Last week saw the reveal of Battlefield 6’s singleplayer campaign, but the series was founded on large-scale multiplayer, and it’s now time to see the main event.
Battlefield 6 multiplayer footage has already leaked, but that can only tell us so much. Given that it’s been hyping this up as its “most ambitious” Battlefield yet, we have high expectations as EA finally divulges what its menagerie of Battlefield studios have really been up to—that includes DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect, and Motive.
The Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal livestream starts at 11:30 am PT on Thursday, July 31. That’s 2:30 pm ET, 7:30 pm BST, 8:30 pm CEST, and 11:30 pm AEST. It’ll be broadcast on YouTube and Twitch.
Below, we’ll be covering the reveal as it happens, with our reactions and insights from our reporter on the scene.
What we know about Battlefield 6 already
The Battlefield 2042 launch didn’t go great for EA, to put it mildly, and DICE put a lot of work into renovating the shooter before fully moving on to what’s next. Rather than backing away from its flagship military shooter series, however, EA doubled down on Battlefield, tapping Respawn founder Vince Zampella to lead the series and piling resources into it.
“We’re looking for this to be the biggest Battlefield we’ve ever made,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson has said.
The main Battlefield studios are now DICE (as usual), Ripple Effect (which made the Portal custom server mode in Battlefield 2042), Criterion (known for Burnout and Need for Speed games), and Motive (Battlefront 2, Star Wars: Squadrons, the Dead Space remake).
At one time, a new studio run by Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto was going to contribute a singleplayer Battlefield experience, but whatever it was working on was canceled and the studio was closed. Lehto was not happy about that, as you’d expect.
BF6 does still have a singleplayer campaign, though, and EA revealed it in a trailer last week. We’ve also seen leaked multiplayer footage. Here are the top-line details:
- We’re back to a regular old modern military theme
- The Operators (characters with special abilities) from Battlefield 2042 are not coming back
- EA finally made a concession to fans who want class restrictions on guns to return, and says it’ll offer a beta playlist with that feature
- There are rumblings of a free-to-play battle royale mode
- Battlefield 6 probably won’t cost $80
I hope Battlefield Portal comes back
I was one of the weirdos who actually liked Battlefield 2042 out of the gate, and I especially liked what EA was trying to do with its Portal mode, which let players run their own servers with custom rules and maps, vehicles, and weapons from throughout the series. I love classic FPS server culture, and even if not the real deal, Portal was at least an attempt to bring back some of the fun of hopping between servers with weird rules or mutators.
I’d hoped the idea would really take off, but alas, Battlefield 2042 as a whole struggled, so I don’t think it got a chance to shine. I hope EA doesn’t back away from the idea, though.