My first run at the Battlefield 6 beta raises a potentially major problem: too many of these maps feel the same

You really don’t have to look far to find all sorts of praise for the Battlefield 6 beta’s first weekend. Longtime series fans – and anyone who got caught up in the hype and was convinced to try out the beta – have a lot of kind things to say.

My love for Battlefield started with BF2, and I’ve been covering Battlefield games for well over a decade – and it’s never been easier to predict that a Battlefield game is going to be a Big Deal than now. My worry is that, in (seemingly) doing so, it’s already traded off part of its identity for a bigger bite at that wider audience pie.

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That said, I promise I’m not here to gatekeep my precious shooting game or protect some sort of artistic innocence from the corruptions of capitalism. Battlefield 6 is a last hurrah for a beleaguered franchise from a hit-starved publisher; it’s going to do – and say – all it can to convince the largest number of people to care. There’s nothing any of us can do to stop it from going down certain paths or making certain decisions in pursuit of that goal. Fighting over concepts, over integrity – or even the series’ identity – is probably futile. That, however, won’t stop me from arguing that there be some core Battlefield identity to keep around anyway.

My biggest issues with the Battlefield 6 beta are ironically both the result of the same mantra guiding them: in order to make the Battlefield formula more accessible to the millions of players who aren’t interested in learning it, DICE and EA must cut down on as much of the friction as possible.