I. Not a Good Start
I just want to be clear that whenever I get into a game, I NEVER, EVER, EVER want to walk away hating it. EVER! And I’m not saying that Battlefield 6 Open Beta was something that I hated, nor is it a god-awful product. I just think that there’s WAY too much hype behind it.
Battlefield 6 Open Beta was released in early August and the hype was real. I saw the positive thumbnails on YouTube and saw some of the videos that gave it praise. I figured, “Hey, maybe they’re coming back.”
With a sense of hope, I downloaded the beta on August 11th and a warm feeling of excitement filled me as I waited for it.
BUT… once the download was done and I hopped on, I was irritated when I saw just pre-order options on the menu. I looked around and kept asking myself, “Where the hell is the play button?” It was not a good start.
After some research, I realized the beta was available for only certain days. Early access on August 7th to the 9th. From the 9th to the 11th was Weekend 1, and the 14th to the 18th for Weekend 2.
Disappointed about this experience limitation, I wondered how was it back in the day I could play the Uncharted 2 Multiplayer demo for a month before it was released without any problem.
We live in 2025, we have smartphones, AI, EVs, hovering rockets, an internet that’s slowly becoming like Big Brother from 1984, and you’re telling me the beta is limited for only 8 days?
I work a 9-5, I have projects to tend to, and a presence to establish online. That means I’m to severely limit my playtime to a measly 3 days, are you fucking kidding me?!
And forget about me, what about everyone else? 8 days total!? And not everyone gets those 8! Early accessors get the first 2 days and everyone gets 6! WHY!?
And if I’m out of date, fine! Let me know! But don’t shove purchase options in my face without at least saying, “Hey, asshole! The game doesn’t start for another 72 hours! What are you, a fucking Battlefield fanatic!? In the meantime, buy our shit!” There’d be more integrity and elucidation in that.
Nevertheless, I saw the hype and positivity and gameplay footage and I wondered maybe I’m being too contrarian. Maybe it’s me and not EA. Maybe I’m being overly skeptical. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing. Maybe I’m being too rigid. What did I have to lose… apart from time…
But now on August 18th, after the closing of the open beta, I’m not so sure.
II. The Beta
Although I’m originally a Call of Duty player— not anymore, really— Battlefield 6 seemed like it was returning to its “grounded” military shooter aesthetic. I knew Battlefield had problems before, but I wanted to give it an honest chance.
I’ll be addressing those issues later as they are related to my skepticism. For now, I’d like to discuss about my unfortunate, brief experience of the beta.
Keep note: I’m playing on a PC, with an i9-9900K CPU @ 3.60GHz and NVIDIA GeForce ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super and 32 GB of RAM.
Beta launch day was here, I hopped on, and I found myself STILL LOOKING AT THE SAME PRE-ORDER OPTIONS THAT WERE SHOVED IN MY FACE BEFORE!!! And still NO START BUTTON!!! Not on first glance, anyways.
So, note to EA, and I doubt they will learn since they make the memory of a goldfish look utilitarian, you are NOT winning the hearts and minds of gamers when you shove Standard and Phantom Edition pre-order options in their faces on the menu rather than giving them the play button to start playing!
As ever, it seems the priorities of EA of selling the product come first. Consideration for player experience? “Aw, fuck that. We’ve got to have…money…”
Whatever you do, EA, don’t change.
I got in the firing range just to try out the guns. The firing range does help, but a problem I noticed was I didn’t have quick access to weapon menus to make adjustments and selections. Modern Warfare II did this better. And I couldn’t just whip out my sidearm, I had to select it from the menu!
Speaking of menus, it’s a mess. While adjusting certain configs for my mouse and keyboard, I got annoyed every time I returned from certain sub-options it would revert me to the first option on the menu list; not the one related to said sub-option.
For example, the first configuration in the options menu is the controllers. When I select graphics, they’d have the sub-menu next to it where I would select advanced settings to make configurations. When I finished, I’d go back and it put me back to controllers, not graphics.
It was a small annoyance, but it was an annoyance. It made it confusing what menu I was on when it didn’t leave me in the previous spot I selected. It’s a mess and was more of a hindrance for what happened later.
So, the guns and the firing range were fine and an interesting detail I noticed with the sniper rifle was to re-chamber a round, you need to manually reload it by clicking it. It reminded me of the gun mechanics in Red Dead Redemption II.
I’m not sure exactly how other players felt about this design choice, but apparently it can be reverted to automatic. Personally, I would try it out… until I die a million deaths, rage, and then select the alternative.
With the firing range out of the way, I switched to a game and tried out initiation conquest. It’s a game mode where two teams try to capture and hold control of a certain area; a battlefield classic game mode. However, unlike regular conquest, initiation conquest has AI with players.
The idea is to ease the player into the environment and game of Battlefield and get them accustomed to it.
I appreciate that as a novice as it helps to establish map knowledge and understand the varying options one can make when approaching certain situations.
Once I began, I experienced the one problem that would plague the rest of my time on the open beta: Performance issues. I was experiencing slow-motion gameplay, lags, and a sort of rubber-banding effect on the gameplay.
One frustrating detail was whenever I would run and turn toward a door, my character would slide past and overshoot the turn and run into the wall next to it. This forced me to correct myself into entering a building too late. Sometimes over-correcting myself, which was frustrating!
It was like slipping on ice with slow-mo reaction.
Imagine being shot at when fleeing and you were killed because you overshot the entrance due to movement delay.
So, my movement is more impaired than I am when I’m drunk, and I’m trying to play this game with this performance.
The damning thing is it doesn’t always operate like this. Sometimes it runs well, other times it’s unplayable. And too many times I had to stop and make configurations with some research.
It was here that I learned about the infamous Frostbite engine that DICE implements in all its Battlefield games. This engine has a reputation of bottlenecking CPU performance and apparently people with better systems than mine ALSO have this problem. Maybe even worse.
Now look, I understand it’s a beta and it shouldn’t be taken seriously. It’s basically a testing ground for us lab rats to see how multiplayer operates. Things like this happen; nothing out of the ordinary.
But an open beta IS a testing ground, which implies that critiques ARE necessary for the game to improve. That is if EA and DICE care enough and are not busy counting their Benjamins with their feet kicked up.
When you spend more time adjusting your system, making graphical configurations, restarting the app and computer, and fighting the game just to get it working properly rather than enjoying it, you know the game’s optimization is garbage and needs a lot of fixing.
Perhaps it’s not a constant flaw, but it did get in the way and gave me a negative experience.
I’m not a computer nerd— believe me, I tried programming on python, I sucked at it— but how in God’s name do you allow your engine to engorge itself onto a system’s poor CPU!? What, did EA also program it with the deadly sin of gluttony!? You have no way of redirecting it to the GPU!?
We live in 2025, we have AI, EVs, Rockets that— whatever…
Anyways, I hope they get rid of that piss-poor optimization when the game releases for the sake of others.
Actually, It makes me nervous thinking about it because I have Battlefield 1 in my library and I haven’t touched it yet. And now with my experience with the Frostbite engine, I cannot help but worry.
Apart from all that, I must admit that when the game was working, the multiplayer was serviceable. However, a detail stuck out to me that was uncannily familiar.
When it comes to level design, I’ve heard of Battlefield’s reputation of having large maps that dealt with large-scale combat. And don’t get me wrong, there were some large ones, but not in the way that I expected.
In fact, a majority of these maps felt very iterative of a Call of Duty design. And it would further appear that I’m not the only one who caught onto this as it seems that DICE is getting some ideas from Activision. Don’t take it from me, take it from Drift0r who is a long time veteran of the series since ’42 and did a better job in critiquing the maps. And his opinions resonate with mine, a novice.
Imagine that: I get fatigued with Call of Duty that I give Battlefield a try only to technically come back to Call of Duty. Rather dubious, don’t you think?
Do the maps work? Yes, I suppose they do, but some of the maps are so small or so narrow that it leaves no room for maneuverability and it practically becomes a death corridor.
A prime example is the game mode of rush, where the objective is to either plant a bomb or deactivate it, like in Counter Strike or Rainbow 6: Siege. However, rush demands the offensive team to set more than one bomb on two locations and defense to defend more than one target site. Once the two bombs are detonated successfully, the map narrowly moves along to the next objective.
I honestly like the flexibility this game mode has compared to what R6:S and CS2 does where it just ends after one detonation or defusal.
The problem is that as you move further into the map, the more it becomes a death funnel, and the game allows very few options to maneuver about in tight situations.
I much prefer the larger maps of conquest when Battlefield is just being its individual identity.
Speaking of identity, Battlefield 6 has classes in it. I don’t know why, but it surprised me that classes were a thing. At first I asked, “Why wouldn’t it be?” Battlefield has a history of having squads to take certain objectives while using tactical prowess.
Strangely enough, my feelings would have merit as I soon discovered that classes would be completely inconsequential.
You have the options of choosing assault, support, engineer, and recon.
A majority of players, myself included, seemed to take assault class in every game. I personally wanted to just shoot opponents and get kills. And since we chose assault, the others who chose other classes were a minority.
The truth of the matter is to take assault and not, say, support is completely inconsequential. Why? Because whenever a teammate goes down, that’s not support’s responsibility, but everyone’s. Anyone can pick up the downed teammate and revive them. As a consequence, support is not necessary to revive him or her when anyone can revive the teammate. Therefore people will, and have, select assault arbitrarily because of the lack of incentive.
To give a contrasting example, in Hell Let Loose, if a teammate goes down, the only person that can revive them is a medic. Thus, incentive is given to choose medic if you want your men to live and further push battle efforts to win. This gives consequence and incentive for such selections.
But Battlefield 6 does away with that as the game allows anyone to pick up any downed teammate. Actually, what they could’ve done is have anyone drag downed teammates to get them out of a compromising positions but have only medics revive them. That way consequential gameplay options are established and gives meaning to class selection!
The irony is that by allowing ANYONE to revive a downed teammate, no one helps out. I cannot tell you the amount of times where I had been downed and had more than two people nearby just “peace the F out” and leave me behind.
To push further irony, the only ones who do help in this act of humanity are AIs.
If I had to guess why people don’t help, it’s probably because players rationalize that they are too busy engaging a target that they have no time to assist. Furthermore, because the game allows anyone to help, there’s justification in thinking someone else will come along to resuscitate them.
Support classes have the ability to toss ammo. And it’s broken. The cool-down for said ability runs on a short timer that in no time they can toss more ammo, like Solid Snake. It becomes more broken when you have a team full of supports and EVERYONE can toss ammo! And guess what? More irony! They don’t toss ammo to support others, they toss ammo to support themselves.
It’s ridiculous.
To further emphasize this circus show, the class allows you to choose the best gun in the game, which is the M4A1, which has strong fire power, manageable recoil, and a high rate of fire making it effective in combat. Just slap a scope on and a vertical grip and you’re ready to rock, baby! The support becomes the Rambo, not the assault.
Again, Hell Let Loose figured this out by maintaining a certain amount of people playing certain classes while managing what sorts of firearms they were allowed to wield. And there’s no cool-down after a use of material or ammo. Instead, you had to get restocked.
In-game engineers were like pandas; you rarely see them. Although I have heard when people did choose them, they evolved into worker bees as they could fix tanks and aircrafts at a ridiculous rate. Furthermore, vehicles are more vulnerable on here than in previous Battlefield titles. I don’t know how I feel about that, but it certainly isn’t good.
And recon… well… they were the second most chosen class and they’re the sniping class of the game.
Another iterative moment that reminded me of Call of Duty was the glares reflected off their scopes. Not all scopes have it, but it’s the image you associate with danger when you’re in the middle of an open field and see one.
There’s an amusing meme online that’s been passed down the community where it’s a picture of a mountain in one of the maps and all you see is glints decorated all around it like Christmas lights.
Speaking of sight or vision, I haven’t had this issue, but some players have critiqued that vision is too realistic. For example, interiors of buildings make it harder to see from the outside and thus makes it difficult to judge whether they are safe or not to rush in. I imagine many player’s lives were compromised because of this.
On the other hand, and this is from experience, when you exit a building, the glare of the sun temporarily blinds you. It’s supposed to simulate the eyes adjusting into a new environment of lighting, which is immersive and a neat detail. But in a multiplayer game where you need constant vigilance, it can be a burden.
Another thing that I also noticed on the subject of vision was the crystal clarity to tell who the targets were. The reason being is because they always had a red diamond hovering over their head. That little detail bothered me because it’s implication that the game does not trust you to know who the opponents were.
If you are playing an FPS and you don’t know who your target is… then you shouldn’t be playing FPS games.
And it’s not just that you can see who your opponents are. You can see these red diamonds from a good distance. Apparently even behind foliage or smoke. Not only does it dumb down the experience for snipers, but it also gives them an advantage to spot their targets. Is this suppose to counter the sniper glint feature, or vice-versa?
If, for example, you took off that diamond feature and instead had your cross hairs on an enemy, and their username appears above them in red lettering, that would be fine. But to have it constantly above their avatar?
Like I said, it dumbs down the experience for sniping; there’s no sport or challenge when you find your target and engage to get that kill when the game generously shows you where your targets are. And if they are going to treat me like a child, then I demand a lollipop to come along with my pre-order of this game.
But then again, this is an EA product, so it would probably taste like shit.
III. Final Details
As the title suggest, I noticed the following in game.
- Footstep audio seems to play a part in here, but it’s usually useless when you’re bombarded with gunfire and discharged tank rounds.
- Shotguns are regrettably over-powered.
- Super Bullets. I know that I have mentioned performance issues already, but a certain subject of super bullets have made the rounds. Desynchs seem to be the culprit as most of my bullets never seem to affect enemies, yet they can down me with one hit to the chest. Again, it’s a performance issue that DICE needs to fix.
- Time to kill feels rather too quick and reminds me of Call of Duty again.
- The keyboard layout for crouching and prone is ripe for disasters since the keys are adjacent to the gadget button. I would unintentionally fat finger the button and got in quite a lot of predicaments.
- While trying to adjust keybinds for the gadget that kept messing up my gameplay, for some reason, and this was not continuous which made it more frustrating, it wouldn’t allow me to assign the gadget or the grenades to the proper mouse button.
- I’m not sure if anyone else had this problem, but whenever I was taking cover behind an obstacle via crouching, my guy would stand up for no reason, making me a target. I cannot say for sure what that was about.
- There’s a mounting ability when you want to fire around corners or over obstacles, but it is strangely inconsistent. Sometimes it’ll work, but sometimes your character will stop aim-mounting, expose him or herself, and sometimes when you want to mount and push the button, your character will knife the corner or obstacle.
With all these details and experiences in mind and having my brief time in the beta, I cannot help but feel like I just walked out of a Call of Duty match. And it’s probably because I kind of did.
Once again, it’s the size of the maps, the inconsequential nature of classes, the ridiculous customization options for classes, the TTK, and, most importantly, the lack of spirit of team or squad mates. It feels very individualistic.
There’s a video by slorgs who talks about how the modern-day Battlefield games are a far cry from the old ones because they were squad-based while this newer one is invidual-based, like Call of Duty. Hell, even Battle(non)sense goes over more details of the older games to back up slorgs’ thesis.
In hindsight, it makes sense as to why I can’t shake the unconscious associations of traditional Call of Duty meta while playing Battlefield.
When I hear these other Battlefield veterans describe the classic games, it’s sounds something more akin to Hell Let Loose, or maybe Arma.
Does this mean Battlefield 6 Open Beta is bad? No, not really. It can be good. The problem is it leaves me wanting something new. In the end, what’s the point of playing this when I have another game that does it arguably better?
I was expecting and hoping that Battlefield would introduce me that novelty that separated it from Call of Duty. And it didn’t.
IV. Out of The Game
To wrap up, did I enjoy the open beta? When it worked, sure. But unfortunately, I had to fight my system and the game to make it work. And it’s not an ideal way to experience a game.
On top of that, after seeing the trailers, the promotions, the fan hype and all the rest, and hoping that Battlefield would go back to its roots, I cannot say that I’m impressed. And the reason is… because it’s not going back to its roots.
What’s happening is that DICE and EA are going to try and swoop in for the kill, to take Activision’s fans since they screwed Call of Duty so bad. And how will they do that? By trying to do what Activision and what Triple A game companies do.
Word is that EA and DICE are planning to make annual releases of Battlefield in the next 3 or 4 years. And that does not bode well.
That’s right, they’re even taking the bad ideas from Activision which will probably lead them to the same road of failure. People got tired of Call of Duty, which is why there was an immediate drop-off of players on the first month of Black Ops 6.
The same will happen to EA and DICE if they continue down this path. There’s over $400 million riding on this project and future game budgets and prices will balloon further on, making this complete global saturation of annual FPSs more volatile. And when people get tired of this, it could lead to some sort of crash.
That’s what I’m predicting; I’m not an economics guy. But you don’t have to be smart to understand when lots of money is involved, there’s always potential for complete disaster when it meets failure.
Another detail was that there doesn’t seem to be any tampering of the culture wars. If you saw the trailers, it would be understandable why one would think that. But it seemed EA and DICE were being clandestine about this.
Although no female soldiers were seen in trailers, they were featured in the beta. That tells quite a bit when EA and DICE intentionally hid that in the trailers only to reveal it in game.
I could dismiss it as a simple luxury of thought ordinary civilians would have in the civilized world, which is fine and tolerable. However, there was a deliberate message behind it and people should be aware.
There’s a story of one player who messaged EA and DICE and requested if there was a way to deactivate female voices in the game. He asked politely and civilly.
The response? Banned. The reason? Hate speech.
If you want to earn MY TRUST in playing your game that has no intentional political identarian messaging, this… it not… the way… to do it…
By banning the player and calling it “hate speech,” EA and DICE has made their message quite clear that they want to involve and push identity politics on us. And it’s quite wretched that they made this decision because they are under the delusion that men and women are equal in battle. It’s a luxurious thought and they are completely wrong.
As a former service member, the last thing I want to see is a woman on the front line. So it’s quite understandable why someone would want to disable the death screams of women in battle. And I can unquestionably concur.
It comes from a place where deep down inside, the thought of having women facing gunfire in battle is unthinkable and upsetting.
I call it a luxurious thought because EA and DICE can comfortably think that men and women are equal in the military and in warfare in their bubble of idiocy.
They think that because they’ve never experienced the absolute brutality of war. They didn’t think about what could come about to female prisoners of war should they be captured by an enemy. And knowing history, there is unspeakable potential for cruelty and malice.
What they failed to realize is luxurious thoughts like that has no place on the frontline or in the real world. And they’re willing to push that for identity politics. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have pushed this narrative in their game nor banned the respectable player.
Again, as a former service member talking about this subject, I have a message for EA and DICE: Shut the fuck up with your identitarian politics and keep that shit out of our games. You’re not virtuous, you’re not righteous, you’re not saving the world, and you’re not arbiters or innovators of justice. You are just obnoxious narcissists who are unaware of your idiocy because you have no higher purpose in your sad, pathetic, wretched, isolated, wasted, degenerate, life.
If that wasn’t enough, there was also the controversy of rileycs, an infamous cheater of the Battlefield 6 Open Beta
Cheaters over the past several years have been running rampart in so many first-person shooter games that it’s rendered them not worth playing. It’s one of the reasons I don’t play multiplayer games anymore.
But the real problem was when half of the Battlefield community accused riley of being a cheater, the other half responded with anyone who accuses riley of cheating is a transphobe.
That’s right, ideology mixed with cheaters.
If community managers can ban someone for making a polite request for removing female voices, then there’s nothing to stop them from banning “transphobes” who call out legitimate cheaters.
That’s right, people can literally ruin a game by pulling the victim card and receive no consequences. That’s the kind of game I want to play! Don’t you!?
In the end, this builds up to nothing but cultural disaster and corrupted escapism and ruins everything for everyone. Especially the fans. I really thought EA and DICE would learn their lesson in identity politics after that disastrous business campaign of Battlefield V, but it seems I was wrong. Identity politics is here to stay.
In that case, I’ll take their advice: I don’t like it, so I won’t buy it.
V. Conclusion
Like I said at the beginning, I NEVER, EVER, EVER want to hate a game. I want to put down the controller loving it. But I cannot do it without incentive. And Battlefield 6 Open Beta lacks that incentive.
It’s nothing new or stand-alone, it’s mimicking Call of Duty, its optimization is a pain in the ass, it’s relying on a business model that will only corrode the industry, its price is ridiculously high in this unstable economic climate where other priorities in life must be considered, and probably, most important of all, these corporate idiots REFUSE to let go of identity politics and are willing to shove it down our throats like every other ideological idiot.
At best, it makes me not interested in buying it when it comes out this October. At worst, it makes me want to avoid it.
Battlefield 6 Open Beta is a competent experience and any one casual player can enjoy it. Especially with friends. And I was looking forward to getting into Battlefield and hopefully enjoy it after my poor experience with Battlefield 3 a long time ago.
Tragically, it does not offer anything new, interesting, or revolutionary that will keep me around. Instead, it seems to want to take the technique from its competitors and ride it out to certain industrial calamity. In the end, with that element at its core, it never really gave me much of a novel experience to begin with.
The only thing I wanted was a traditional Battlefield with modern innovation, minus all the things that deter it from succeeding. What prevents it from doing that is it suffers from a subconscious identity crisis that I’ve seen from in another game that is conscious of that exact symptom. And, unfortunately, they both seem to relish in it.
And that is the reason why Battlefield 6 Open Beta doesn’t impress me.
But, hey, that’s my opinion, what was yours? Did you enjoy the open beta? Did you hate it? Did I miss any details? Do you think there’s any hope for EA or DICE in the future? That’s a trick question.
Tell me your opinions in the comments below and subscribe to my website if you liked this piece. Stay tuned for more works. Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen!