Make no mistake. Battlefield 6 is a superb game, the best that Electronic Arts has launched in years. This is one of the reasons why the Saudis and private equity firms have agreed to buy publisher Electronic Arts for $55 billion.
Credit Battlefield for the timing of this gigantic financial acquisition, which came just day days ahead of yesterday’s launch of Battlefield 6 across the PC, Xbox and PlayStation platforms. And so I set out to review the game to see if I see what the Saudis see. After all, they were pretty lucky in guessing that Scopely’s Monopoly Go would be a success when they bought Scopely for $4.9 billion in 2023. Monopoly Go went on to generate over $5 billion, making the Saudia Arabia Public Investment Fund look pretty smart.
The EA deal doesn’t close until 2027, and it’s going to saddle EA with $20 billion in debt — making it the biggest leveraged buyout in history. That deal is going to burden EA with $1.6 billion in annual debt payments, making people worry that EA will be beholden to debt holders who may force it to sell off parts. But EA has about $2.5 billion in cash flow, according to analyst Michael Pachter, and so it should have plenty of money to make the payments.
But that’s only if it’s games are good and continue to be blockbuster successes. And so it comes around to the basic question for Battlefield 6. Is it really that good? Parts of the game are so cinematic that you’ll feel like you’re on the best rollercoaster ever. But it also has weak characters who aren’t fleshed out, a relatively short campaign that you can finish in five hours or so (it took me 7.5 hours), and a story that seems implausible, plot twists that are puzzling and a story that wanders a little too much. The nine-mission single-player campaign is a bit short and light on emotional impact because we don’t get to know the characters very well.
Those are heavy words and sad given Battlefield’s potential as an intellectual property. But make no mistake. I’m being overly critical, as I think the experience of the single-player campaign, together with the multiplayer combat, are amazingly entertaining for shooter fans like me. Just look at Twitter/X to see some “Only in Battlefield” cinematic sequences from Battlefield players.
And the game has resonated on places like Steam, where it has already set records of 747,000-plus concurrent players (on just one platform). Analysts are estimating it could sell more than five million copies — which would generate $350 million at retail. I’m sure it could do better than that, given Battlefield 2042 sold a lot more despite its quality problems. And this is even taking into account some people who said they would boycott the product because of the Saudi deal, given the Saudis’ human rights record.
Now the good start doesn’t mean that it’s going to bury Call of Duty as a franchise. After all, Call of Duty (owned by Activision Blizzard, which is now owned by Microsoft) regularly generates more than $1 billion in revenue every year — $37 billion to date versus Battlefield’s $15 billion (perhaps). But Battlefield 6 looks prettier than Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which is coming out on November 14. I’ve played both games for hours.
Battlefield 6 origins
Battlefield 6 has been in the works for four years, ever since Battlefield 2042 shipped in the midst of the pandemic in 2021. Battlefield 2042 was a decent modern warfare game, but it shipped with bugs and had server problems at launch that devastated EA’s reputation.
Under Vince Zampella, the head of Respawn, EA reorganized and had four big studios — DICE, Criterion Games, Motive Studio, and Ripple Effect — working on Battlefield 6. It turned out to be the right amount of development firepower, as Battlefield 6 looks very polished, its multiplayer is solid and it was battle-tested in beta by millions of fans. By contrast, Activision has three or four major studios and a total of 10 that contribute to getting a Call of Duty game out every year.
Sadly, EA app users had to wait hours for their games to work. However many complaints we hear about server queues with the Battlefield 6 launch, it won’t be nearly as many as there were with Battlefield 2042. Part of the reason is the huge test worked out a lot of the bugs. And another reason is that cloud-based data center multiplayer technology has gotten a lot better.
In the early days of planning, EA made some of the right decisions this time around. They took the level of quality with 3D graphics on the internal Frostbite game engine to an incredible level — with certain imagery far better than what you see in Call of Duty. The team leaned into the engine’s ability to generate physically realistic destruction — where entire buildings collapse under heavy fire from tanks and rockets.
EA also embraced user-generated content with the Godot engine — something highly unusual for a triple-A game company. It is launching the Godot-based Portal UGC platform within Battlefield 6 so the fans who complain about what’s in the game can fix the problem by creating their own versions of the game. Portal wasn’t reviewable ahead of launch, so we’ll see what it will yield. In a supreme joke that shows gamers’ sense of humor, players have already reproduced a ton of Call of Duty multiplayer maps in Battlefield 6’s Portal.
You could fairly accuse EA of not trying hard enough on single-player campaigns. I recall an EA CEO saying that only around a third of players bothered with the Battlefield single-player campaign, even though it accounted for a huge part of the cost of making the game. This one reflects the most effort in many years. There are good things about it, like the shock of playing campaign missions in places like Brooklyn, Egypt, Tajikistan and elsewhere in scenery that looks exceedingly realistic.
But EA has suffered for a while from relatively weak single-player campaigns — and in some cases nonexistent ones — that fail to properly motivate players to care about the stories from game to game and fail to motivate players on an emotional level.
Battlefield’s campaign story and characters
There’s some small spoilers in this part.
The bad guys in this game are part of a private military corporation known as PAX Armata. PAX triggers a war with NATO, assassinating the Secretary General and then using its vast mercenary army to invade the country of Georgia in the old Soviet Union. NATO is hampered with crumbling alliances and trust issues — much as it has been said to have been weakened under Trump’s transactional diplomacy.
The global war brings to mind Russia’s mercenary army, the Wagner Group, which triggered a brief insurrection in the Ukraine war and wound up getting dismantled after a failed coup against Vladimir Putin. However, that’s where the political similarities to today pretty much end.
In this case, PAX has no national origin or explanation for how it became so powerful. When you gun down PAX soldiers, it looks like NATO troops shooting down other NATO troops. This is where the world-building at EA is pretty weak in comparison to other games like Ghost of Yotei or Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Perhaps because of this shortfall, EA didn’t show off the campaign to the press during its big preview event.
It makes no sense that this PMC could become so powerful and release a surprise attack on NATO across so many countries — for unexplained political reasons. I could go on, but let’s stipulate the backstory could have been better and the outbreak of fighting more plausible. In any case, EA depicts the world on the brink of World War III, and it is a terrible and chaotic sight to behold, as you can see in the game trailers.
So we cut to one squad — a part of a plausible U.S. Marine Raiders elite unit known as Dagger 1-3 — in the fight that has the potential to turn back the tide of PAX victories.
Early on in the very first mission, we get to see a 10-story building wired with C4 get detonated and brought down in a cloud of smoke and rubble. It’s impressive what the Battlefield 6 Frostbite engine can do. There’s a lot of 3D scenery that looks amazing in the campaign, from the rock of Gibraltar to the vast valleys and mountains of Tajikistan. Off Gibraltar, you get to witness and participate in a beach invasion with so many moving pieces — ocean waves, landing craft, gunfire coming from entrenched positions on the beaches, and soldiers running everywhere.
You play as Dylan Murphy, who is the leader of the squad at the beginning of the game. They get wiped out, and only Murphy escapes the surprise attack. He joins another squad with Haz Carter, who has personal experience with the villain of the story, Alexander Kincaid, a former U.S. operative who feels he was left behind by Carter on a mission and betrayed by his own government. Kincaid leads the surprise attack by PAX, and he takes his betrayal very personally and pursues Carter’s team.
Kincaid’s time on the screen is relatively brief. While we witness and participate in the firefight where Murphy comes to hate PAX and its leadership, we don’t see the battle where Kincaid is betrayed by Carter. This is simply relayed in dialogue, and it becomes a classic problem of “show, don’t tell.” Because this takes place offstage, we don’t understand the gravity of emotion between Carter and Kincaid. It’s almost as if someone said, “Let’s do a better job with the single-player campaign, but don’t spend a lot more money on it.” (Let me tell you, scriptwriters are a good investment as far as developers go).
Aside from Murphy, the squad includes Simone “Gecko” Espina, a recon specialist who is good at flying drones and sniping. The rest of the soldiers are Carter, Cliff Lopez, and a somewhat mysterious Lucas Hemlock, a CIA operative who doesn’t say “always faithful” when asked to do so. There is a little bit of banter, but most of it isn’t witty or funny.
I’m not asking for this to be super-wordy. I just want to understand more about the bad guys so that I understand the stakes of what hangs in the balance and why I should be emotionally attached to winning against the bad guys. Having just come from the excellent revenge story of Ghost of Yotei, I’m feeling like the single-player campaign is like a single helping of ice cream when you’re hungry for a big dessert.
There is a lot of heavy-duty combat where you can be overwhelmed by the number of enemies in a scene. They’re all gunning at you and your squad, but there are also a lot of bots on your side to give the scenes the appearance of big battles. I was stunned to see the realism of scenes in Brooklyn, Cairo and a Tajikistan airbase.
While you’re limited by the class types of soldiers in the campaign, there are plenty of weapons you can pick up in the campaign that are lying on the ground. I did well using a sniper rifle, assault rifle and light machine gun during much of the action. You also get secondary weapons like grenade launchers and RPGs — which you can conveniently pick up when a tank goes rolling by.
I tend to die a lot charging in at first. Then, once I figure out how many enemies there are and where the choke points are in the map, I go there and pick off the enemies. It’s very static combat in single player. You’re not always on the move like with multiplayer. And the enemies are inevitably dumb enough to expose themselves in the open. And the power of the sniper rifles or LMGs is always enough to bring them down.
And when you are taken down once, your allies will come revive you once. But if you die more than once, you restart at the latest checkpoint. That works pretty well, as you don’t have to start a mission entirely over if you die once.
There are flaws in the design. In one place where you have to blow up a bunch of radar and air-defense emplacements, you don’t start the mission with any C4 explosives. I wandered around, figuring out how to blow these things up once I defeated the defenders. It turns out you can go to the rocket emplacements, turn the guns toward the anti-aircraft batteries, and let loose on them. But it took me minutes to figure this out — wasted time in a single-player campaign.
The game’s maps were vast, and yet I never saw a loading screen except at the beginning. And each map’s user interface was pretty good about keeping you on track for where you needed to go. When I went off track, it just told me to turn around and return to the combat area. At the big airbase, I was so impressed with all the action happening that I hung back and watched it unfold for a while — and I wondered how I could survive.
Across the nine missions, EA does a good job of circling the world and showing us what all-out warfare is like in the modern era. But multiplayer does that even better.
Battlefield 6 multiplayer combat
I got some very good hands-on experience with Battlefield 6’s multiplayer at EA’s preview event.
As EA says, multiplayer is more varied than ever, packed with an incredible breadth of modes and content. Players battle across richly detailed and destructive maps, including fighting through Tajikistan’s glorious mountains in Liberation Peak, in an intense stand-off underneath Manhattan Bridge and across dangerous construction sites on the outskirts of Cairo in New Sobek City. Plus six other maps, which also take mass destruction on a global scale. EA can outdo Call of Duty with its approach of giving equal weight to soldiers, vehicles and air combat in the game’s multiplayer maps.
Kinesthetic combat: Battlefield 6 brings enhancements to movement and gunplay. This gives players an unprecedented level of mobility, offering new tactical options such as Drag and Revive to pull teammates out of danger and back from the brink, where you move backward and revive a player at the same time. And you can mount weapons on walls to reduce recoil.
The class system: The class system returns with four categories: Assault, Recon, Support, and Engineer, empowering players to define their role on the battlefield. The four roles have been enhanced, designed to empower players to push their team towards victory, each with class-specific gadgets, signature weapons and dedicated training.
For those who want to combine weapons from different classes with their own preferred loadout, there’s a complex answer. In Call of Duty, you can do this if you reach a certain level in multiplayer stats. I, for one, love carrying an assault rifle with a sniper rifle.
In this case, it depends on whether weapons are open or closed in a given mission. If they are open, the Assault player can play with two primary weapons given right conditions like earning your way to the privilege. If you play as another class, you can switch out primary weapons, but you don’t get the perks you have earned for those weapons if they belong to another class.
Engineers are the only ones with a gadget that can repair a vehicle in the field. The support class can intercept enemy grenades, revive teammates and resupply ammo.
One example of the new movement system is a support player (medic and other roles) can drag a wounded soldier and heal them at the same time that they move them to safety. There is a distinction of subclasses where you can really specialize as a combat medic, or something else. Support players can heal a wounded comrade faster than others can.
Recon is a tactical mastermind, providing vital info from drones to the squad and stalking the battlefield as a sniper. They can call in strikes from missiles with a laser designator.
Squads can stay together more easily with vehicles that have more seats in them.
Destruction has a purpose: An unprecedented level of destruction also returns, but enhanced to offer a new level of freedom, letting players transform the combat zone, to create new paths, flank enemies and dominate the battle.
The amount of physical destruction in the game is stunning. You see entire buildings fall, or stories collapse on each other, and the ground itself reaction to massive explosions. What’s even more stunning is that the destruction still allows the game to run at 60 frames a second.
In an interview, I asked Jeremy Chubb, producer at EA Dice, whether this amount of destruction was so computationally expensive that it means the game might sacrifice something else like movement.
“That’s a great question. And you know, you’re absolutely right, Chubb said. “It’s possible, with like, a big, physical, destructive experience, that the level can end up feeling, you know, hard to navigate, snaggy, janky. We work really, really hard to establish metrics within the fractures of the destruction.”
This means that it’s not random destruction purely based on physics. The physics serves gameplay. A building will not blow up in a different way every time. Rather, it will blow up in the way that a player expects it to blow up. Maybe you can reduce a building to rubble, but there will still be places to hide or fire so you aren’t just randomly exposed.
We’ll wait to see what happens with Season 1 of content launching for multiplayer on October 28. That includes Rogue Ops, with a map dubbed Blackwell Fields and a new 4v4 mode. It will also have a new map on November 18, after Black Ops 7 launches, located in Southern California with the California Resistance as its theme. We’ll also find out if fans like the battle royale mode, which could challenge Call of Duty: Warzone. That map is still in testing.
Multiplayer maps: Battlefield 6 will launch with a robust package of multiplayer modes and maps, taking the fight around the world from Egypt, to Gibraltar and the streets of New York. Each map features multiple combat zones, hand-crafted and tailored to suit specific modes, ensuring each fight is designed to complement the player experience and provide a variety of play options.
The mountains in the first level I played — Liberation Peak, Ridge 13, in Tajikistan — turned out to be a very deadly place.
Other maps listed in the event brochure included Manhattan Bridge, Saints Quarter in Gibraltar, New Sobek City near Cairo, Kudara Valley, and Iberian Offensive.
Multiplayer modes: EA is focusing on fan favorite modes for multiplayer.
Familiar multiplayer modes are returning in Battlefield 6, with classic staples making an appearance, including Conquest, Breakthrough, and Rush. Players will also experience a host of fast-paced and intense first-person shooter staples, including Team Deathmatch, Squad Deathmatch, Domination and King of the Hill.
There’s a new mode called Escalation. It plays a little like Conquest but it starts bigger. It starts with up to seven capture strategic points. And as you progress the experience, it wiggles down to just a few.
Conclusion
Battlefield succeeds in delivering great set-pieces and jaw-dropping moments. I agree with David Jagneaux, who is a freelance writer for GamesBeat, that the campaign could have been outstanding — and it wasn’t. In that way, it has left an opening for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to make players happy and to steal them back from Battlefield 6 in about a month.
I think that players will like the EA setting of 2027 better than the 2035 setting of Black Ops 7. It feels like that COD setting is too far in the future — more like science fiction than modern warfare. And that evokes a whole different set of emotional reactions.
In Call of Duty games, many of the iconic scenes take place among characters — people that you care about — whereas in Battlefield 6, the iconic scenes take place with huge levels of destruction. Therein lies the difference between Call of Duty and Battlefield.
I’m pretty sure Call of Duty will beat Battlefield on single player. But it’s a toss-up as to whether players will prefer multiplayer for Black Ops 7 or Battlefield. I really liked the infantry combat of Call of Duty and the destruction of Battlefield 6.
As far as platforms go, I felt like playing was best on the PC version on my Falcon Northwest machine with an Nvidia 5090 graphics card. I also tried out the game on the PlayStation 5 and the level of destruction was a lot less impressive in the PS5 version. The game is also available on the Xbox Series X/S. When I played on the PS5, I noticed bugs. But I didn’t see any on the PC, and the game died on my only once.
I rate Battlefield at four stars out of five. Did the Saudis get their money’s worth? I would say yes. The Battlefield franchise has huge potential, and I believe that the Saudis should double down on it and bring it on par with the annualized Call of Duty titles. I think there is still a lot of room to grow in the $33 billion first-person shooter market.
Disclosure: EA provided me with codes to play on the PlayStation 5 and the PC via Steam.