Battlefield’s “Back.” Now What?

By Moises Taveras | August 12, 2025 | 2:00pm

Video Games Features battlefield 6

After a long weekend spent playing Battlefield 6‘s open beta, I’m ready to join the choir: Battlefield is back. Despite my reservations about the game’s politics, the beta did in fact remind me of my teenage years spent playing the series with my best friends, messin’ around, foolin’ with all that goofy stuff. Whether it was haphazardly launching rockets at unsuspecting snipers, leveling a building on top of an unwitting enemy, or sneaking around enemy lines to collect dog tags, I enjoyed myself a great deal. The latest game in EA’s storied multiplayer franchise is in rare form after a decade of less-than-stellar installments that threatened to drag the series’ name and rep through the mud. It has dropped some of the recent gimmicks, like map-altering freak weather, to drill down on the fundamentals and get Battlefield back to where it was a decade ago. I think it’s mostly there, too. Now the question on the tip of my tongue is: where do we go from here?

I ask because EA and the collective army it has tossed at the Battlefield franchise have been trying to answer that question for about a decade now with no real answer. Following the success of Battlefield 4 in 2013, it tried toying with different theming and aesthetics to mixed results; the oft-forgotten Battlefield Hardline turned the players into cops and robbers on the streets of Miami, whereas the widely acclaimed Battlefield 1 transported them to the underexplored trenches of World War I. From then on, the waters got significantly choppier, and while games in the series never struggled to move several million copies, it became quite clear after a while that EA was less than satisfied with the numbers they were pulling. Meanwhile, fans of the games were increasingly frustrated with the series’ direction.

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And so we land back at Battlefield 6, which is, at best, a hedged bet. It’s conservative in almost every regard and its developers haven’t exactly been shy about how it explicitly, intentionally harkens back to now decade-old installments. As a result, it often feels more interested in untangling the issues made by its most recent predecessors than taking any real strides forward. Battlefield is done with specialists, and is all in on back-to-basic classes. It is also doing away with 128-player matches, sticking to the tried-and-true 64 player max. Battlefield 6 is even repealing the “Levolution” gimmick it began chirping about around Battlefield 4‘s launch. On its surface, you could be forgiven for thinking this newest title was largely one big step back.

Except most of these changes are in fact an improvement for Battlefield 6. 128 players was simply too much for Battlefield 2042, and the maps produced to fit this number were more of a chore than anything. Specialists, who acted like heroes in Overwatch with unique abilities, just didn’t fit Battlefield’s class system, which seemed to fall by the wayside. After enough experimentation, Battlefield stopped feeling like itself. What does it mean for Battlefield 6, then, and indeed probably the rest of the games industry, that a step back appears like a leap forward? What does that spell for Battlefield 6‘s future?

It is, after all, still a product molded for a growth-obsessed industry at the end of the day. When it launches this October, it will be in the hope that it captures the attention of 10s of millions of players to start. By the time it launches, it will boast a roadmap with vaguely defined goals all in service of reaching that audience milestone—and, if reports are to be believed, the hope of even more. Reportedly, EA wants the game to reach 100 million players, a number that seems wholly unattainable, and yet resembles the kind of expansion-above-all-else thinking that drives the C-suite which continues to do irreparable damage to the games industry.

EA wants Battlefield 6 to save it, and is willing to unfuck the mess of the series that it made in order to get there, but the truth is rather the inverse: EA seems best positioned to run this game, this series, into the ground, and is pretty likely to. It will force Battlefield into whatever shape it feels is best suited to its goals. For now, that means a throwback, but we’ve been here before with the very same titles that Battlefield 6 is inspired by, and look at what happened to the series after that. I trust that Battlefield 6 won’t bomb, considering the early numbers and the fact that sentiment already seems on its side. It’s what happens beyond its launch that concerns me, and leads me to think that history might simply repeat itself.

Battlefield 6 might be starting a war it can’t win. It’s hamstrung by unrealistic expectations and shepherds without conviction who won’t hesitate to pull an about-face on its current trajectory for the most meager possible increase in influence and money. It can neither fully commit to the past which it gestures at nor fully shed the hell-ish entrapments of the games-as-a-service present into which it is being cast. It is not a game that can possibly envision a better future for itself. In other words, it’s stuck. So where does it go from here? Unfortunately, probably nowhere great.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.