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The phrase "boots on the ground" is used no less than six times while interviewing the developers at Criterion, part of the creative team behind Battlefield 6's single player campaign, and several more times in chats before and after. That interview itself comes after I was given the chance to play three of the nine missions that comprise the single player campaign, a select sample of moments from the game's plot designed to show off what the latest entry in the series is all about.
Now out the other side, it seems as though Battlefield 6 is clearly intended as a return to a classic Battlefield. In the current era of shooters, where superpowers and jetpacks are the norm, the more realistic spirit of the late 2000s and early 2010s is flooding back with every second.
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As part of my three hour taster experience, I was given the chance to try the third, fifth, and eighth mission of Battlefield 6's story, and I can say my time definitely improved as the morning progressed. Mission three was a beach landing, evoking a kind of modern day Normandy – one that starts as a rail shooter experience, before pivoting to defending a tank that rumbles through the city at an unhurried pace. Mission five was better (in part because the first thing it did was give me a sledgehammer) before I got to do some breach-and-clear tactical gunplay through NYC apartment complexes.
But I'd say it was mission eight where things really came together for me, and the sequence I'm definitely most looking forward to replaying in October. Having largely been cinematic, linear experiences up until that point, suddenly I was given free reign of a scout-sniper in an open countryside with a series of enemy artillery guns to blow up, backed up by an RC drone that could drop explosives on the unsuspecting.
Good stuff, plus I was told I could handle the operation however I wanted, which may be why the devs couldn't help but look slightly disappointed when I took that as an excuse to ram-raid the depot in an armored jeep, furiously honking my horn and running down hired goons… At which point I'd inevitably get hit by an RPG and have to shriek for one of my NPC squadmates to revive me.
Design Director Fasahat 'Fas' Salim and Senior Producer Danny Isaac explain to me that even in the more linear levels, choice of approach was a high priority, though that still doesn't mean playing like an idiot is going to fly. "We want the player to be creative," points out Salim. "We want them to have agency in the way they deal with these problems. But you running out into the open… I noticed that after that you changed your strategy. You try different things, right? Because you understood that, 'okay, I might have to slow down a little bit.'"
He wasn't wrong there. In fact, I was rather surprised at times by how unforgiving BF6 could be at times, especially when I was darting around, hoping to squash mercs with a sledgehammer. I've been conditioned by recent FPS titles to assume a certain amount of invulnerability, but Isaac lays out the obvious to me in the aftermath. "It was definitely done as a cover shooter. But I think we've still got, hopefully, that right balance, that it's not punishing, right?" I can't speak for everybody, but I found it at a healthy level of challenge, especially when I stopped acting like a mindless berserker and actually took the threat of gunfire seriously. In this post-Elden Ring, post-Silksong world, it feels as though the barrier to entry is a lot less significant than what it used to be.
Marine life
The story itself is something that's a little harder to speak to in real specifics, getting a kind of piecemeal selection of greatest hits as I did. I wrote before about my secret wish for a true successor to the first Bad Company, but that was always going to be a tall order in 2025. Instead, BF6 is… well, say it with me: "boots on the ground."
And yes, Battlefield 3 and 4 are the stated ur-texts that hang over everything, but it's broader than that. Movies like Lioness, Civil War, Generation Kill and more are mentioned as inspirations by narrative director Emily Grace Buck, not to mention "so many contemporary war documentaries I couldn't even begin to name them at this point. () We have to look at what war really looks like today through the eyes of people who are experiencing it, through stories that are coming out now," though when I ask exactly which frontline accounts they're talking about, the group is quick to clarify that they're not looking at any particular corner of our wartorn world.
"First and foremost we're trying to build entertainment," says Isaac. "We don't look at, I guess, the news. I think it's more entertainment and documentaries. This game has been in development for a good few years. Anything that's kind of lining up with the game is coincidence."
Personally I found the game's narrative had a pretty elastic relationship with reality. Our protagonists, I'm told, aren't a shadowy cabal of black-clad killers from some unclear deep state division of the government, but realistic soldiers through and through. "You're not playing as Special Forces," Buck makes clear. "You're not the SAS. You're not a Navy SEAL. You're playing as a Marine Raider – which is a relatively elite unit – but you are still a person who's there." Well, I don't know how many Marines find themselves fleeing the tidal wave that comes from an exploding dam, or leaping across a collapsing bridge to grab a reaching hand that might save them from falling into the abyss, but I admit it's certainly more rooted in reality than the science fiction cosmic wars that Call of Duty has indulged in recently.
The sit-rep
All that being said, the experience was not without its flaws. The game always places you as part of a squad, backed by several AI buddies who you can give limited orders to (blow that vehicle up, mark everybody in that building, etc), but neither side of the conflict was living up to the military ideal. More than once I'd crash through a doorway, only to see hostile mercs uncertainly shuffling in place like I'd appeared too soon and they weren't ready for the scene yet. Likewise, relying on your allies to revive you when you're downed was no guarantee of anything. At one point the team medic seemed baffled by the flight of stairs between me and he, and had to spend thirty seconds trying to decipher how they worked, even as I patiently bled out on the mezzanine.
I also found visibility and reading the environment to be an issue – destruction physics keep throwing up clouds of smoke and ash with every falling wall, and with the enemy not looking particularly distinct from your teammates (along with everybody on both sides milling about like penguins), it can be hard to tell mid-firefight who's got your back and who's trying to stick a knife in it.
But those were only moments, and ultimately I did enjoy my time with Battlefield 6's single player. It definitely feels like a return to an older era of military shooters, one that doesn't feel the need to heighten itself with space age tech or superpowers. That will probably lose the interest of some even as it appeals to others, but right now I'm looking forward to going back to the war on October 10 – especially that cracking eighth mission. Oo-rah.
