Battlefield might finally be listening...

So today we got a pretty big update for Battlefield 6. This is a massive quality of life patch that's releasing on the same day as we get the second map in season 2 base. And I just had a quick skim through of this. I'm going to look at it in more detail now, but if they actually deliver on a lot of this stuff, it could be a big turning point for the game in terms of just the basic momentto moment gameplay because there's a lot of improvements here. So, I thought that this was worth making a video on and we're going to take a look. There's some really interesting things here. A couple things I don't really agree with and I'm like, uh, why did you do that? But there it is. You know, you can't win them all. So, we're going to have a look through today. So, season 2fall, they calling it Nightfall. This like mid-season B is going to launch with update 1.2.2.0. And also the new map, it's coming out March 17th at 0900 UTC. and then midday UTC, the new map's going to go live and all the other stuff as well. There's a quick look at the map there. I do have some B-roll footage of this that EA gave us for the original season 2 capture event which I can put in the video if I if I think I've still got it. I'm sure I do, but I'll whack it in the video now so you can just have a quick look at that. And there's some footage of the new gun there as well. So, here we go. New map, Hogel Base. Plunge beneath the surface and prepare for gripping underground close quarters combat. blast through walls or cave-in ceilings to flank and ambush enemies lurking in the tunnels. So, having seen the B-roll and seen some of the leaked gameplay from BF Labs play tests, this looks pretty cool. There's a lot of areas of the map where you can use a sledgehammer. You see four rocket launcher and blow the walls up. Basically, it's like cracks and yellow paint, I think it was, or like red X's or something. You blow them up, do a flank, and it's just given a bit of player agency to the destruction, which I quite like. So that's part of the map. Think about ambushes in the corridors and play to each class's strength as you take control of a newly discovered base. So it's infantry only map obviously. Maybe there's like a quad bike or the new bikes in there somewhere, but it's a meat grinder operation locker operation metro style map. Not that everyone is asking for that, but typically those kind of maps have been quite popular for grinding XP. And in this update, yes, finally. Next week, we're going to get much faster weapon XP, which I think is a huge deal, and I'm thankful that they finally got around to it. I mean, it should have been ages ago, but they're doing it anyway. So, we're getting a new LTM, Nightfall. Squads can compete in a mix of TDM, squad, deathmatch, and domination matches on Hogel Base. Wait, so it's not in conquest or breakthrough. Isn't that a bit weird? All matches will take place with Nightfall's darkness modifier where it cuts most of H Park bases lights out. Your survival during nightfall depends on your ability to see through the dark to night vision goggles and using the environment to your benefit. So you just like hold X on PC, one of the D-pad buttons on console, I think, and you equip the night vision goggles. They have a battery though, so you can't have them on forever. So that's where a torch flashlight might come in handy, but of course you're going to give yourself away. So, it might offer a little bit of a different gameplay style, but again, it's an LTM. It's only on one map, so I'm like, h, do we really need this? But, you know, I'll play a couple rounds of it. I'm sure it'll be fun for a couple games and that'll be it. I'll be done with it probably. We're going to have Gauntlet Nightfall 2. I don't really play Gauntlet, so I'm not really interested in that. And then we got a Red Bull event here. Red Bull Super Moto. So, I think this is a tiein with Red Bull and the bikes. Oh, arriving later in season 3. Uh, so this isn't coming next week, right? High high-speed gauntlet style experience focusing on dirt by gracing. Eight players enter competing across three knockout rounds. By the final stage, only four remain to battle for Red Bull in-game rewards in a fast-paced elimination showdown. So, is that going to be like bike races maybe or stunt some kind of stunt racing? I don't know. That sounds interesting. Okay, it's like a FOMO LTM thing. Uh, and then there's a new POI on the BR map. Secret complex. Again, there was footage of this in the B-roll. I'll put it on screen now if I've got it. Fort Lyndon expands with the addition of defense testing complex 3, a newly accessible underground sector beneath the main battleground. This secret chemical testing facility includes a network of tunnels that serve both as traversal routes and high stakes close quarters combat zones. So, this is going to be a underground bunker section. was quite linear, but there were a few left and rights there, you know, where I guess you can flank and get back up to the surface. So, that could lead to some interesting end games in Battle Royale, maybe. And in the B-roll, there was also like blacklight pistols where you were searching for stuff. So, it could be some kind of return to Easter eggs or the Phantom Program. We'll have to see. But, I think if they put the Phantom Program stuff in Red Seeds to do it, that's a big mistake, man. I feel like that should be in multiplayer cuz there's a lot of multiplayer people who play Battlefield that just don't care about Red Se at all. So, forcing people to play it to get some kind of cool hypothetical skin or weapon down the line. Not sure that's a good idea, but we'll see how that turns out. I'm just making some assumptions there. So, we've got new vehicles. There are two variants of the dirt bike, one for each team, NATO and packs. And it's a two-seater, which is nice. Built for speed and maneuverability. Available in faction specific variants for NATO and PAX forces. These bikes enable rapid repositioning, flanking maneuvers, and swift escapes across both BF6 and Red Sack. Cool. I hope that they add them to all of the maps in the game where it makes sense. Put a bike on it. Bikes are fun. They're going to lead to some crazy sandbox moments. And it's a two-seater, so I guess the guy in the back could have C4 rocket launchers, stingers, whatever. These were incredibly fun in the BF3 Endgame DLC. if you remember. And also BF4, they had them in China Rising and some of the other BF4 maps down the line. So cool. Bikes are nice. I like that. New weapons CZ 3A1. High rate of fire SMG for aggressive close quarters engagements. Ideal for fast pushes and confined firefights. This is going to be nuts. The rate of fire in the B-roll footage I've seen, it looks very good. I think it's going to be extremely good for close quarters. Might take the crown in terms of time to kill. We'll see. The fastest at the moment is 150, which I think is a bit too fast, but could it be quicker than that? Maybe equal with a bit more range. Not sure. And then the VZ61, a fully automatic sidearm with a rapid fire rate. Best suited for extremely short range combat scenarios where quick reaction speed is critical. So, this is like a small variant of the Scorpion. I think you've seen like a Kimbo in a lot of games and movies, people carrying these things around. interesting sidearm choice. I think that's the first fully automatic sidearm in BF6. Please correct me if I'm wrong. And then they're having a free trial for the game from March 17th to 24th. So March 17 when the new map goes live and all this new stuff will be free for all players. Wage water crossontaminated. Oh, or descend into the underground corridors of Hoganel base. So it's limited free trial. So, you can play on four maps and six modes, including large scale conquest and the Nightfall event. So, it's almost like um a snapshot of the game for free, but you're not going to be able to play everything. They're trying to tempt new players in. I don't know if this is going to work cuz I feel at this point in time, everyone that was going to play BF6 played it and bought it cuz it was the bestselling game of the year and they've already stopped playing because the live service content was so bad. The content cadence was terrible for a game with such short time to action and little depth. You need you need to just update that live service constantly to keep people engaged. They didn't and all those players have gone now. So trying to get people in. I don't know if that's going to work, but yeah, if you haven't tried it yet, great opportunity to give it a go, of course. And then major update. So, here's some of the quality of life stuff I was talking about. Vehicle gameplay improvements, added light transport vehicle detling. That's a word, isn't it? Improved helicopter landing stability, refined vehicle camera behavior, increased tank braking power, and boosted UH79 survivability across multiplayer. This is really good. Transport helicopters should be transport helicopters, and they should be a bit tankier, so you can actually use them for their intended purpose, flying around the map, dropping people off. portable mortar and gadget updates. Expanded portable mortar deployment rules to HQ areas. So, you're now going to be able to put your mortar down in HQ. Some people will be like, "H, is that a good idea?" Others will be like, "Okay, fair enough. If you're getting mortared, you can probably counter mortar. If you can hit their deployment, they can hit you. Vice versa." So, we'll see how that goes. The mortars aren't particularly effective in this build of the game, but I've just seen here improved mini map visibility and direct hit effectiveness. So, they might buff the damage a bit there if you get a direct hit. I just hope that they haven't gone too far with this and they're insanely OP and people just spam them left, right, and center. Please dice, don't do it. And introduced update anti-tank mine limits and despawn rules for better battlefield balance. They go into this a bit more further on. AI behavior. So, basically the bots can use like a load of vehicles now. bike scout helicopters. The bots are going to be a bit more humanlike, I suppose. Maps and mode fixes address multiple exploits, spawn logic issues. That's a big one. Traversal bugs and invalid state problems across Mira Siege, Eastwood, and Contaminated. Progression and battle pass reliability delivered a broad progression consistency pass. correct in battle pass tiers, token calculations, end round rewards, accolade tracking, challenge criteria discrepancies and stat inconsistencies. And then there's a load of fixes for the UI hood and front end and audio and squad expansion. Introduce the stricks raider squad with four unique voice performances. Don't really care about that. Improved footstep clarity and spatialization. Good. I hope that this is a big update to the audio with the footsteps in the game. Got to test it and see. Refined vehicle and jet mix balance. So maybe you'll be able to hear tanks more when they're coming. That's great. And added new stereo width customization options. Be interesting to tinker around a bit with that and experiment. And then there's a huge change log here. There's a ton of stuff. I mean, I'm not going to go over all of this cuz I think a lot of it is just good quality of life stuff where they're tweaking, tightening, fixing things. So this stuff here is just going to improve the game across the board. I think network and hit regge improvements. This could be massive. Applied networking optimizations to improve bullet data transmission efficiency. Improved time nudge. Time nudge. What's that? That's interesting. Reliability to reduce instances of dying behind cover and inconsistent hit rage, particularly under unstable system or network conditions. Great. Basically, better hit, better net code. you're not going to die around corners as much and hopefully you're not going to feel like you die in one frame as much. But again, that goes back to the weapons that can kill you in 150 milliseconds. But there might be some improvement there, which is good. We'll test it. We'll see. But they've been focusing on this for the last couple months. They've talked about this before. The proof is in the pudding, though, as we all know. And this here, resolved an issue where lethal damage screen effects could appear delayed. Improving kill feedback timing. So perhaps sometimes you were dead but your game didn't show that you were dead. So it felt like you were dying instantly or around a corner. So again that's just buffing the whole package which is great for vehicles. So they've kind of buffed the vehicles a little bit here in terms of their maneuverability it seems. And they've also where is it here somewhere? Decrease speed of the IFV MBT and attack heli aimguided missiles. This is a big nerf to those missiles. And I do think that they're very easy to use. You know, when you fire it and you kind of control it with the mouse or the the analog stick and you can and just like bop a helicopter that's 300 400 m away. They're not difficult to use or they weren't. They might be now. It depends on how much the speed has been decreased. But I think that's a good change cuz it hopefully means that helicopters will be able to survive a bit better. Here's a big one for the transport helicopter. UH79 health increased by 20% across all multiplayer modes. So, you're going to see people using this, fingers crossed, as a transport vehicle. Now, it's a good change in my opinion. This one though, I don't understand cuz I don't think this is a problem. I don't really see this in my games. Restricted scout helicopter passengers from using engineer rocket launchers. Isn't this just removing a fun sandbox element from the game when you're in a helicopter with your buddies like the little bird and flying around and you're on the side with a rocket launcher? Maybe you're about to be killed by an enemy attack helicopter because the pilot has to reload his gun or it's overheated or he hasn't got any rockets left. Flares are gone. But you're on the side though. You got that small, you got the RPG. Bang. you save the day or you shoot tanks or quad bikes on the ground from that helicopter. Isn't that just a fun sandbox thing? I don't know why they've done that. That just seems a bit anti- sandbox to me. Anti phone, anti battlefield, but I don't know. I don't think that's a great change. Big change to the mines here now. And I think that this was much needed. I know people are going to complain about this, but there's mines everywhere. Oh, there was. Anti-tank mines are now despawning 180 seconds after their owner is eliminated. I think that personally I think that's a good change and it's going to increase survivability of tanks if you're not going to randomly explode when you're on quad bikes or these new bikes. There's still going to be mines. Yeah, but you might not see as many of them. And here limited anti-tank mines to six active per player. And then there's a bit about the mortars here. You can now deploy them in HQ which we talked about. You can't deploy them outside of combat areas. Good. And there they're talking about the effectiveness of direct hits with the mortar being slightly buffed. Some weapon changes here. I think it's mostly just bug fixes apart from the new ones. Map and mode changes. Some fixes to contaminated resolved and exploit and escalation that allowed players to clip under the map and shoot through terrain. I don't think I experienced that, you know. I didn't see that one. And here's the bit about progression. So they added five times 15 career XP boost and four times battle pass XP boost as career rank rewards. These are now split between rank 3 and 23. These were live in the previous patch but the note has been carried forward for documenting purpose. All right. Camo unlocks a move from mastery ranks 20 30 40 to 51530 respectively. So now you're going to start getting camos much quicker. Good. And this is the big one here. a new XP curve with a reduced XP requirement about twice as fast in the early ranks and 15% faster in total. So, you're going to be unlocking attachments way quicker in those early ranks and overall 15% faster. That's a good change. Of course, you throw double XP on top and you can get your attachments for your guns hopefully without it feeling like an absolute grind fest. I don't know why they decided to gate so much of that gameplay content with the attachments on the gun and it's taken this long to actually attempt to fix that. I think the weapon grind should be much more acceptable, but the camo grind, I feel like that's the thing where you go, "Okay, if you want this super sick camo at the end of the road that you can peacock and show off to everyone, you've got to put timing." I think it's fair to put like a big grind behind that, but weapon attachments, especially stuff like suppressors when spotting and cell spotting is so dominant in this game. It was in a bad place. We'll see what this feels like with the new weapons that they've added. Load UI and hood fixes. Gray. I mean, look at this. This just goes on and on and on. I'm not going to read all this. Some fixes with the settings here. Single player fix portal. A new camera type called fixed. You can now place fixed cameras in GDAU and assign them an object ID. Not sure of the applications for this. We'll see. Again base assets now available in the SDK. Good. Audio added a new stereo width setting in the audio menu for support configs, allowing further spatial customization. Have a play with that if my setup supports it. This one's pretty big here. Implemented a new footstep mix strategy to improve clarity for close to mid-range enemies in busy combat scenarios. and improved distance separation from close to mid-range and content, making it slightly louder when close and obstructed, but reduced when far away and obstructed, especially when indoors. Improved distinction between indoor and outdoor footsteps at further ranges. Cool. So, it looks like sounds like, pun intended, footsteps are going to be a bit more clearer and audible. Again, we'll test that and see. And this one here, increase priority of various footstep assets to reduce chances of performance-based culling on these assets. The footstep sounds are going to take more of a priority now. I suppose that means red sec new POI I'm in. I'll definitely check this out if they've got the Easter egg stuff there too. Of course, I'll cover that. Like I said though, not that I agree if it's only in that. If it is, hopefully there's another way of getting that kind of stuff in multiplayer. Hopefully they add solos pretty soon as well cuz I played a few rounds of that and thought it was all right. But again, the armored vehicles, I think they kind of ruin it. So huge patch coming on the 17th with the new map, load of updates. Sounds pretty good. I mean, unfortunately, there's still no mention or acknowledgement of server browser at all, of a classic server browser. I don't know what's happening there. And no idea of a road map if we're going to get more maps in the future for the game. Nothing like that. So, I do feel like they're missing the mark in certain areas, but yeah, this could be a pretty big deal for the game and maybe a turning point. We'll see. With that said, I'm going to leave it there. I also wanted to highlight this. So, Viper Studios Andy, who has been like a portal guy, he's added snow to a few of the maps in the game, and I think he actually did a pretty good job. So, you can actually play some of the base game maps with snow on, which is neat. And I'll put portal codes on the screen now if you want to try that out for yourself. But I think because it's got custom logic, you can't earn XP on it, which yeah, no one's really going to play that, are they? That's still an issue as well. But there we go. Let me know your thoughts below, guys. I appreciate you watching. Appreciate you being here. Thank you so much. I've got some really fun videos coming up next few days and next week. It's going to be packed. New games. Look out for those. I've been doing a lot of behind the scenes. Anyways, drop me a like, subscribe if you're new, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.