The second week of Battlefield 6′s beta is upon us, and the refresh includes things like a new map and the classic Rush mode. With the addition of a Custom Search, you’d think there would be a lot to celebrate here, especially for a franchise that’s struggled to find its footing in recent years. But complaints are rolling in, and the consensus is this: Battlefield 6 maps feel cramped.
Typically, Rush mode offers a version of Battlefield that is emblematic of what the series does best: large-scale battles. In it, there are teams of attackers and defenders; attackers get a pool with a limited number of lives while the defenders can respawn infinitely. The goal is for the attacking team to arm or destroy a cache somewhere on the map, but defenders get a small window to disarm an attack and fend off advances. Should the attacking team prevail, the game isn’t immediately over. Rather, Rush moves on to a different map connected to the first one, and attackers have to pull it off again. A new rush replenishes lives, and attackers win if they manage to arm all three maps.
Rush is a fan favorite for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that it feels like a high-stakes battle of epic proportions. There’s some inherent drama to watching lives dwindle to single digits and managing to arm the cache while the odds are stacked against you. It also feels like a more tactical version of Battlefield, and one that requires some flexibility as teams advance and learn how the other half plays. Critically, Rush has typically involved teams between 12-64 players, depending on the Battlefield installment in question. There have been takes on Rush that condense the experience, but Rush is typically a large-scale affair.
Battlefield 6 is different, though. Rush mode is limited to 12 versus 12 players, which immediately changes the feel of the game type. Combined with smaller maps, there’s a widespread feeling that any sense of grandeur offered by previous versions of Rush is gone.
Notably, EA labels rush as something that provides “medium-scale” battles, which suggests that Battlefield 6 might have enormous skirmishes down the line. But if the game type already feels cramped, whatever qualifies as ‘big’ will feel like anything but.
“Petition to change ‘Medium’ to Absolutely Tiny battles,” reads the title of a highly upvoted Reddit thread.
The displeasure spans beyond Rush, though. Empire State is a new locale for week two of the beta, and it’s getting slammed for the same reason: the maps feel tiny. As you can imagine, the compact maps are further arming players to compare Battlefield 6 to Call of Duty. The combination of a short time to kill and run and gun playstyles are stoking fear about the future of the franchise and whether it’ll retain the sauce that set it apart from the competition in the first place.
“Feels like a COD map honestly,” reads one comment on a contentious thread. It later continues, “the old school BF feeling is gone now.”
“The game has changed towards targeting a bigger audience, we’re no longer the target audience,” laments another beta user.
Some of these remarks are definitely an exaggeration: on the whole, Battlefield 6‘s maps are much larger than what you’d find in Call of Duty. Instead, fans online are making it sound like EA turned Rush into a team deathmatch mode that takes place in Battlefield’s equivalent of Nuketown.
But players aren’t entirely wrong, either. The game isn’t out yet, and being a live service experience means that whatever the Battlefield 6 beta is now isn’t necessarily what it will be in the future. EA has proven receptive to player feedback as well, as evidenced by the recent addition of custom search. New maps aren’t out of the question in future updates. Still, there’s a niggling worry among veterans of the series that the heart of Battlefield is changing. Unless the more action-oriented design philosophy at large deviates from its current trajectory, some hardcore fans aren’t optimistic about the direction of Battlefield 6.
Player discussions online are a fickle thing, though, and game developers know this. Players think they want one thing, and in some of the instances where their wishes are granted, fans just end up hating it. Everything players are complaining about right now wasn’t true in Battlefield 2042, a game that featured, according to some, maps that were too enormous for their own good. That wasn’t the sentiment at the start, necessarily. At first, prior to release, people were excited about having a gigantic playing field that could take advantage of all of Battlefield’s signature vehicles. But as time went on, feelings started shifting. Folks wondered if it wasn’t the number of people on the maps, which could be up to 128 soldiers. But with the addition of more maps, players realized that the real issue was with the play area itself.
“They were simply too big for even that many people,” reads a remark in one popular Reddit thread. “And it’s pathetic that it took for extreme criticism from the community to let them know that they fumbled the maps badly,” another commenter said. As tempting as it is to wave away the pablum, even DICE felt that the game didn’t quite nail the right map size.
“The biggest action point for ourselves is that bigger maps doesn’t necessarily mean more freedom and playstyles, or fun,” Battlefield dev DICE said at the time. “So you can expect future maps to be smaller in scale than most of our release maps.”
EA changed course, and Battlefield 6 is where they landed after the fact. And… people don’t like that either! But if the Battlefield 6 beta is indicative of the overarching experience, it’s not a death sentence per se. Battlefield 2042 arguably got it wrong initially, and eventually got to a place where updates allowed its strengths to shine through. It didn’t, however, revive the playerbase.
And now, some acknowledgment that whatever internet denizens say online is hardly indicative of overarching player sentiment. Battlefield 6‘s beta is breaking record player numbers, which would suggest people have been enjoying the game even in its limited form. And with a franchise that’s been kind of floundering in its most recent iterations, an evolution of some sort has been a long time coming.
Another aspect worth considering is why, exactly, a shift toward COD-style gameplay is supposedly unacceptable. For my money, it’s partially a case of stigma and identity. Bear with me for a moment, because I’m about to make some very broad generalizations. For better or worse, Call of Duty has a reputation for being a series for bros and hyperactive children. Battlefield, by contrast, is more of the thinking man’s multiplayer shooter; the expansive maps allow you to think about the combat like a general even if you’re playing like run of the mill infantry. A fast trigger finger helps in Battlefield, but you can’t get very far without pairing those reflexes with a sound strategy. Just because you can get a killstreak in Call of Duty doesn’t mean you’ll be able to pilot a helicopter in Battlefield.
To be fair, most people can’t man a Battlefield chopper. But my point is that I’m not sure people enjoy the idea of playing the meathead’s version of Battlefield, or what it might reflect on them. Plus, we’ve already got Call of Duty, and no shortage of games trying to copy it.
You can’t blame fans for mourning the loss of what they felt made the game special, though.
