Electronic Arts held a preview of the massive Mirak Valley map for Battlefield 6. Battlefield Studios also showed off the Operation Firestorm map, which is a refreshed version of a map from Battlefield 3.
EA described Mirak Valley as a prime destination for all-out warfare, a massive war-torn landscape filled with every type of vehicle. This is Battlefield 6’s biggest map, and EA understands that this is one of the key ways of differentiating Battlefield 6 from its main competition, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
Battlefield games have a lot more destruction, larger maps and more players fighting at the same time. But Call of Duty has the edge when it comes to fast-action shooting at close ranges. EA did not show off its Battle Royale map, though footage of that fighting leaked in recent days. My observation was it took a long time to find guns after landing — something you won’t see in Call of Duty: Warzone.
Still, kudos to EA’s Battlefield Studios team for showing something that (even if it doesn’t have raytracing) is something that Call of Duty can’t match. OK, so the next move belongs to Activision and Call of Duty in this billion-dollar chess game: the battle of FPS marketing. In this competition, Battlefield 6 comes out on October 10 and Black Ops 7 comes out on November 14.
Mirak Valley is surrounded by snow-covered mountains and it takes place in a town that has a lot of rock formations, trees and small hills that you can use to ambush tanks. There’s a some big buildings that are mostly blown out in the middle of the map. There are areas where the trees are nothing but burned out stumps and others where the greenery is beautiful. Since the map is so big, there’s plenty of room for jets and helicopters to maneuver, have dogfights or get picked off from far-away antiaircraft battteries.
Operation Firestorm
Operation Firestorm is a big map with oil fields burning. It has some high buildings in a military base, but it also has huge distances for snipers to go to town. You can see black smoke from the oil fires and embers floating in the air.
During this event, players experienced the brand new mode Escalation for the first time. In Escalation, two teams fight to capture strategic control points. As the teams expand their territory, fewer and fewer control points remain, creating increasingly intense areas of combat. Other modes played were Conquest and Breakthrough.
Crossplay
The developers said they had some questions during the event about how crossplay works in Battlefield 6 so they clarified that.
- Crossplay ON
- On console, when Crossplay is on, we will prioritize allocating you on servers with other console-only players, but players can expect to be in a larger matchmaking pool with players on all platforms. Crossplay On is the only option available on PC.
- Crossplay OFF
- You will only play against players on your platform (Xbox only if on Xbox, PlayStation only if on PlayStation). Joining with friends/parties containing players from other platforms will not be available.