Early access for theBattlefield 6beta has begun, and, as expected for a game with this level of hype, players already have some thoughts on DICE’s latest offering.
It already hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing for the beta. There weremassive queues from server congestionbefore it even began, andplayers have already been running into cheatersdespite its kernel-level anti-cheat.
There have also been questions aboutthe presence of bots in matchesto fill space.
Another point of contention in the beta has beenthe selection of maps available, or, more specifically, their scale, as players are finding themto be a bit on the small side.
Why Are Battlefield 6’s Maps So Small?
The reduced scale of the maps in Battlefield 6 was a deliberate choice by the designers, according to aVGC interviewwith the game’s design director Shashank Uchil and Criterion Games’ Fasahat Salim.
According to them, the decision to make the maps smaller was intended to make them more oriented toward specific playstyles while also reducing bloat, making them denser, more interesting, and easier to fill with the game’s destructible terrain.
“We want to make a map that suits every type of player,” Uchil explains. “They could be infantry players. So we want to make sure we have good infantry maps. Maybe a player who likes tanks, vehicles. OK, let’s make a map that’s good for infantry and tanks.”
Battlefield 6 Hardware Requirements Revealed
We finally get some clarity on what machine you need to run Battlefield 6.
Or helicopters, or jets, or however else players want to play, they want there to be a map that caters to that. However, more powerful hardware and the growth of battle royale games (a mode thatBattlefield 6 will seemingly also havewhen it fully releases) have made players expect much larger, more spread-out maps.
Scale is not everything. Right? Well, just because you have X kilometers doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good map, because then if you make a really big map, you’re going to fill it up with stuff. Then it becomes more of an open world. And then you start compromising on a bunch of stuff. – Shashank Uchil
In other words, they’re taking a bit of a less-is-more approach, focusing on map quality rather than scale for its own sake.
That being said, that reduced size has heavily altered the dynamic of matches in ways that not everyone is happy with, but this is only a beta, and things may be different in the final release. The maps likely won’t change too much, but the meta will evolve to match the new scale, to say nothing of the rumored battle royale mode.
The game has drawnfrom the Battlefield series’ whole history, after all, so even if the scale of matches is reduced, hopefully it’ll shine that much more in other areas.
