I really dug what I saw in the Battlefield 6 Beta, but I cant shake this feeling of enshittification that has slowly encroached into multiplayer shooters. My biggest and longest standing beef comes from the obnoxious scope glint that every single sniper sight inherently has now.
Rewind to Bad Company 2 and it simply didn’t exist. Snipers were in ghillie suits, could climb into trees, and simply did not have scope glint. If you wanted to find a particularly annoying long-gunner, you and your squad became a hunting party, digging through the brush, hunting wabbits.
BC2 also included an upgrade in the unlock path for the recon class called Magnum Rounds. This made sniper rounds lethal in hardcore no matter where the shooter landed their shots. It made snipers ruthless and important. But it also made counter sniping a micro-game within the larger game.
BF3 was more widely adopted (I believe, though I am unsure and hoping to make a shot back turned to the hoop) and as a result the Hardcore game mode became far less populated. This had a two or three-fold consequence.
1) Snipers moved into becoming headshot farmers. At a glance, not terrible, but it led to the role becoming slightly more trivialized. You had to land a headshot to guarantee a kill. How is that useful in a moving battlefield? Players that take a chest or leg shot just leave, and at the range you are, they’re likely lost to cover or in the field of gray.
2) Removing the hyperlethality of the most lethal weapons platforms on a battlefield, in turn, lessens the impact of all the others. This is to varying degrees, of course. But one of the more aggravating for me is the weakness of the LMG platform. LMGs are big fuckin guns, they hit like BFGs. The M240B fires a 7.62 round, a thick bitch with a lot of stopping power. Its belt-fed rapid firing capability means a lot of hot metal down range. As a player, running a 7.62 carbine has better TTK than and LMG putting out the same rounds, from a longer barrel, often more frequently.
This leads to number 3) leveling the playing field has appeared to make everything work about the same, and therefore causes a lot of things to FEEL the same. But the LMG takes a hit to mobility (how fast you can aim it) so why use it? DMRs take 3 bullets to kill unless they are close range, and wouldn’t you guess it, only a headshot at close range seals the deal in 2. And snipers, one of the most valuable assets a decade ago, has been relinquished to a dozen polyps budding on the edges of the map, being largely ineffective, and moderately annoying. And they all glow like fucking cylons.
There are solutions for this, in my opinion, but it means making classes more terrifying than they have been allowed to be in recent interactions. Take scope glint away and bring back the vapor trail, increasing in intensity based on caliber. If you want to find a sniper, find a good spot and hunt dammit. Make sniper rounds more debilitating. Chest and leg shots should make sprinting go on cooldown. Full stop. That sucks for the target, but like, it should. LMGs need to make players blur-out. Let them be suppressive weapons again. Covering a corner in pop-fizz so no-one can advance is a good thing. All of these things force players to think more. The thing that bugged me the most about BF6 was that it seemed like thinking was largely cast aside for mobbing. And that feels bad when a match can be 40 minutes long.
All of this being said, the beta did make a few things very clear that I liked very much. The lack of stupid gadgets made rolling armor feel much more scary. The destructability made every position feel tenuous, and the return of real weapon customization feels great. Top tier stuff there. But don’t try to make this another Call of Duty. Stand strong on what set Battlefield apart. Big maps, scary situations, and tactical retreats that make you deal with problems more specifically. I want to go sniper hunting again, I want to make whole squads retreat when I put the lead man down. Sniper fire should give pause, force a scatter. Armor should make you hunker and crawl backwards. Squad composition should matter. And honestly if that means limiting snipers to 8 a team 1 per squad, I’m here for it.
And give my LMG mules some fucking love. Let them slam the goddamn door.