Battlefield 6 Season 1 will offer a couple of new modes, but they’re not very good and only highlight one of the biggest problems with the game. Battlefield, as a franchise, is best known for its all-out warfare gameplay. The series thrives in large-scale battles with chaotic destruction, 64-players, a mix of infantry and vehicles, and more. Its a very cinematic experience and there’s really nothing else quite like it. Anytime someone has tried to imitate it, it comes off as cheap and not nearly as interesting. Battlefield 6 still has a grand scale to it, but it does feel like it has shrank down a bit as well.
While I do believe there are a variety of factors to that, the heavy focus on smaller-sized content does feel like an attempt to appeal to the Call of Duty audience. There are multiple modes in the base game centered around infantry-only gameplay within smaller maps. In fact, one of the maps in Battlefield 6 is only available in the smaller game types. It’s quite possible that a lot of people don’t even know Saints Quarters exists because it’s not in the playlists most people will play on.
I don’t think it’s bad to have smaller game types for the sake of variety, as Battlefield 6 isn’t the first game to do this. However, it does feel like there is a much larger focus on it than in the past. Unfortunately, Battlefield 6 Season 1 is doubling down on this.
I had pretty glowing impressions of the new maps and toys being added in Battlefield 6 Season 1, but the one aspect I don’t enjoy is the new modes. Pretty much everyone I played with agreed that the new modes are bad, with the worst being Sabotage, which launches in November. In Sabotage, one side is defending two points which have valuable caches that need to be protected. The other team is doing everything they can to destroy them with explosives, sledgehammers, and raw firepower.
It’s not a bad premise, but it is poorly executed. The two modes carve out small sections of existing maps, but they don’t feel designed specifically for the mode. When I was playing as the attackers on one of the new maps, Blackwell Fields, we got spawn trapped. We had zero protection and were getting killed before we could even move. It was a total mess, and there was only one real path for flanking. Even if you managed to break through, it’s not satisfying because you end up shooting generic boxes. It’s not nearly as exciting as planting a charge on an M-COM, which then causes some panic for the opposing team and may lead to a break in their defenses.
In my opinion, Sabotage should be delayed and completely reworked. It’s not fun and doesn’t feel well thought out. There’s enough content in Battlefield 6 Season 1 that this missing its window wouldn’t be some kind of disaster. If anything, taking the time to make sure Sabotage has some time to cook would be the better PR move.
The other mode, Strikepoint, will release next week on October 28th. It’s Search and Destroy-inspired, with two teams of four competing to capture one point on a small map. You get one life, but you don’t die immediately. If you take enough damage, you can go down, allowing your teammate to revive you, and don’t worry, they can’t kill themselves because they’re impatient. The downed person has the opportunity to crawl to safety, but the enemy can also finish them off, unlike other multiplayer modes. I had some fleeting fun with this, but it’s ultimately just a poor man’s Search and Destroy.
The problem with these smaller modes is that Battlefield isn’t a game designed around smaller maps and modes. The gunplay is satisfying and fast-paced, but we all know the bread and butter lies within Conquest, Breakthrough, and even Escalation. As a result, it feels like these smaller modes are trying to mimic Call of Duty’s style without much success.
It’s like how Call of Duty: Modern Warfare had its Ground War mode, which felt like the franchise’s take on Battlefield, but it all felt weirdly hollow. It’s the same situation, except Battlefield is shrinking itself instead of expanding. Call of Duty was at least trying to add something by putting vehicles in play. Battlefield is just taking stuff away and putting you in a corner of a larger map, making it all feel less intentional.
Sabotage and Strikepoint largely feel budget-y as the team tries to find ways to make new content without having to make completely new maps for them. I am hoping that future seasons either make give these smaller modes more depth or there’s a return to focusing on the larger scale content, offering some kind of fresh new take on the all-out warfare gameplay. Will that happen? We’ll just have to wait and see what happens in 2026.
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