On October 10th, the world was graced with another iteration of the Battlefield franchise, introducing another opportunity to squad with friends and crash a few fighter jets or capture flags on conquest.
As with every topic in our modern era, everyone has an opinion on the Battlefield franchise with many of those voices deriving from the Call of Duty fanbase. Battlefield 6 did not escape the close inspection new games are accustomed to, with many dialing into the open beta weekend to check it out for themselves.
Fortunate for Battlefield 6, the Call of Duty players expressed their distaste for the large-scale warfare and movement system built into the game. Everyone and their mother had an opinion, with the streamer’s resounding opinions dominating much of the conversation. The COD fanboys could not glide across the map in one quick quip or simply jump off a wall in defiance of their opponent. “Without killstreaks or movement, this game is dead” was the sentiment among many players. The slower paced gameplay of Battlefield 6 was reserved for the “older generation” and those with no skill. That there’s no fun to be had on a game without killstreaks or an intense camo grind. Ultimately, the Call of Duty fanbase can’t seem to piece together how anyone would ever have fun in a Battlefield game, specifically Battlefield 6.
The players fail to see how one can enjoy themselves without the fulfillment of a tiny bar filling up on the right side of the screen, only another kill or two until that UAV…
What the Call of Duty players fail to realize is that in Battlefield, you’re incentivized to make your own fun by leveraging the unique mechanics of the game. Simply winning isn’t enough now, and that is easily witnessed by anyone who games. While Call of Duty has shifted gears towards amassing an impressive kill count through churning killstreaks over and over, Battlefield remains focused on the entire battle at hand. Capturing an objective is your main focus and you’ll need to find your own fun along the way. Seeking out high-kill games isn’t unheard of in Battlefield and many players pursue this each match, but there isn’t as a laid out path to follow in order to achieve those numbers.
Ultimately, Battlefield players manufacture their own fun. If you’ve spent any time in the Battlefield community, you already know many of the ways people have fun in the BF sandbox. Flying jets into close proximity only to hop out and RPG another jet passing by, while ALSO re-entering your own jet? That’s fun for some. Realizing that drone you’ve just unlocked with the recon class is only missing a few C4 to transform it into a tank buster? That’s fun for some.
Creativity is at the forefront of the “fun” found in a Battlefield experience. Players are encouraged to create their own micro-narratives in the pursuit of fun, crafting ways to interact with the environment, vehicles, and objectives on the map. What’s fun for me? Catching a sneaky flank on the enemy team in escalation to capture their second objective, shifting the flow of the map. Eventually, the enemy team will arrive and by then I will have already placed my recon specialty of a sensor beacon, claymore, proximity mine, and C4 in the pocket for when the tank arrives.
Geoff W - A Space To Myself 