Battlefield 6 Developers Acknowledge “Ghost Bullets” Bug, Ask For More Player Reports

While Battlefield Studios has been working hard at fixing bugs since the launch of Battlefield 6 last week, the development team has now been faced with new issues regarding the core gun play of the multiplayer shooter. After seeing quite a few complaints about “ghost bullets”, principal game designer Florian Le Bihan has asked asked for players for more details regarding the issues, including whether or not it has been a consistent issues and what weapons and attachments were being used at the time.

The issue was discovered by some players where, despite the game indicating that a target was hit by a bullet, complete with blood coming out of them as an indicator, the game itself wouldn’t acknowledge the hit by reducing the target’s health. Players on the Battlefield 6 subreddit have jokingly started referring to this issue as their guns being filled with blank bullets. Others have taken to calling them ghost bullets.

“We’re currently investigating this issue,” wrote Le Bihan on social media. “It is commonly observed with the target being visibly hit (blood splatters) but no damage is confirmed in the HUD (no hit indicator etc…).”

This bug seems to have some connections to a recoil-related bug that was originally spotted in the game’s beta from back in August. Le Bihan has confirmed that the recoil bug had since been fixed. However, he went on to note that after fixing the bug, the developers had identified two more issues that impact how Battlefield 6 handles bullet dispersion/bloom. One of these new issues is likely to be the ghost bullets.

The bug from the beta revolved around how recoil – typically used as a balancing tool – was handled in Battlefield 6. Typically, the more a player shoots their gun, the higher their recoil rating would rise, resulting in more and more of their shots missing with the bullets “blooming” around the target. To prevent this, the player would need to take a small 1-2 second break from firing their weapon to let their recoil reset. However, a bug in Battlefield 6 was seemingly preventing the recoil from resetting, making players’ bullets spray around their targets.

Since the October 10 release of Battlefield 6 across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, Battlefield Studios has been quite open in its communications regarding the various issues faced by players, and how it plans to solve them. Earlier this week, the developers noted that, since matches for the new Breakthrough mode weren’t filling up, changes were being made to the server backends to ensure that matches would fill up in a more consistent manner.

Several of these issues being discovered in such a short time should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to player interest in Battlefield 6. According to a recent report courtesy of Alinea Analytics’ Rhys Elliot, the shooter has sold more than 6.5 million copies in less than a week. Along with this, Elliot also believes that this has generated EA more than $350 million in revenue.

For more details about Battlefield 6, check out our review. Also check out our thoughts on its campaign, and why we believe so many players love the game.