It's T-minus three days until Battlefield 6's launch, and with every hour that passes, I get even more excited. But my sheer joy at the prospect of jumping into blissful chaos is also somewhat overshadowed by the rising dread that the servers simply won't be able to cope.
Battlefield games have a rather unfavourable track record of borking their servers on launch as more people than expected pile in. To be fair, so do most multiplayer online games. But Battlefield 6 lead producer David Sirland seems to think all will be OK when Friday rolls around. "Should be! We are planning for that, of course, and the open beta helped gauge the interest as well," Sirland said (via GamesRadar) in response to a fan question about whether the servers would be ready.
The betas likely helped Battlefield Studios realise just how popular Battlefield 6 will be, as hundreds of thousands of players piled in to experience the joys and horrors that Iberian Offensive had to offer, and many were met with a 140,000 player queue.
The other pitfall that many were nervous about Battlefield 6 falling into is releasing in an unoptimised state (like Borderlands 4 last month). Although from what I've seen so far, this won't be the case: The beta played pretty smoothly, except for a slight hiccup on the second weekend of beta testing, with virtually no server issues to be seen.
Honestly, even the worst-case scenario, getting met with hour-long queues of hundreds of thousands of people, doesn't even suck too much. Sure, it would be nice to get to enjoy Battlefield 6 straight away, but the queues never last for long, and players will have all the time in the world to enjoy everything on offer in the coming months—and hopefully years.
