MORGAN PARK, STAFF WRITER
This week: Wrapped up a replay of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and questioned if a better stealth game exists 21 years later.
This week is the most excited I’ve been about Battlefield 6 since it launched. EA announced that seven more maps are coming this year, and several of them are legitimately huge. Naval warfare is making a comeback, filling in a blank that’s very much felt in its current pool of samey, landlocked locales. A remake of the fan-favorite Wake Island will even reintroduce asymmetrical beach invasions with functional aircraft carriers.
This is one of the problems with roadmaps, or more specifically, the trajectory of live service updates. Not only do developers treat exact release dates like they’re state secrets until days before they come around, but seasons themselves are now chopped up into smaller pieces, and the average player doesn’t know which pieces to expect soon and which fall under a nebulous “mid-season” umbrella.
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It’s especially bad in Battlefield 6, which has so far split its seasons into three monthlong mini seasons. Each mini season gets a new gun, an event, and sometimes a map. The idea behind splitting the pie up this way is to create the impression that Battlefield always has something new and exciting going on, when in practice all they’ve done is demonstrate that individual Battlefield updates aren’t worth showing up for.
Season 4, for instance, is hyping up the grand return of naval warfare, but on the day it begins, that grand return will amount to a single map. More are coming, but when? Don’t worry about it, says EA.
Allow me to describe what I suspect is a common experience:
- Player reads about Battlefield 6 getting two new maps, new features, a handful of guns, new modes—they get excited
- Weeks later they hear the new season starts tomorrow, so they reinstall/update the game
- The season begins, and they boot up Battlefield 6 to find just one third of the stuff they read about is actually there: a map, a mode, and two guns locked behind battle pass grinding
- They try the new map for a while, but decide to wait until the season is actually feature-complete
- They forget to check back in with Battlefield 6 until the next roadmap comes around, and the cycle repeats
EA seems to operate under the assumption that everyone who enjoys Battlefield 6 is hopelessly addicted to it—that by drip-feeding morsels of roadmap content every four weeks, our thirst is quenched right as our mouths are getting dry. That doesn’t reflect how I play Battlefield at all, and the player numbers we can see suggest I’m not the only one.
Battlefield has never been my forever game. Its brand of casual competition, static classes, and joyous chaos make it the perfect FPS to get obsessed with for days or weeks at a time before I put it back on the shelf for a while. Even in a live service age where developers pin their hopes on constant engagement, a lot of people don’t have one “forever” game as much as they have a rotation of “sometimes” games.
At its best, the FPS “season” is really just an expansion (or “map pack” if you’re in your 30s) that you don’t have to pay for. Seasons are fun when they feel like a true event—a significant milestone that signals to lapsed players that it’s a good time to check back in.
The only “right” time to jump back into a Battlefield season is, paradoxically, right before it ends. It’s really a baffling setup to continue on with, in no small part because it hasn’t worked.
You could argue that Battlefield’s problem is one of volume—that what it truly needs are more maps each “full” season to fill out the mini ones. That brute force strategy does work for Call of Duty, but personally, simply releasing what’s promised in a season when it begins would go a long way. Make the occasion actually mean something!
After 80+ hours of Battlefield 6 I’m only coming back in bursts—I’m not a caged hamster that will eagerly appear when DICE refills my bottle every four weeks. The cage is wide open, and I can always go gorge on the dozen other shooters I could be catching up on.
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