Improving Battlefield 6 Dogfighting: Decouple Freelook setting and features
I sincerely hope this message reaches the right and enough people, and that this feedback is finally heard. Please take a minute of your time, because I truly care about making the game a bit better in terms of dogfighting 🫡
With the recently announced TopGun collaboration, especially with one centered around jets and dogfighting, you should now take the opportunity to implement some essential dogfighting features that are unfortunately still missing in this Battlefield title. These would significantly improve the overall experience, making air-to-air combat more engaging, cinematic and much more enjoyable.
BF6 has a lot of potential being really good in terms of air-to-air combat / dogfighting, but for that to be the case, well, I will state some issues and especially one important issue.
In Battlefield 6, you’re still unable to maneuver your jet while simultaneously looking out of the canopy in first person view. If you want to look around in the cockpit and outside of the canopy, you can only do so while remaining static and unable to maneuver, which is simply nonsensical. This is essential in a dogfight and, basically, necessary for it to even feel like a proper dogfight in the first place. Currently, the pilot's neck is just stuck looking forward.
Imagine being a pilot in a dogfight, who is stripped of his awareness, not being able to properly keep track of his enemy’s position at basically all times, not being able to tell whether the enemy has decided to make an angle switch so he can adjust accordingly by changing his rudder input, managing his energy state, or both. Or not being able to properly keep track of his opponent’s energy state, which can have a significant impact on his turn radius, loop geometry, angles and much more.
This tiny yet incredibly simple feature would undoubtedly make dogfighting so much more fun while adding a great amount of depth to it. It would make the experience far more immersive for pilots – which, in terms of dogfighting in a Battlefield game, is truly a a great thing and especially important. Who on earth wouldn't want to be able to operate their jet or plane from a real pilot's perspective, right?
As already mentioned, it would add such a great amount of depth by raising the skill ceiling considerably – solely in terms of air-to-air combat / dogfighting. For pilots, there would be many new things to learn and practice, simply because they would finally have access to much more important, essential information about the fight around them. That is exactly the kind of depth that makes dogfighting fun in a game, but also rewarding for players who are genuinely interested in it, or even passionate about dogfighting.
A 2D minimap radar with tiny jet icons simply doesn’t make up for all the depth and potential that is being left on the table.
This feature was already implemented in Battlefield V. It was simply called “Decouple Freelook” in the settings. Unfortunately, this was disabled by default for everyone, and it was also very well hidden within the settings. As a result, unfortunately only very few players even knew it existed, let alone enabled it. It was truly the definition of a hidden gem and it still is, or else it would have been implemented in all following titles.
Demo video: https://youtu.be/uQwRfvJ5GfI?is=v1eiazaRprFaKkkH
The players that knew about this setting, well, for example the more niche dogfighting community grew tremendously around this title, and many of the players who still dogfight to this day continue to stick with Battlefield V. It's definitely because of what this feature made possible, but also because of BFV's surprisingly deep and genuinely impressive flight physics. Unfortunately, also the flight physics themselves were somewhat hidden behind a number of suboptimal default settings. Because of this, the depth of the flight model was neither immediately apparent visually nor particularly noticeable in how the planes felt for most players in this title.
To this day, it remains the only Battlefield title that still has such an active dogfighting scene though. There are community-hosted dogfighting servers still active multiple times a day, across Europe, North America and Asia. Some players have been doing this for six years or more, because of the fun involved and there unfortunately being no other option for them in more recent BF titles. Thank's to features like this, no one has truly reached the skill ceiling yet. Everyone's still getting better and better depending on how much they play and practice, and that is exactly what keeps passionate players invested in a game and also the games released in the future.
• the second, but also very important issue: in third person view, let pilots be able to "look back" while still being able to move their jet, like in other BF titles.
It would make the game so much better for everyone that enjoys flying and dogfighting.
Thank you!
