BATTLEFIELD 6 - You’ve got a Pilot Problem
I’ve been playing Battlefield since the very first game (yes, I’m that old). It’s always been my favorite FPS and one of the only multiplayer games I play actively. For me, it always crushed Call of Duty. There was nothing better than a good squad with clearly defined roles: medic, assault, engineer, recon.
Battlefield 2042 tried very hard to destroy that identity (that’s a separate rant), and now you’ve buried “class-locked weapons” in a mode that looks abandoned. Nobody wants to play it because it’s full of bots and presented as an afterthought. Meanwhile, too many players are running around as quasi–super soldiers: sniper outfit, C4, and an assault rifle all at once.
If you actually care about the integrity of Battlefield, you should have maintained discipline on class-locked weapons and roles. You’d see a resurgence if players were encouraged—if not forced—to play the way that made Battlefield great in the first place. But I digress.
Since 2042, you’ve had a pilot problem.
Battlefield is not a flight simulator where a handful of cheaters or hyper-sweaty pilots with macros and limitless Red Bull get to treat the map as a personal playground, farming 75 infantry and 10 tanks a match while the rest of us just try to find cover. That’s not what we signed up for.
Either:
- Some of these players are cheating, or
- The game design is so unbalanced that this level of dominance is “working as intended.”
Either way, it’s a problem.
Most players won’t call it out because they follow these “gods of the sky” on Twitch, and DICE won’t call it out because you rely on their content and brand promotion. But if you keep leaning on that tiny elite segment, you’re going to look up one day and wonder where the broader FPS audience went.
Here’s the answer in advance:
No one is going to spend the next generation of FPS gaming watching a super-sweat pilot macro-farm 100 bots a game. Real players will have moved on to more balanced, more intelligent, more respectful games—ones that remember Battlefield’s core: combined arms, team play, and roles that matter for everyone, not just the top 0.1%.
