Battlefield 6 is making an excellent case to skip Call of Duty this year

This time 15 years ago, I was a staunch Battlefield guy who had every Call of Duty rebuke memorized. My beloved Bad Company 2 was the better FPS because it had vehicles, 32-player lobbies, class roles, and maps that put Modern Warfare 2's puny arenas to shame. I was and still am correct. But CoD fans always had the same comeback: Call of Duty had the better gunplay, and it had create-a-class.

It's true: Battlefield's simulated ballistics were cool and all, but its guns were fiddly and slow—a bad combination in close-quarters fights—and permanently fitted with whatever attachments DICE chose, which occasionally felt limiting.

Call of Duty had the advantage where it arguably mattered most, but in Battlefield 6, that advantage has vanished.

You've heard that there's a lot of Battlefield 3 and 4 in Battlefield 6, but there's also a ton of modern Call of Duty in there. It's most obvious when you fire a gun—bullets travel noticeably faster, to the degree that they feel like hitscan weapons up close. This does wonders for the feel of close-quarters fighting in BF6 because you don't have to lead shots on enemies running right in front of you, but you still have to account for bullet drop when bursting bullets at a sniper 120 meters away.

EA hasn't mentioned exactly how BF6's ballistics have changed since BF2042, but I wonder if it adopted a system similar to the one that CoD has used since 2019, where bullets are treated as hitscan up to a certain distance, then become simulated projectiles.

It helps that the maps in the BF6 beta are more infantry-friendly than anything in BF2042. The largest map available right now, Liberation Peak, is longer than it is wide, with sightlines broken up by hills and rocks. Fewer of my fights have been unloading on a tiny black dot 70 meters away.

Then there's the weapon customization. BF6 has essentially lifted Call of Duty's Gunsmith system in its entirety, right down to its handy Firing Range button that instantly lets you test loadouts on paper targets. BF6 easily has the most tweakable weapons in series history, giving free rein for attachment addicts to dial in their recoil and sway with grips, barrels, muzzles, rail accessories, and optics.

Interestingly, BF6 doesn't have a hard attachment cap, but instead an "attachment point" pool of 100 you can't exceed. Using a powerful attachment that costs 50 points, like my LMG's extended magazine, means I probably can't afford my 30-point suppressor and a fancy thermal scope. It's a more flexible system than CoD's, and possibly an easier one to balance as Battlefield Studios adds to it.

Something feels different

As long as I've been playing Battlefield, its rivalry with CoD has always seemed more ceremonial than serious. A lot of people love Battlefield, but the interest in CoD has always been on another level. That still may be true, but the extremely positive response to BF6's reveal and the explosive popularity of its beta have me wondering if the CoD fatigue has really set in this time.

I knew something was different when the most dedicated Call of Duty YouTuber I follow, TheXclusiveAce, started sharing tips for CoD players playing BF6 for the first time and elaborate guides to make BF6's controls feel like CoD.

To be fair, Activision hasn't held its big reveal yet, but I'm not seeing many reasons to get excited for Black Ops 7. I do see reasons to be worried, like how CoD has become the ugliest shooter around, or the fact that Blops 7 is a direct sequel to last year's game led by the same two studios. The last time Activision rushed a sequel like this, we got the worst CoD in modern history.

Meanwhile, Battlefield has caught up. It has the maps, it has the classes, it has the scale—and now it has the gunplay, the weapon tuning, and CoD's small-scale modes.