Battlefield 6 is built around a familiar question: What is the point of war?
Why fight, when all the old standbys like honor and patriotism ring hollow? When all your struggles amount to nothing? When your biggest enemy is yourself?
The franchise’s familiar large-scale shootouts, 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 pummeled by waves of enemies, until a break in the action allows your squad to burst bellowing 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 scripted six-hour campaign attempts to craft a world with a real sense of conflict, with real enemies who supposedly have different interests and ideology than me, who commit real atrocities and present a real threat to my existence. But none of this manifests in the narrative, which is vague and hazy at its sharpest moments. Soldiers scream in ambiguous, globally diverse accents. They wear armor and drive vehicles emblazoned with a clean, corporatized logo.
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 theaters.
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 the brain-dead jingoisms your squadmates quip while freewheeling through points in Spain, Egypt, Tajikistan and the United States. 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.
They’re clumsy signifiers, stale from overuse during America’s distended war on terror. The firehouse where your team helps protect the president during the New York mission is festooned with Sept. 11 remembrance imagery. The heavy-handedness of all these messages is confusing, considering the anonymity of your supposed enemy.
Much of the campaign’s plot revolves around the mystery of who is behind this curious organization. We get few answers in this direction but do 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, all of these dead bodies amount to a disappointingly simple vendetta.
“What are we dying for?” Harris asks us with a pointed expletive. “Don’t you want to die for something real?” With this, the game’s villain puts a point on the story’s dilemma: There’s no glory in performing as a warrior for an empire so large it has no real enemies to fight.
But aside from platitudes about being there for your squadmates, no concrete solutions are put forward. Your team ends up going rogue in order to seek out solutions on its own, an all-too-common motif in modern military shooters (most recently in the rebooted Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series), where libertarian themes of self-reliance and individual bravery often sneak in.
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, doesn’t require an unwieldy plot reveal explaining how the opposing force is funded by a shadowy tech billionaire or whatever. They simply are, as a function of the constraints and expectations of balanced competitive play.
The tensions and conflict present in the multiplayer mode more closely resemble a team sport than a war. There are those rounds where one side runs away with the game, others where the underdog flips the odds and comes out on top. They’re fun, they’re 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, the 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.
Battlefield 6 was reviewed on the PC. It is also available on the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S.
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