During yesterday’s Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal showcase, DICE producer Jeremy Chubb said the studio wanted to return to the “atmosphere and grit that made Battlefield 3 and 4 iconic games,” but “needed to take that aesthetic to an entirely new level.” Based on the content of the 23-minute presentation, it seems like EA is measuring that new aesthetic height based on a single metric: helicopter violence.
While watching last week’s Battlefield 6 reveal trailer, I noticed a tone shift that would continue through the multiplayer event. I don’t mean DICE’s traditionally more sober military fetishization giving way to Call of Duty-esque chest bumpery; that’s a conversation for another day. I’m talking about how Battlefield Studios has decided the best way to illustrate the impact of virtual warfare is to make sure the viewer is only ever seconds away from watching another helicopter explode.
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Don’t get me wrong, a downed helicopter is a strong image. You get to watch something blow up, spin around all funny, and then blow up again. Around the third time I watched a Battlefield 6 dev calmly delivering their assigned marketing beats as a rotorcraft detonated in midair behind them, however, the helicopter death toll started to feel a little absurd.
So I went back and counted.
I tallied each helicopter shot down by shoulder-fired RPGs. At times, I advanced frame-by-frame, making sure I didn’t mess any moment when helicopters were felled by stationary anti-air emplacements, laser designator-guided missiles, and autocannon gunners riding aboard their chopper fellows.
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EA left no untaken opportunity for helicopter destruction. As devs listed out class features and multiplayer modes, attack choppers were sent plummeting to earth in the backdrop behind them by tank shells and surface-to-air ordnance. During the section detailing the new Portal offerings, the cavalcade of rotorcraft carnage took a sharply surreal turn, as helicopters fell unbidden out of the air to tumble down levitating staircases and stretches of highway.
At one point, a player-piloted jet flies towards a ring of eight attack helicopters that all explode in unison for no discernible reason. I didn’t know I could feel sympathy for a helicopter, but here we are.
In total, during the approximately 22 minutes and 54 seconds duration of the multiplayer showcase presentation, I counted 34 destroyed helicopters. That’s roughly 1.476 helicopters exploded per minute.
(In case anyone decides to check my work: I did count the helicopter that we only see suffering a potentially survivable missile impact at 17:04 as destroyed. However, I chose to only count one destruction when an attack helicopter is hit by a guided AA missile at 6:43 and the footage cuts to a shot of what’s implied to be the same helicopter falling into a building and exploding, despite being pretty confident that those are separate regions of the map after watching the multiplayer livestream sessions that followed the showcase. So it evens out.)
Now, yes: it’s military stuff exploding in a military game. That’s not surprising. But the frequency of helicopter casualties is wild. For comparison, I only counted 19 tank kills—a 55% disparity. Just two jets were destroyed! Two! Nobody even knows how to fly those!
It’s such an overrepresentation of chopper-related violence that it’s hard to believe that someone, somewhere in EA’s marketing division, made the deliberate choice that no rotorcraft be suffered to live. For that individual—whoever they are, however personally wronged by helicopters they might be—I have just one question: When will it be enough?
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