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With Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 both releasing in fairly quick succession over the next couple of months, a big question remains – which of the big AAA first-person shooters is going to be better received? Right now, it's all to play for, but the fires of this rivalry appear to have been stoked by a new Battlefield 6 trailer, which appears to throw shade at Activision's long-running series.
Battlefield 6's live-action launch trailer was posted yesterday, and immediately opens on a group of celebrities – High School Musical (and a few other films, we suppose) star Zac Efron, basketball pro Jimmy Butler, country singer Morgan Wallen, and martial artist Paddy Pimblett – cinematically walking towards a fight, before a missile promptly takes them out.
After the smoke clears, we see a group of realistic Marines – notably, not famous faces – approaching carefully, with one asking, "who was that?" Another is quick to respond, "doesn't matter, let's move," before going into the real action of the trailer as we see the soldiers coordinate on their strategy, blow up a tank, and destroy a building. Yup, that's Battlefield.
Now, Call of Duty is never mentioned by name, but it's very easy to interpret this as poking fun at Activision's series and its many celebrity skins, which have included everyone from Nikki Minaj to Snoop Dogg and even Seth Rogen. That's on top of all the other wild collab skins, including The Boys' Homelander, Starlight, and Black Noir, and more recently Beavis and Butt-Head, just to name a few. Obviously, it's not the only game that does this – just look at Fortnite – but needless to say, it doesn't exactly feel like the most grounded military shooter out there when you have all these skins running around.
Meanwhile, Battlefield 6 devs have already made it clear that this isn't the plan for their upcoming FPS. "What's really important to us is that things feel grounded," producer Alexia Christofi previously said, noting: "We want people to express themselves and to have cool skins and peacock in a way like 'I look pretty cool and I have this great weapon skin…' but we want it to feel authentic to the franchise, that's the approach we're thinking."
With all that in mind, it seems even more likely that the latest Battlefield 6 trailer was a reference to this starkly less grounded approach. Fans certainly think so, anyway. "Starting off with a celeb cast only to blow them away and to show off realistic soldiers instead is the greatest COD diss I've seen," one responds on Twitter.
"Fucking shots fired at COD," another adds, while one says: "That CoD roast in the beginning was gold."
After Sega appeared to throw shade at Mario Kart World in its recent Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds ad, it suddenly feels like game rivalries are out in full force again.
