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Playing Battlefield 6 last week, I found it a pretty frenetic affair. Running, rolling, diving, pivoting, ducking, sliding, and that's even before you get into the driver's seat of some rumbling ten-ton piece of billion-dollar military hardware. Battlefield as a series was never slow, but it was definitely chunkier and weightier than many other shooters out there – and I don't mean that as a negative.
I love zooming around in games like Doom or Marvel Rivals, but being slower and more sluggish can emphasize more strategic, tactical thought. If you can't easily take an action back, you're forced to think about it more before committing to it – and I don't know how I feel about the new game getting closer to what turned me off the Call of Duty franchise.
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Let's be clear: Battlefield 6 isn't having you race around like Sonic, but it's certainly less sluggish than its forebears. And in a vacuum, I have no problem with this! I love having freedom of movement in action games and shooters, especially if it's fun and seamless. Dropping down off scaffolding into war-torn streets and landing in a roll before coming up with a spray of bullets, vaulting a barricade when things get hairy and grabbing hold of a passing tank to be carried away – this is all good stuff, no doubt about it. It's a bit of a departure from standard Battlefield practice, but it's not some complete reinvention. Just running at one-point-two speed, y'know?
And yet to quote a great man: "But when I do it, it's cute!" Ever since I started approaching 30, my reflexes have begun to notably power down, and my reaction time is now measured with a calendar. So while I'm perfectly happy to be given the gift of swiftness in any game I play, a player base capable of using that gift so much more effectively is becoming a challenge with no solution. It's what drove me away from Call of Duty – the demand for quick reflexes and the incredibly high TTK felt like I was watching a time-lapse effect of a game I had once understood, and I was often killed before I realized I was in danger, let alone given time to respond.
Battlefield 6 isn't quite at that point yet – I'd say characters are still just more nimble than actually fast, if you see the distinction – but to broaden the scope beyond my own selfish needs, I do think that strategy and speed are two elements that play against each other in most games. It's incredibly hard to plan around a situation that is constantly, rapidly changing. Likewise, those who can quickly react to situations don't usually need to think ahead.
This may be part of why the promised "tactical destruction" felt less substantive than I had hoped. Aside from the difficulty of working out what walls can and can't be blasted through, planning a breach-and-clear assault takes precious time. But once you have even a few basic pieces in position, there's no guarantee that enemies will be where you think they are anymore – or that they won't have popped up somewhere else and blown your head off.
I had a lot of fun with Battlefield 6, and part of that definitely came from the characters' inherent agility. But I wonder how it'll change the experience once the wider world is brought in and millions can experiment and push that agility to its limits. Whatever the case, I'm definitely happy for this to remain the peak of the series' speed for the time being.
