Sometimes life gives you lemons – I just got back from a lovely week on the English coast, but the timing of my holiday meant I missed an opportunity to get hands-on with Battlefield 6 this week, which is somewhat gutting. Still, I’ve been poring over the trailers and briefings that EA and Battlefield Studios released as part of its announcement event, and my hype is building hugely.
There’s no way to really avoid acknowledging that Battlefield 2042 was a disappointment. While its launch brought some great ideas (in particular, the Portal system of old content), its abandonment of classes and insistence on Specialists was misguided, and its glitches didn’t help matters.
That means that Battlefield 6 feels like a seismic moment – it’s coming at a time when Call of Duty: Warzone has gone majorly stale, and the ground seems ripe for a new class leader in the first-person shooter (FPS) genre. These trailers don’t half make it seem like BF6 could assume that mantle.
Where 2042 mistakenly assumed that players would be impressed by doubling the player count on each server, BF6 seems to be a reassessment, judging that higher-fidelity action and better destruction are the way forward. I couldn’t agree more – 64-player servers are plenty chaotic enough already, and it’s obvious that the more detailed maps are streets ahead of what 2042 offered.
Of course, a crucial part of this is that 2042 was a cross-gen game, engineered to work on the PS4 and Xbox One, while BF6 has dropped those older platforms. This is part of why its visuals are such a dramatic leap forward, with new lighting and destruction that makes everything the franchise has done before look like light work.
Plus, the developers have listened to feedback and reinstated the class system to help incentivise strategy and teamwork within squads and teams. Trying to be like Call of Duty has never really worked for Battlefield, so I’m really hoping this means it can be the best version of itself.
Having mentioned those older consoles, though, the footage we’ve seen so far has left me with one big question – how’s BF6 going to look on PS5 Pro? EA hasn’t yet lifted the lid on what enhancements it’ll get, and the game build that creators and journalists played at the launch events was on high-end Nvidia 5070 PCs, from what I’ve gathered.
That means we don’t yet have a clear view of console performance, although a 60fps aim is almost guaranteed. I’m hoping that the PS5 Pro gets a proper enhancement that boosts its fidelity and perhaps that framerate up, since this seems like the sort of explosive game that could underline the console’s power.
That said, with my own 5070 Ti rig in my back pocket, I’ll be incredibly interested to try the game on both platforms. All my friends play on PS5, so I’ll almost certainly mainly play there, but I’m mighty tempted by a double purchase, just so I can see how far it can push things on a beastly PC.
Of course, it’s not impossible that even the PS5 Pro might struggle to keep up with some of the most advanced additions, and that upgraded destruction looks particularly taxing. As someone who’s hugely enjoyed The Finals over the last couple of years, though, I’m super excited for the tactical options it’s going to unlock.
All in all, this is a dynamite reveal for Battlefield 6 – and the open betas that are coming should hopefully give us a proper chance to see what it’s like on consoles as well as on PC.
