I've been waiting a long time for this – since well before its tremendously impressive and successful open beta, Battlefield 6 has been a light at the end of the multiplayer tunnel for me. After a good half-decade of consistent fun, my group of friends and I have grown tired of COD: Warzone, which is in as stale a place as it's ever been, and the great hope that BF6 brought with it is hard to sum up.
Now, though, after months of waiting, it's finally here, and I played a whole heap of the game over the weekend, to see if it could live up to expectations. I'm extremely pleased to report, like many others, that this is one of the best mainstream multiplayer shooters to be released in ages, and that's down in no small part to some fairly stunning visuals and audio.
The core Battlefield experience is back at last. Big and medium-sized maps are full of vehicles and strategic points for each team to contest, with a range of modes offering different experiences. Conquest lets you make your own mind up about how to take over territory, while the likes of Breakthrough or Rush funnel everyone towards objectives for a far more hectic experience.
Along the way, you'll watch as maps go from pristine environments to war-torn and devastated landscapes, full of rubble and half-demolished buildings to be used as cover. The game's destruction system isn't quite as total as the zanier The Finals, but it's on a much grander scale, and still impresses hugely.
I'm going to be testing how Battlefield 6 holds up on my 5070 Ti in the next couple of weeks, too, but since my social group plays entirely on PS5, I've been putting the hours in on my PS5 Pro for now. Thankfully, EA is catering to the pro console properly, with its own performance targets distinct from the base PS5.
In practice, this basically means higher resolutions in both quality and performance modes, with the latter getting you somewhere around 80fps most of the time for a bit of a bump in smoothness – but coming in sharper than it does on the PS5. That's not necessarily the biggest difference ever, but it's a welcome bonus for those of us playing on Sony's most powerful console.
The graphical decisions that Dice and the other Battlefield studios made for BF6 are looking like pretty canny ones, too. One that's drawn some attention is the lack of ray-traced lighting – but the per-map baked-in solutions that have been chosen instead seem to make for a more performance-optimised final game, with plenty of headroom for destruction physics, and there's no doubt it looks tremendous.
The game also sounds unbelievable. I'm playing on the new SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite, which is as high-end a headset as you'll find, and the destructive explosions and gunfire in Battlefield 6 are as punchy as anything I've experienced in a shooter. The rebooted Modern Warfare in 2019 had some seriously excellent shot sounds, but it's been surpassed here.
In fact, the whole multiplayer experience can be quite neatly summed up by the word "cacophonous". Whether you're pushing an objective with the support of a tank, being strafed by an attack helicopter and its missiles, or hiding in a corner while a building collapses around you, the game's full of moments of extreme noise, in the best possible way.
I know that I'm going to be playing Battlefield 6 for hundreds of hours. The lack of buzz around COD: Black Ops 7 is telling, and the Battle Royale mode that Battlefield has never nailed promises to arrive before the year is out to truly rival Warzone. If it can stick that landing, I might just have my new forever game.
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