Since Battlefield 6’s first multiplayer beta, a contingent of players have held firmly to a fundamental criticism: The maps are too damn small. Ensuing weeks of heated debate have seen some longtime Battlefield veterans venting frustration with BF6’s tightly-corseted combat corridors, while others have insisted those of us longing for broader battlezones are suffering from nostalgia poisoning.
Thanks to the efforts of community cartographic analysts, however, we now have a more definitive assessment of whether BF6’s maps are up to scale. Redditors ClaraTheRed and PENGUINonPC painstakingly compared the playable areas of Battlefield maps from Battlefield 3 forwards, and yes—based on their measurements, the map selection in BF 6 is more cramped than in previous games.
To assess the dimensions and playable areas of Battlefield’s maps, ClaraTheRed and PENGUINonPC devised their own process of recording the distances from a player’s position to that map’s HQ and control points. Using those measurements, they resized images of the overhead view of each in-game map until they shared a scale of 1 pixel per meter.
“There’s always the risk of human errors, but we did as best as we could,” ClaraTheRed said in a comment explaining the methodology. Unfortunately, the technique meant that Battlefield 5—which didn’t show distances to objectives in the player UI—was excluded from the survey. But through their work, ClaraTheRed and PENGUINonPC have provided a digestible comparison of Battlefield map sizes, complete with charts ranking the total and playable areas of each game’s maps.
Even at a glance, the map scale comparison is telling. The problem isn’t that Battlefield 6 has small maps; every sampled Battlefield has had its share of closer quarters. The issue is that BF6’s largest maps, when compared with the offerings of earlier games, could best be called midsized.
Updated: Battlefield maps from BF3, BF4, BF:HL, BF1, BF2042 and BF6. A scale comparison from r/Battlefield
For those formulating a case to tackle the tiny map agenda, the playable area chart is particularly damning. The Battlefield 6 incarnation of Operation Firestorm, with a playable area of 0.34 km2, is only the 26th largest map in the series. In comparison, Battlefield 3’s take on Operation Firestorm—the sixth largest map in the tally—offered almost three times as much playable area at 1.10 km2.
And it’s not just the map dimensions contributing to BF6’s claustrophobia. If you take a closer look at the way objectives are distributed throughout earlier Battlefield maps, you’ll notice that many of them surround their clusters of objective points with wide stretches of open playable area. In BF6—as Morgan noted last month—the map margins are pulled tight against the flags, forcing Battlefield’s combined arms toybox into a compacted frenzy that follows predetermined channels.
If all you’re looking for is frenetic, high adrenaline firefights, BF6 maps have more than enough to offer. But for those of us who’ve found the traditional rhythm of Battlefield combat has been harder to find, it’s nice to have numbers to validate the feeling.
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