Battlefield 6 is almost in our hands, and the intense first-person military shooter almost fixes every mistake made by its predecessor. Guns feel powerful, the player count has been cut down, maps are fun again, and destruction is beautifully devastating.
While the game is so well optimised that it can hit 120fps on a base PS5, Battlefield 6 is a current-gen only game. Unlike Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, EA’s new shooter isn’t releasing on the 12-year-old Xbox One and PS4 consoles, and that allows them to go above and beyond.
Speaking to PCGamer, lead producer Nika Bender explained that the goal of Battlefield 6 was to go back to the cutting edge feel the studio hit back in the day.
“We knew that Battlefield 3 and 4 were the fan favourites, and we really are leaning into what really worked, and hope that this will continue resonating with players in Battlefield 6,” they explained.
In the days of Battlefield 3 and 4, the series was renowned for its destruction tech with collapsing skyscrapers and buildings that were turned from brightly lit office spaces filled with camping spots to drywall carcasses. While Battlefield V had a similar level of destruction in specific cases, Battlefield 6 devs wanted to go back to what made the series special, and that meant leaving older hardware in the dust.
“Maybe the only magic trick is that we’re not on the PS4 or Xbox One any more,” added technical director Christian Buhl. “So we’ve kind of raised the floor of what we have in terms of memory and CPU speed, and so obviously raising that floor helps with improving performance overall. Since we’re not trying to get the game to run on a PS4, for example.”
Buhl explains that the Frostbite engine Battlefield runs on was “built for destruction”, saying “those pieces are core parts of the engine”, but it’s also hard to keep pushing graphics technology further while retaining intense destruction and also supporting older hardware. (Especially when that hardware already had its fans ramping to the max playing Uncharted 4 in 2016.)
“I don’t think there was any magic bullet,” Buhl admitted, saying most of it was just discovering where performance bottlenecks were and working hard to fix them. “It was just a lot of testing, a lot of iteration, a lot of work.”
That level of iteration has obviously worked. While games like The Finals technically offer more destruction, Battlefield 6 manages to run extraordinarily well while looking great and letting me slam a tank straight through the ground floor of a house.
Battlefield 6 officially launches on PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PS5 and PS5 Pro on October 10, 2025.
