Battlefield 6 brings Absolute Cinema back to multiplayer mode

Capturing points is the backbone of many multiplayer games and is often the most exciting moment of the match. Zarya casts down a Graviton Surge, gluing the entire enemy team together, ready to be wiped out by D.Va's self-destruction. Or when your super gauge finally fills up, you can unleash your guardian's inventory ability. Or, when you unlock the Perfect Kill Record, it dumps a warehouse's worth of ammo, wiping out your opponents seconds before they can capture the area.

But none capture points quite like Battlefield.

I recently played a Battlefield 6 Conquest match and watched a point in Operation Firestorm gradually be attacked and captured over the course of several minutes. At first it was just soldiers on foot, rushing in and sending out smoke to cover their attacks. Then the tanks appeared. Cannons roared, and chunks of masonry scattered. Sparks flew as the engineers repaired the armor. Then, like some kind of final fireworks, a jet roars overhead, its deployed payload securing the target against the last remaining enemy.

When all this happens, The Internet’s Most Popular Scorsese Memes I thought about it. “Absolutely cinematic.”

Battlefield's massive, combined-arms, destructive multiplayer is unlike any other. “Cinematic” is a quality that's often put in opposition to multiplayer shooters, which typically require a bit more cleanliness and precision. Clear sight. Hard counter. Precision designed three lane map. Competition is fierce. There's little room for spectacle, and that's reserved for the single-player campaign. But not in Battlefield. Playing Battlefield 6 is like being an actor in a war movie. What a great feeling it is, especially after years of sweat-soaked battle royale games and esports tactical shooters dominating the charts while previous Battlefield games were left in the cold.

Battle royale games have been dominant for nearly a decade, and it's not hard to see why the format of players fighting to the bitter end endures. Of course, the never-ending brand crossovers offered to Fortnite and Warzone play no small part in keeping the masses entertained, but there's no denying that each game has the potential to tell a gripping survival story. The single-life, you-versus-everyone nature of battle royale games makes it an inherently tense experience, a trait the genre shares with the breakout success of escape shooters — the stress of a match like Hunt: Showdown or Escape from Tarkov is unparalleled.

This high-pressure, competitive design is also the underlying dynamic behind Counter-Strike, the most popular game on Steam, and Valorant, Riot's hugely popular tactical shooter. Their carefully designed maps, finely calibrated balance, and high-stakes single-player matches are the ingredients for an exciting digital campaign. While sports do tell stories – the epic highs and lows of high school football, for reference another meme —There’s a big difference between those critical victory stories and “movies.”

Battlefield 6 is the complete opposite of games like Valorant and Fortnite. While Battlefield does have rules and parameters, it's equally committed to immersion. Where Counter-Strike's maps are clearly man-made structures designed to facilitate the most competitive gameplay, Battlefield's goal is to transport you into war…or, more accurately, war movie scenes. Each map's paths may have been laid out by level designers with multiplayer in mind, but they feel like fragments of a crumbling conflict zone rather than a playing field.

These maps and the objectives within them create moments of big, loud, chaotic drama. Yes, such dramatic scenes may often be rooted in pivotal wins, similar to what we see at major esports tournaments, but they're made up of the components of explosive action movies rather than streaming skirmishes. Battlefield is full of drama because a tank is firing shells into the building you're trying to capture and the walls are creaking and the entire building is about to collapse, but your squad's medic finally arrives and resuscitates a nearby engineer, who fires a rocket just in time to destroy that tank and save us all. This combination doesn't exist in Counter-Strike or even Fortnite, although the latter tries to throw everything it has onto its deadly island.

Battlefield is designed so that a story like this happens in every game, and every time it feels like a scene from Black Hawk Down. The squad and class systems only reinforce this. You are all characters in a war movie, each doing your part. Drop covering fire. Repair the tank you're huddled in the back of. Headshot the sniper to put your team in trouble. The new drag and revive mechanics are perhaps the best example of this. My shattered body being pulled to safety, bullets hitting the ground around my legs and explosions ringing in my ears, was one of the most heroic, brotherly things I've ever experienced in a game.

Many competitively focused shooters that dominate the charts seem to be controlled by the “meta” – viral builds and strategies that can make every game feel the same. This phenomenon really cements them as online video games rather than counter-terrorism simulators or superhero showdowns, which in turn further separates them from the chaotic feel of Battlefield. While we all knew the meta would eventually invade Battlefield 6 in some way, it could never truly control Battlefield, as its greatest strengths were those sudden cinematic moments rather than its weapon stats or KDA ratios. It's no wonder that “Battlefield only” moments have been a core part of the series' marketing for years.

Back in the summer, I wonder if Battlefield 6 is playing it too safe. While its preview demo was fun, I worry that EA isn't pushing the series in any interesting new directions. While the final product is truly the definition of classic Battlefield, and often feels like a game I've spent hundreds of hours playing before, I enjoy it more than any other PvP multiplayer game I've played in years. In many ways, this is just because, Our great multiplayer review explained that “Battlefield 6” has excellent layering and clever design. But more important are the stories that are emerging. These player-created, war-movie-like sequences never happen in any other game.

Sadly none of these are found in the single player game. our Activity review Criticisms that it's not only extremely boring but also makes almost no use of Battlefield's signature components are quite right. There's no interesting squad dynamic, the vehicle's use is limited, and its destruction is often scripted rather than improvised. There is no battlefield feel at all. Instead, its linear mission design makes it very clear that it's using Call of Duty as a blueprint.

But why Call of Duty? Putting the multiplayer suites from these series together, it's clear that they have almost nothing in common beyond a military theme. While there has long been a rivalry between the two franchises, that's because they were both fighting for different visions of a post-Medal of Honor FPS, rather than abandoning the same idea. So you might think the same would apply to the campaign, and that Battlefield's single-player would be a very different beast than Call of Duty. But they are not. They're both similarly tightly controlled linear shooters. Well, almost the same. Call of Duty is generally very good at this sort of thing. The battlefield… not so much.

In another timeline, things might have been different. As early as 2022, EA established Ridgeline Games to develop the Battlefield 6 campaign. The studio is led by Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto. With this history, you can see how Battlefield would benefit from his guidance. After all, Halo's campaign is built around vast open levels that allow for clever use of infantry and vehicles – some of the key components of Battlefield. But the studio was hit by industry restructuring woes and shut down in 2024, with both Criterion Games and Ripple Effect Studios seemingly scrambling to piece together something ahead of the 2025 release of Battlefield 6.

The hollow results left me wondering how Battlefield was able to capture the cinematic impact of its multiplayer without ripping off Infinity Ward's work. Given its iconic components, Battlefield seemed like an ideal place to recapture EA's own long-abandoned idea of ​​mercenaries. With a sandbox open world, vehicles, artillery, and fully destructible buildings, Mercenaries seems like the ideal template for a modern battlefield campaign. But I'll take anything that truly reflects the series' long-established identity. We can only hope that Battlefield 7's development process is less troublesome and more ambitious.

But now, we have Battlefield 6 and its destructive, raucous multiplayer. Every target in the game is the stage for a war movie, complete with explosions, smoke, sparks and the rattle of a dozen rifles. Jeeps roared around the corner carrying much-needed reinforcements, and jets scrambled to drop game-changing payloads. Battlefield is definitely back and it's definitely cinematic.

Matt Purslow is IGN's executive editor of features.