I’ve always been a fan of the Battlefield games. Some of my earliest gaming memories are of sitting at my friend’s PC playing Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam. I skipped the Bad Company games, but over the years I’ve played most other games in the series. It’s come around to the open beta for BF6, but before I talk too much about that I wanted to discuss what I think went wrong with Battlefield 2042, a game I almost entirely skipped.

I think at this point it’s fairly well known that 2042 wasn’t the great success it was meant to be. As a game that was a supposed love letter to fans of the series, it missed the mark and from what I’ve read in the time since, the only saving grace that came from it was Portal mode.

I remember going into the open beta for that game with a mix of hope and skepticism. It was marketed as the biggest ever Battlefield, but looked like it was trying to copy Call of Duty’s homework. It also brought in a reworked class system, removing the traditional structure and replacing it with specialists.

After playing the beta, I decided not to preorder, and for all the complaints around the mechanics, specialists, lack of destruction etc., that were going around at the time, my biggest complaint and the reason I think the game ultimately didn’t do well was the quality of the maps - caused by the scale in my view.

DICE aimed big, quadrupling the size of the maps and doubling the player count to 128. But the problem is, the maps in Battlefield were never particularly small, and sometimes there were quieter areas of the maps. So when you quadruple the size but only double the players, most of the map felt almost deserted to me. For performance reasons (I assume), there was then limited scenery. The game felt like it turned into a very bland running simulator, plagued by poor netcode. Overall, I think this was the biggest failure of the game, and why it failed.

In my view, the game could have been decent. It may never have been great, but if DICE had prioritised the quality of the maps rather than scale, and making a good 64 player experience rather than delivering less than ideal 128 player game modes, it could have been decent.

I recently picked it back up, for free thanks to PS Plus, and I feel vindicated in my opinions up to this point. The small amount of time I’ve spent on it recently has been playing the Close Quarter maps and it feels like a much improved experience.

Going into the BF6 beta then, I was extremely skeptical. Would DICE have learnt from their mistakes?

At first glance it feels to me like they’ve done a good job. No more specialists in sight - we’re back to a good ol’ class system - Assault, Support, Engineer, and Recon. I do somewhat question taking the Defib away from the Assault class but overall I’m fairly happy in this area. The gunplay feels solid, and although I have a gripe with the shotguns, that is something that can be fairly easily balanced. I also haven’t had any issues yet with hit reg or netcode. All sounding positive so far.

But what about the maps? The things I think killed the previous iteration. Overall I have very few complaints. The scale of the maps feels decent, it never feels like you’re too far away from the action. There are plenty of routes through the maps, the sight lines don’t feel overly long. With the exception of Liberation Peak, I think it’s a solid effort on this front.

My main complaint map wise is actually the opposite of 2042 - in my view there is too much visual clutter. Nobody wants a total lack of cover, but on some of the maps the rubble around the place feels a little too distracting. It feels a bit like DICE have done something like this - “We’ve heard your complaints about the lack of cover in 2042” and then gone overboard with the cover brush. Some of this could come down to colour blindness on my part so I’m not going to judge this too harshly either.

So while I don’t have a lot of time to play the BF6 beta, and I still won’t be preordering, it feels like DICE have listened to the player base this time round. Maybe this will be the love letter to the fans we were originally promised? Only time will tell.