Battlefield 6 Beta Fantastic Core, but Hollow Without Teamplay Features
After spending time with the Battlefield 6 beta, I can honestly say that this game looks, plays, and sounds incredible. The gunplay feels smooth, the visuals are stunning, and the audio design is everything you’d expect from Battlefield.
During early access, games felt very tight with less than 100 tickets left at the end. It was clear people were working together to play the objectives, and achieve a common goal. It was clear we were playing with lifelong Battlefield players.
That said, once the beta opened up, it became clear who this game is primarily catering to the casual player. That’s not inherently a bad thing; it’ll likely pull in a lot of Call of Duty players and broaden the player base.
But it’s come at a cost. Team play, community, and working together to achieve objectives, the very things that made Battlefield stand out.
Work with your squad and your team to win, or zerg rush the alleyway without any braincells and loose.
Commander Mode is gone.
It’s not for everyone, but it gave squads a reason to communicate, coordinate, and feel like part of a larger effort. Without it, matches feel more like a collection of individual firefights than a cohesive battle. Sometime you don't want to participate in the ground warfare, but effective commanders can and did make the difference in older titles. Working with your squads to secure a win was a rewarding experience. Again, it's not for everyone, but it seems like an easy to implement oversight.
VOIP is squad-only.
I can’t talk to anyone outside my squad. Sometimes you need to coordinate with other squads to turn a game around, and without team-wide comms, that’s impossible. This is a battlefield — communication should be a core feature, not a limitation. When I turned to text chat to encourage a strategic direction results were mixed. Sometimes the team would follow the suggestion, others I'd get people bitching about me chatting, and I don't care about that - it's the internet.
Time To Kill (TTK) feels a little too quick.
In previous Battlefields, if you got hit, you often had a split-second to return fire and while you’d usually lose, there was always that “I might be able to turn this around” moment. That’s gone now. The current TTK feels closer to COD’s Shipment-style gameplay, where the first to see the other almost always wins, and counterplay is minimal. A very minor adjustment here would address that feeling, and I mean a very minor tweak.
Overall flow feels disconnected.
Without tools to foster teamwork, everyone plays their own mini-game. The end result is matches that look like Battlefield but feel like a big deathmatch with capture points sprinkled in. There's no battlelog, no platoons and no community.
Battlefield 6 has the foundation to be one of the best in the series. But to get there, it needs features that encourage and even demand teamwork and community building. Without them, it risks becoming just another pretty shooter where players fight next to each other, not with each other.
If DICE builds it, players will come. But I suspect the features I look for like server browsers, platoons, persistent community tools won’t be there at launch.
