Battlefield 6

There's always a way to throw yourself back into the fray or to grab a breather and assess your options

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For almost as long as Battlefield has existed, it's been hampered by an unhelpful line of thinking: because the series is competing with Call Of Duty, it should play like Call Of Duty. Most recently, this impulse resulted in Battlefield 2042, a game which – at launch – was defined by systems that undermined teamwork and encouraged players to think more individualistically. Fans could spend hours preening their specialists, gradually adding to a nest of unlocked weapon attachments, plastic explosives and recon drones until they had assembled a build that was entirely their own. It might have been an alluring progression system worthy of Treyarch or Infinity Ward, but it meant an end to the clear, simple class system that first made Battlefield tick.

DICE had more or less reversed its mistake by 2023, but by then the damage to Battlefield 2042's reputation and playerbase had been done. And so Battlefield 6 represents a fresh opportunity to get the class system, the teamwork and everything else that makes Battlefield different from COD right the first time – and by and large, this is what DICE and the other developers unified under the Battlefield Studios label have accomplished. The problems from 2042 aren't the only ones that have been addressed, either. During August's beta, we had concerns about BF6's maps being too small, but in the launch version they're all ideally sized, wide enough to swing a fighter jet, but not so enormous that the action always seems to be happening one block over.