I’ve Turned on Battlefield 6’s Senseless Destruction

By Moises Taveras | October 14, 2025 | 3:30pm

Video Games Features battlefield 6

I’ve Turned on Battlefield 6’s Senseless Destruction

On September 2, 2025, Motaz Azaiza broke my heart. The photojournalist, who has been covering the carnage in Gaza, shared a video which he captioned, “The most devastating transition in my life..” The first half of the clip shows the Gaza Strip in July 2023. The city is alive and well with the sights and sounds of pedestrians milling about and vehicles on the motorways. Trees line the streets, and you can hear chatter—even the sound of someone shouting at one point—as well as the distinct honk of car horns. A life here almost seems plain…normal, even.

Though I know what to expect from the jump to September of 2025, a lump nonetheless forms in my throat as the image comes into shape. The facades of most buildings still standing have crumbled. Most everything else is rubble. Shoddy tents pack the street and there are more people here than ever. Only these people are different: They’re the lucky ones. These are the survivors, the ones that have made it through ceaseless bombardments and fought off starvation long enough to lose their homes and wind up here. This city of tents, which stretches miles into the blurred distance of Azaiza’s video, is their new home. This is the kind of ruin that real-world destruction has on innocent lives, and I’m reminded of it every day. It kills me.

I’ve been turning this image, and so many others out of Gaza, over in my head for the last several months and years. Every last kid stumbling out of the wreckage of a bombed-out building. Every parent who’s been forced by this ongoing cruelty to hold up the lifeless body of their child. Every normal life surrendered to insatiable violence. Every starved Palestinian I see pleading on Bluesky for any aid before the site’s callous and insufferable moderators silence them.

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In a way, I’ve been haunted by these images and the toll that man-made destruction takes on people, and their specter has hung over every moment of my time with the jingoistic Battlefield 6, the latest installment in EA’s tentpole FPS series. A series whose legacy is inextricably intertwined with a now-fetishistic approach to environmental destruction. And as blameless as Battlefield 6 is for the current state of the world, I can’t separate it from the tragedies its environments echo nor can I help but think what a feckless reflection it is of our reality.

For decades now, Battlefield has set itself apart in the realm of multiplayer first-person shooters in a number of ways that have attracted me and numerous others. For one, its scale has been hard to replicate. For as long as I’ve been playing the Battlefield games, they’ve emphasized conflicts that spill across massive maps filled with vehicles like helicopters, jets, and tanks, as dozens of players are pitted against one another in matches that have, at one point, fit as many as 128 players. Imagine dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of tiny narratives unfolding and colliding with one another at the same time in sprawling arenas like that, and it isn’t hard to see the appeal.

Crucially, Battlefield has also long placed an emphasis on realism and a level of simulation that its competitors, like Call of Duty, have shied away from. This has manifested in technology—the Frostbite Engine out of DICE—that has rendered games at photorealistic levels and birthed Battlefield’s signature penchant for destruction. Beginning with 2008’s Battlefield: Bad Company, every subsequent title in the game has made a greater spectacle of the player’s ability to punch bigger holes into walls and wreak havoc. In Bad Company 2, you could level small buildings and huts. By Battlefield 3, you could strategically knock down a giant radio tower.

Battlefield 4 encouraged players to topple a whole skyscraper in Shanghai, leaving a ruinous island of rubble in the middle of the map and spreading dust through the surrounding city streets like a scene straight out of 9/11. Battlefield 1 allowed you to knock a zeppelin out of the sky and watch it careen into the masses on the ground, eventually scorching the Earth. Battlefield is quite capable of rending horror from its spectacles and it’s been tough, nigh impossible, to get these parallels out of my head.

Mirak Valley, one of Battlefield 6‘s largest maps, has already been torn apart by the time I arrive there. As my teammates and I hold the line, a rocket flies past our heads and into the building behind us. My vision is blurred by debris kicked up in the explosion, but more importantly, I hear the building groan. I hear the supports snap and its structure give way. It crumbles to pieces with someone inside, and I can make out the anguished cries of a downed player in the wreckage. It’s the cries of a woman.

On one hand, it is impressive how theatrical Battlefield 6 is. How its sound design complements the physics at work and turns that inconsequential moment—which was all of about twenty seconds of a much lengthier match—into such an indelible sequence. On the other hand, I can’t help but think, “God, is this what Motaz sees day in and out? What does he hear while he photographs families crushed under the weight of their own homes brought down on them or films the destruction of the building from which he’d shoot the sunset?”

Throughout Battlefield 6‘s open beta, the developers tallied the property damage players had wrought. By the end of the first weekend, the number was north of $70 billion, and still, the developers wanted more wanton destruction. $1 trillion by the end of the second weekend, to be exact. If you ask me, it was an ill-conceived “challenge” filled with boneheaded language, but such is largely the case for gaming, which often riffs on the affairs of the world for theatre—for fun—while rarely saying anything of substance about it all. But at least the bluntness of such a challenge reveals the priorities and cynical worldview of its creators, who only know how to quantify that devastation in dollar amounts.

By the end of a long and fruitful Battlefield match, it is typical of the map to look like some of the scenes I’ve seen out of real cities turned into warzones. The before and after of it all often looks eerily like Azaiza’s video of a devastated Gaza Strip. Eventually, every structure is hollowed out by tank shells and grenades. Any life those places could’ve sustained has been destroyed. It’s impossible for me to place a number on it. The damage done is incalculable.

To answer my earlier question, no, the destruction I’ve observed and played a part in while playing Battlefield 6 isn’t comparable to what Azaiza sees out there. Of course, it can’t be even close. Because where EA and Battlefield Studios see dollars, and where players like me have been conditioned to see opportunity for reckless abandon, Azaiza sees the once lively region he calls home and the stories of his family, friends, and neighbors crushed under the weight of senseless violence. He sees the bodies.

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.