Battlefield 6 is built around a familiar question: what is the point of war? Why fight, when all the old standbys like honour and patriotism ring hollow? When all your struggles amount to nothing? When your biggest enemy is yourself?
The franchise’s familiar large-scale shoot-outs, during which dozens of players fight on maps full of jeeps, tanks, planes and destructible buildings, are distractions full of memorable highs and lows. Nearly every 30-minute multiplayer match has moments when you’re facing insurmountable odds as your position is pummelled by waves of enemies, until a break in the action allows your squad to burst forth from cover and leap over obstacles in a last-ditch attempt to capture the enemy point, all while tank rounds and machine gun fire pound the walls overhead.
Meaningless battles work when you’re playing online as nameless, faceless combatants, in it for the ride rather than the destination. Conquering the point feels properly triumphant, even though you’ll inevitably have to trade it back later — even though the match will end and reset itself, and you’ll have to start over again. In a few rounds, we’ll switch sides and my former ally will become my enemy.
It’s harder to turn that meaninglessness into a compelling single-player narrative, which only exposes how empty Battlefield is at its core.
The story starts in a fictional near-future with the dissolution of Nato and the rise of a private military contractor called Pax Armata, which has taken control of several former Nato nations across Europe and Asia. We control members of a Marine special forces unit as they run around the world trying to take down a group with no real objective besides chaos. Pax clearly has no national interests. It’s simply a convenient artificial boogeyman, a conglomeration of bodies to shoot at in various global theatres.
Battlefield 6’s war is truly postwar. It has been stripped of the normative messaging — competing ideologies, battles over sovereignty, questions of justice and security — that accompanies modern wars. All we need to know here is that America is under attack and there are bad guys who need shooting.
“I’ll leave the politics to you, sir,” one Marine tells the president, a sentiment that perfectly sums up the whole enterprise.
In place of any real politics are your squad mates’ jingoistic quips while freewheeling through points in Spain, Egypt, Tajikistan and the US. During a mission in New York, your commander barks, “Never again — that means not on our watch, got it?” Another Marine casually drops “shock and awe” into conversation.
Much of the plot revolves around the mystery of who is behind this curious organisation. We meet its ostensible face Harris, a former Marine who’s working for the bad guys because he was captured and disfigured in a past mission. All of this destruction amounts to disappointingly simple vendetta.
The story and context of Battlefield 6’s campaign may provide the backdrop for each of the game’s nine multiplayer maps, like one on the ruined streets of downtown Brooklyn and another in a cramped Cairo marketplace. But the imprecise nature of this mode means it doesn’t have to answer any of the campaign’s thorny questions. That the teams in an online session are evenly matched doesn’t require explanation, they simply are.
There are rounds where one side runs away with the game, others where the underdog flips the odds and comes out on top. They’re fun and spirited and the adrenaline pumps freely, but they don’t really have anything to do with real military engagements outside of their surface aesthetics.
Within this unreal space it begins to make more sense that Battlefield 6’s primary developers Swedish studio DICE would choose to make a game where grizzled American operators swaddled in high-tech kits rampage around the world. Beyond the clear visual parallels, it doesn’t feel anything like the images that scroll past on our social media feeds every day.
That makes it easy to have fun in this unmoored soldiering fantasy. The hollow sense of purpose spun up by the campaign all but fades and is easily discarded. We can enjoy the drama of playing within these ruins for a while, fighting only ourselves.