Battlefield 6 is one of those gaming stories that prove certain companies never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Despite being one of the best-selling games of the last year, it has been bleeding players like there's no tomorrow, leading to massive layoffs at Battlefield Studios amid a total lack of understanding of what fans actually want to see.
There haven't been many maps released, and content altogether seems dry, but with the release of Season Two, the future could be looking a lot brighter. What happened in this new season was the return of Operations after the game launched without them for no apparent reason. Operations was an incredible game mode back in Battlefield 1 that, though a bit grindy, continues to retain large numbers of players to this day, 10 years later, with EA playing ignorant to that fact all this time.
It was reintroduced in BFV to little success due to poor execution and then excluded from the disastrous 2042, with BF6 again launching without it. However, Operation Augur, as it is known in BF6, is one of the best and most fun game modes I've ever played in a Battlefield title, with attackers having to beat the defenders on two different maps by capturing successive sectors using limited manpower.
A couple of friends and I have been logging in constantly to play this new mode, and we are having a blast no matter the side we're playing on. We haven't been getting together to play BF6 since October, around the game's initial launch, since those starting maps got rather boring pretty fast with EA not adding anything significant or noteworthy to change our minds. The two maps on Augur, though, are bringing back classic Battlefield vibes even if the mode is locked to 48 rather than 64 players.
The first map, Contaminated, is wide enough with many chokepoints where players can get stuck in and duke it out for control of a point. Some sectors have one, some have two points that need to be captured, with poisonous smoke dropping onto the map after each sector falls. While not nearly as large or open as some Operations maps in Battlefield 1, like Monte Grappa, it genuinely does offer enough for players to actually feel like they're involved in a larger-scale conflict.
On Hagental Base, I felt like I was in Battlefield 3's Metro again or, for a better comparison, BF1's Fort-de-Vaux map. It's closed off, claustrophobic, and has players throwing enough frag grenades to blow up an entire city, let alone an underground system of tunnels. I even found it more fun than Contaminated since it features so many paths you can take to flank enemies, outmaneuver them, or try to avoid their explosive defenses.
There are flaws, sure, mostly of the narrative kind since, as one player in my match said, "Why do I care about these places?" Yeah, I don't find myself as hyped up to defend random bases fighting for NATO or Pax Armata as I do toppling the bourgeoisie and saving the Motherland from fruitless warfare in BF1, but there's enough in the mode itself that helps maintain pressure and drive players into trying to push through.
As you can see, I'm rather ecstatic about the mode. And you know what EA did? It made the mode time-limited. Yeah, it's an event, not a permanent thing, and that really is a bummer. I genuinely cannot recall when I had this much fun playing Battlefield 6, and knowing that fun will at most last two weeks is genuinely disappointing and makes me actually not want to play it.
I've grown so tired of FOMO tactics that I find it disheartening when I see genuinely good features locked behind arbitrary temporal limits, making me not want them, instead of the opposite.
If EA wants to preserve what's left of the BF6 player base, it should make Operations a permanent mode. In fact, it should update it constantly and add new scenarios to it, even if it means some other sides of the game are to be left out of the schedule. The company announced it's going to add naval warfare and persistent servers back into the game, so let's hope that's a segue into bigger and better Operations down the line.
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