starts August 7th-8th, and you can get access by watching a select few hundred streamers as part of today’s multiplayer showcase. Then there are general access betas on August 9th-10th and August 14th -17th.
Concluding verdict: still fine. Channelling the BF3/BF4 energy should work for them; whether it’s enough to get them 100 million players is another matter. Smaller complaint: I would quite EA to lay off the percussion just a little in their Battlefield videos. I realise that bangs and booms are Battlefield’s vital fluids, but if there are too many bangs and booms it makes the game seem almost constipated, like it’s trying to find that one bang or boom that will finally shatter the viewer’s reservations.
The livestream above is on-going at the time of publication – let me know if you have any thoughts.
