It's no secret that the Battlefield series has been in a bit of a state, with recent games having launched in a terrible state, only to become good a year or two later, which in this day and age is just a tad too late. In what seems like changing tides, Battlefield 6 is going all out on what we want.
We're returning to the traditional classes over specialists like in BF2042, and these classes have been given a much-needed TLC, such as moving the Deploy Beacon to Assault instead of Recon. We're even getting both open and closed weapons at launch, letting these duelling ideologies finally coexist.
With hype at an all-time high ahead of the beta weekend, this renewed focus is paying off so far. With that excitement in mind, I was really looking forward to playing during the closed beta early access, which lasts just two days before the BF6 beta is open for all. I logged in at 9 am here in the UK, bang on the dot, and was immediately met by 140,000 other players who had done the same.
PC Gaming Show Editorial Director Jake Tucker had 220,000 people ahead of him, so I'll say I had it good. Nevertheless, one full hour of waiting later, I was finally in. Or so I thought.
None of the UI's text had loaded in, so I couldn't really tell what I was looking at, but I managed to stumble my way into searching for a match. Two minutes later, what I correctly assumed to be the game mode selection menu was suddenly all locked and I couldn't queue anymore.
Forced to completely reload the game, I'm now back in an even larger 200,000 player queue for a second attempt that's hopefully more successful. The one positive I can draw from this painful torment is that maybe we're finally back. With a few hundred thousand trying to log in, and already a peak of 289,505 players on Steam alone during a somewhat limited early access beta, BF6 certainly has a lot of eyes on it. Now it's time to deliver.
Unfortunately, I'm not the only one having issues with the BF6 beta so far, either. Besides the incredibly long queues to get into the game itself, which I've already seen peaking at 300k online, some players are also reporting:
- Crashes (forcing you back into the queue).
- A "requires early access" error despite…having early access.
- PC players are seemingly receiving an error claiming they need a "premium subscription" like PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass to play.
- Having no hands in-game.
Hopefully, some of these issues can be ironed out before even more players start flooding the servers over the weekend when the beta fully opens up.
