A year later, I'm still playing this PS5 Pro game pretty much daily
Battlefield 6 hasn't let go of me
It's been just past a year since Battlefield 6 came out – something that you might have noticed thanks to a big promotional push around its new "Game of the Year" edition. That's a label you're allowed to use even if your own mum's the only one who gave it to you, but in this case there's a pretty decent shout about its success.
After all, the franchise had languished far behind Call of Duty for years, through some real low points (the monetisation in Battlefield V being possibly the nadir), only to leapfrog it brutally in 2025. It was the best-selling shooter of that year, and might have a chance at keeping that label this year even with Modern Warfare 4 arriving in a matter of days.
Sales don't make a game good, of course, and if anything, sometimes mean it has to come from behind in terms of my expectations. Yet, without any artifice, I can say that I play Battlefield 6 almost every day on my PS5 Pro, with a group of friends for whom it's completely supplanted COD at present.
We all fell back into that latter franchise in a huge way when Warzone released, but in the last few years the crazy in-game movement it required alienated us, so when Battlefield returned to a more grounded system it was music to our ears. Now, a year on, its fifth season is proving just as much of a hit, and its new maps (set in Las Vegas and Area 51) have already hosted a good half-dozen hours of team play.
I've particularly enjoyed the new Area 51 map, which is expansive and full of varied terrain – and unlike some of the arrivals in previous seasons (like Blackwell Fields), it doesn't feel like one big plane of similar situations to fight in. It has verticality, sprawl, and a whole heap of routes between points.
Crucially, though, the game is also finally at a point where it sounds as good as I remember it being during the pre-launch beta, when footsteps were incredibly clear and could help you win fights multiple times per round. After quite a few months of muddy audio, Dice has tweaked things to the point where wearing a headset once again feels completely essential.
While my friends all play on launch PS5 consoles, I'm also enjoying the game on my PS5 Pro, and it's one of those titles that makes me feel good about the admittedly sizeable investment it represents. It's sharper and a little more fluid than it would otherwise be, not least thanks to its use of PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) to sharpen its base image.
With PSSR actually getting upgrades over time from Sony, this means that BF6 is, if anything, also feeling better than it used to, and it's nice to be able to rely on a game for this long. I have reservations about some of the cosmetics in the game, to be fair, and the "Secuty" typo on a skin this season is particularly embarrassing.
I'm more fussed about the basic fun factor than I am about skins, though, and BF6 continues to nail that side of things. For a game to be drawing me in on basically any free evening an entire year on from release is really impressive enough on its own, frankly.
