BF6 Beta feedback

I played almost 60 hours of the BF6 beta, did all the challenges and maxed out every weapon at level 20 and the following are my thoughts on how to make BF6 the best that it can be on launch.

First, let me tell you what kind of player I am. I have been playing shooters for 25+ years, but none of the modern battlefield games appealed to me, besides BF6. I've played BF1942, BF2, BF Heroes from the BF series. Other notable shooters I have played are CS1.5-CS2, Quake3, CoD4MW, MW2, BO1, MWII (2022), Natural Selection 1+2, Tribes: Ascend and many others.

Now let me get some positives out of the way, so I can focus more on what I think needs some work.

The game looks and runs really well, even older hardware from what I am hearing from friends. Even with everything around you exploding and crumbling. Great work on that.

Also the amount of cheaters that have been banned is a great sign that you are taking this issue seriously. Hopefully this continues and even improves.

I love the more grounded thematic approach that seems to be taking place compared to previous entries and especially CoD, which has gone fully mental with it's aesthetics. I really, really hope this will not be ruined in BF6 at a later date because of new skin additions to the game.

Now while I am on the aesthetics, let me start with some of the criticisms I have which will affect whether or not I will end up buying the game.

Now I don't mind female characters in the game, but I think the spawn rates should be more realistic. Right now it seems to be 50% chance to spawn as a male/female, while in reality you would have less than 1% females serving in the kind of roles we have in battlefield. It would be cool if you simply set the chance to spawn at 1% and maybe limit it to specific classes. It would make it much more special to spawn as a female and it wouldn't be completely immersion breaking as the current 50% is.

Alternatively and maybe preferably, I think the solution to this is to make it an option for each player to adjust the rate for themselves client-side, so every player can adjust the spawn rates for all players (client-side, from their own point of view), so one could set a slider between 100% male and 100% female. And if you want to really want to top that off, you could add the option to choose which of the two genders you want to spawn as on top of the client-side slider. But depending on the current implementation, this might not be feasible to implement in time for release.

While the gunplay generally feels okay, recoil definitely needs some work. Some guns have practically no recoil and that should never be the case for any gun, despite being fully decked out with recoil dampening attachments. It really lowers the skill ceiling of the game and makes it less interesting to learn to master the different weapons.

I also think that having different recoil for mouse and controller isn't a good thing. I have played mostly shooters on PC, but also have played CoD on consoles and it is entirely possible to learn to control recoil with a controller to a satisfactory degree.

Auto-aim isn't needed for controllers either. I was one of those rare people that actually disabled that and learned to manually aim, instead of just aiming in the general direction of the enemy and then just holding ADS and spray while the auto-aim is locked onto the enemy. Auto-aim lock-on lowers the skill ceiling by insane amounts on controller. It also makes controllers very imbalanced vs mouse/keyboard, as it is effectively aimbot that requires minimal skill to use, while mouse/keyboard requires a good amount of skill to spray on target for the same period of time, having to deal with player movement and recoil. 

If you do not remove auto-aim for controllers, please do like other games and only match up mouse/keyboard players with others using mouse/keyboard, and match up controllers with controllers (regardless of platforms). And if you switch input method during a match, make a pop-up that tells them to use the input that they joined the lobby with or quit back to the menu and queue up again to be matched with players using the input method they changed to.

Now for some of the glitches I have seen playing the beta.

Right now you can climb up broken walls, get to the bridge in Cairo and then go from rooftop to rooftop across a large portion of the map and enemies will have a very hard time getting to you. Either make the rooftops accessible on most buildings (preferable as more vertical gameplay is good) or make sure that people can not climb up there. Make things unvaultable or add some invisible walls that blocks player models (but not projectiles) to prevent players from doing it.

You can slide into a window and gain incredible momentum and height and actually use that in combination with the parachute to relocate yourself in nonsensical ways. This should just straight up be fixed.

Sometimes when you run into angled geometry, your character flies up into the air and this causes similar problems as the other glitches I described. I did it several times during the beta myself, unintentionally. Not only can it be abused if/when players are able to reproduce it reliably but it can also be detrimental to players when it happens accidentally and you are suddenly flung up into the air 5 meters (not exaggerating) and have been completely exposed from your cover.

If the things above are fixed on release, I will immediately buy the game, but I do not pre-order digital products. It seems like complete nonsense to me to pre-order a digital product that isn't scarce. Pre-ordering was born of scarcity of physical products, but somehow carried over to digital products without scarcity. Also I like to see videos of a product after release before I decide to make a purchase. 

With that being said, BF6 is well on track to become a product that I want to buy post-release and want to play. But it requires a little bit of work to fix these minor issues, for me to actually go for it. I hope you are taking player feedback seriously, because you could make a significant shift in the first person shooter landscape with this game, if you play your cards right. I for sure am rooting for BF6 to become a great game.