Battlefield 6 features the series' first singleplayer campaign since 2018, which as a fan of both Battlefield and dumb AAA shooters had me pretty excited! After rolling credits yesterday following roughly five hours of action, I should have known not to get my hopes up.
Unlike the last few games, which shipped with either glorified tutorials or no campaign at all, Battlefield 6's singleplayer harks back to entries in the series like Battlefield 3 & 4, which tried their best to mimic Call of Duty and craft an actual story around a singular campaign. While there's still a whiff of tutorial here--you're introduced to a number of multiplayer maps, and slowly taught how to use the game's various weapons, gadgets and vehicles--for the most part Battlefield 6's campaign plays like it's earnestly trying to be a proper, singleplayer shooter.
If you are interested in those solely for the big explosions and bits where you drive a tank around, you're in luck here. This game blows a lot of stuff up in quite spectacular fashion, with buildings and sometimes entire streets frequently collapsing around you, while also presenting you with loads of ways to fight bad guys in big and interesting ways. In just the most superficial, sensory way, this is very much a modern military shooter.
While you're doing all that stuff though, you'll be interrupted frequently by cutscenes that attempt to tell you a story, to provide some context to all your jet-setting and cross-border destruction, to give you a reason to kill all those guys you need to kill. And honestly, I'd skip every single one of them.
I'm as aware as anyone that military shooters can feature questionable politics, that they struggle to squeeze coherent plots full of intrigue and international realpolitik into their limited runtime. Those are issues Call of Duty, and even previous Battlefield games, have struggled with for decades. But man, even with that bar set as low as I thought it could go, Battlefield 6's campaign still sails comfortably under it.
In its opening 30 minutes it clears its throat, opens its mouth then says...nothing. Nothing at all. Or rather, nothing that could upset anyone. Like so much other AAA stuff these days, it’s paralysed, caught between the desire to have a point to it all and the reality that having a point can sometimes be bad for business. You can see the bones here, buried under what could have been months of meetings and strategy and input across DICE and EA, of a story that wanted to say something about the times we're all currently living through. Battlefield 6 is set in a near-future world where alliances are breaking up, where NATO is divided and new, sinister forces stand ready to challenge the world order.
That, uh, sounds pretty familiar to anyone alive in 2025. Or 2022, or whenever serious narrative work on this game started. And could have been the perfect introduction to a campaign that went through with that, to put some boots on the ground in a story about Russia taking advantage of European division and civil unrest to destroy their Cold War foes, or of nefarious authoritarians seizing power in the United States. None of which happens in this game.
Of course Battlefield has no obligation to put forth its take on modern politics, no remit to provide commentary on the rise of fascism in the United States or the fracturing of international diplomacy. The problem here is that it starts down that road! It could have been a game about anything, from historical conflicts to big wars against Russia and China--all things Battlefield has done in the past with no hesitation!--but nope, within minutes of firing it up we see this game walk right up to some very contemporary issues, size them up then swiftly walk away, abandoning them in favour of some bullshit that even after finishing I'm still not quite sure I fully understand.
There's some kind of tale here about a wronged soldier fronting a global paramilitary force that is somehow able to take on the combined forces of the USA and Europe, with some shadowy CIA stuff thrown in for good measure, but from beginning to end the whole thing is simply ridiculous. A company amassing the manpower to fight whole continents--or at least doing so under the context provided here--is comedic, and the idea that its soldiers would fight to the last man, as though they were conscripts clinging to the ruins of Stalingrad instead of random dudes dressing up like NAVY Seals for a paycheck, is even dumber.
It all means so little, and is explained so poorly, that I was actively forgetting things while I was still playing through it.
Even by Call of Duty or Battlefield's standards, this is a stupid game. And not the good kind of stupid. Half the appeal of these shooters is that they're Hollywood explosions, that like an action movie you just start them up, disconnect for a few hours then get back to life. Battlefield 6's campaign would have been fine if it had tried to be that kind of stupid, to just pick a convincing bad guy, make them threaten something we care about and let us have at it. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's plot isn't too far from Battlefield 6's, and for all the ways we've collectively moved on and mostly forgotten it, it at least knew what it was and had the confidence to revel in it.
This game instead sets its sights on a weightier topic then falls miles short of it, leaving us with something even more forgettable, because the only thing worse than a game saying "press F to pay respects" is a game that says nothing at all.
I guess I'm just particularly frustrated here--shaking my head at the story of a five-hour singleplayer campaign for a game people only play for the multiplayer, I know, it's weird--because like I've said, it feels like someone at some point was trying to say something. Maybe those foundations were the only parts of a story the writers were allowed to get into the game before other departments and cowards sanded everything else smooth. Maybe years ago, when work first began on Battlefield 6, DICE could see the direction the world was headed in, just like they had with Battlefield 2042, a game about climate disasters.
For all I know--and if you were involved, I'd love to know--there was a more substantial exploration of the theme planned here at some point, a campaign that tried to say something about the world we've living in, before someone more concerned with shifting units than telling stories stepped in to say no, we can't alienate the fascists who will be buying this video game, or no, we probably shouldn't paint a target on the Nazis currently running the United States government, or the millions of Twitter users (potential customers!) whose knowledge of the war in Ukraine has been entirely decoupled from reality.
And hey, as far as EA is concerned that would be a prudent move. This game has already sold millions, and there are hundreds of thousands of people playing it right now at any given moment, all around the world. Huge swathes of that fanbase wouldn't have cared what the story was, so long as they got to shoot some shit in it. But surely somebody cared, I cared, that if you're going to start trying to tell a very modern story about a dying world order and a military conflict that could reposition it, you could have at least tried to go through with it.
