Rory Norris, Guides Writer
Last week I was: playing way too much of the Battlefield 6 open beta.
This week I’ve been: mourning the loss of the Battlefield 6 open beta, at least until next weekend, after which point I’ll somehow have to survive until the full release in October.
Unlike Battlefield 2042, Battlefield 6 just feels right. It’s got that gritty style of the older games, with more focused maps, the classes have returned (arguably in their best form yet), and weapon handling is better than ever. Having seen a bunch of worrying clips doing the rounds before getting hands-on with the open beta, I feared the worst: that weapons would feel like lasers, lacking recoil and personality to set each one apart. That’s generally how I feel about BF2042 and modern Call of Duty games, where all the guns just blend into one indistinct blob.
What Battlefield 6 gets right, at least with the selection of firearms available in the beta, is that every weapon feels distinct. The M433 is vastly different to the NVO-228E, the SGX stands out from the PW7A2, and so on and so forth. Each weapon has a completely different feel thanks to its recoil pattern, fire rate, and overall handling. Well, at least by default.
Pick up a new weapon and play with it for a round or two, and you’ll already have unlocked the two most important attachments: a muzzle and a grip. After slapping a single-port brake or the basic folding vertical grip on the M433, virtually all of the recoil that restrains this supposedly ‘close-range’ assault rifle is removed. Congratulations, you now have a laser.
As shown in my testing above, it only gets more extreme when you use both a muzzle and a grip, or even one of the enhanced recoil-controlling grips like the ribbed vertical. Hell, it even works wonders on SMGs like the SGX, letting them confidently overpower other weapon types at medium range. What you can pull off with some of these guns feels outright illegal at times.
Of course, the attachments also have their own downsides. For example, vertical grips improve recoil control at the cost of aimed accuracy during movement, while the brakes reduce recoil in return for increased sway. These are important stats, at least on paper, but there are three issues that get in the way:
- All you need are two attachments to remove the recoil that typically restrains weapons and encourages burst-firing—or specialist weapon types—across Battlefield’s larger maps. Why struggle with a DMR when you could just use an assault rifle at all ranges? Having attachments that can blur weapon categories, completely overshadowing already lesser-used types like DMRs and LMGs, is a potentially grave pitfall.
- Attachments are cheap, so you can equip a muzzle and a grip without actually sacrificing all that much in other areas. Why not turn your assault rifle into an LMG by adding a larger magazine, too, giving you all the benefits of an AR and none of the inconsistencies of LMGs?
- The positives far outweigh the negatives, oddly even more so for the lower-tier attachments.
Say what you want about BF6’s time-to-kill and the obviously overpowered M87A1 shotgun, but falling back on the same two attachments on every weapon is just a bit boring, don’t you think? That relief when I first picked up the unruly M433 was needlessly erased by a measly muzzle brake and foregrip.
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Thankfully, it’s a relatively simple fix. By reducing the overall impact of each individual attachment you equip, you’d be incentivised to further invest in a specific playstyle. For example, if the ten-point folding vertical grip and the five-point single-port brake weren’t a cheap, quick-fix for all your recoil control needs, then you’d be pushed towards the more effective, more expensive, higher-tier versions.
In turn, you’d have fewer attachment points left over for other slots, like magazines, bullets, or ergonomics. Plus, it’d also back up BF6’s solid weapon progression system to be more rewarding.
The weapons obviously need a balance pass from beta to full release, but there’s no point in trying to balance things if the attachments operate on a separate set of weighing scales entirely, undermining any of these efforts. Will there still be an ‘attachment meta’? Yes, we’re predictable like that—it’s quite literally part of my job—but it would be nice to retain each gun’s personality and have to specialise a bit more, especially with classes now having preferred weapons, too.
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