I game a lot, so it's fair to say that I get more excited by big new titles than the average person, but even by my standards Battlefield 6 is a tentpole release. I've been waiting years for this, after the disappointment of Battlefield 2042 and the slow decline of Call of Duty drained my friendship group of online shooter options.
Since its release on 10 October I've been playing it almost to death, with a big tally of hours now logged in its multiplayer modes – most of them on PS5 Pro, since that's where my friends play. I've been taking the time, though, to also play through the game's (admittedly unremarkable) campaign on my gaming PC, and to see how its visuals fare online, too.
As someone who doesn't necessarily pixel peep too deeply, and therefore can't claim the sort of hardware expertise that others might aspire to, I'm nonetheless really impressed by what I've seen on PC so far. I play on a rig centred around an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which is a bit of a beast of a GPU, but the signs are that even with an older card I'd still be faring really well.
Putting the game onto the very highest settings available at a native resolution of 1440p, I've been getting frame rates no lower than around 80fps in the campaign, even during the most intense moments with big maps and destruction taking place. It only takes a few tweaks, though, to get this average well over 100fps with almost no visual hit, which feels terrific.
For those gamers who do want to maximise their performance and don't mind dropping down to the very low end of a settings spectrum to achieve that, there are real shortcuts available, and it all basically means that extremely high performance metrics are possible on relatively modest hardware. That's not a sentence that often applies to big-budget launches on PC right now, with bloat and demanding performance feeling far more typical.
The fact that Battlefield 6 does this all while looking and sounding extremely realistic makes it all the more impressive (even if some lighting bugs do mean that indoor-to-outdoor transitions can be a bit wild right now). Its maps are detailed and offer nice destructability, and its sound design is really booming, especially when using the luxury SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite headset.
By ditching the resource-hungry lure of real-time ray-traced lighting, the team has bought itself a huge amount of performance headroom, and you can really see that shine as you game. When a building crumbles near you, or a vehicle crashes into your hiding spot, it's hard not to get carried away.
It's a high-fidelity experience, that's for sure, and it's left me in the admittedly enviable position of wanting to play the game on my PC more, but being declined by friends who rightly prefer the crossplay-off experience on PlayStation when it comes to in-game balance. PC players are demons, no matter how much they crow about aim assist, and letting me into the party on my PC would open them up to much more brutal lobbies.
I'll manage to get plenty of hours in on both platforms, though, because this has every sign of being a game I'll return to for the next few years. Once its battle royale component releases, I'm not sure how anything else will even be able to compete, frankly. Until then, I really recommend that any shooter fan picks it up for some old-school fun with new-school graphics.
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