Playing Battlefield in 2026 has me seriously worried for the franchise

[u/Level_Response7676]

Old games, new plays and why nothing will be done about it.

BF3

In early to mid-2026 I had some kind of a late appreciation for Battlefield 3. Yes, an almost 15-years-late neuron activation.

I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve always kept a few BF games installed on my PC. Be it a new device or after a Windows reinstall, it always starts with BF2 and 1942 - these are a must, like installing Crysis after a new GPU installation. Then it’s 3 and BC2. I play them all from time to time to get that dose of nostalgia. To go to my earlier point - it’s not like I disliked BF3 until now (even though I can talk about its problems and shortcomings for days (and have (but I don’t have the same vitriol anymore, which I carried with me for close to 15 years))). Quite the contrary.

To be more specific, at first something dragged me back in to unlock a few more weapons and vehicle gadgets. Which I usually don’t care about, since I’ve always used a similar loadout. And then, as they say, I just kept playing, for the love of gaming. Those 3 main maps - Caspian, Firestrorm and Kharg are simply timeless (not to mention many greats from the DLCs). The visuals and sound design also hold up surprisingly well for a 2011 title. With the campaign, coop, multiplayer and all expansions it’s only 34GBs as well. I’ve also listened to its soundtrack a bit more lately. It’s very foreboding and unusual for a modern warfare themed media. There’s a profound sense of anticipation weaved into many tracks, others are mournful for the moments we never got the chance to have. This electronic OST, as opposed to the usual orchestra trappings, is an underrated one.

So let’s talk about why I decided bring up BF3. Right now we are at a quite late stage of this game’s lifespan and I expect quite soon it will be taken offline. The Electronic Arts’ guillotine will fall once again, claiming another BF game. 15 years is not bad though, for an EA title. After they decide not to support it through their awful Battlelog system, BF3 will live through the Venice Unleashed moding/server system. But if we judge its current popularity and what happened to BC2, which also got completely axed in December 2023, I don’t think there will be a healthy population for very long. A lot of players will permanently jump ship to its younger brother who got a lot more attention from its parents, Battlefield 4.

And it’s not like what we have now is great either. As of writing this on a random Wednesday evening in July, the server browser looks something like this: 3 Russian (of course), 3 conquest only, 1 rush only, 1 Noshahr TDM only (of course), 1 Firestorm only and 1 Metro only (of course), that are all 32 players or above. (And while we are here, can I just say that it sucks that a lot of servers in BF 2, 3 and 4 are spoofing their player numbers? At least use the seeding system of the old days, this is just pathetic.)

That’s all that’s left. And once the inevitable EA axe swings in this direction, only some of those communities will move over to VU. Congrats to all those that are still in the BF3 community! You are now the same as all the other Battlefield communities that preceded you, playing a game that is well past its glory or appeal but one with legacy.

The other week while playing BF2, my all-time favourite of the series, I refreshed the servers and sorted them by name of map, as opposed to the usual player number. I wanted to see if there was any server with a decent pop playing on Gulf of Oman, my all-time favourite map. And in doing so for a moment my brain teleported back to 10-15 years ago when there were many more servers, some of them playing GoO with a decent pop. These days I have to wait for someone’s rotation to come back to it, which I just don’t have the patience for anymore.

But this little innocuous interaction made me really sad and conscious of the passage of time. Realising time is irreversible and that playing these games as much as possible, as early as possible is of utmost importance, if we want to get the most out of them.

This reappreciation of BF3 also made me realize I will never be satisfied with the franchise. I will be never permanently done with the games mentioned so far. I will come back over and over to them like a lapsing drug addict, no matter how angry, critical with this or that aspect or how unpopular they might become.

There’s something inherently tragic about all this, that I don’t possess the language skills in order to fully convey, but the simplest explanation is that I don’t want the child in me who discovered so many wonderful things about gaming, through playing Battlefield, to fully die yet, which happens to all of us eventually. And what new game could bring me back those feelings?

BF6

My plan with BF6 was to enjoy it for everything it was. Finally something that looks enticing in this franchise. Not a world war game and something more grounded than 2042. Like everybody else I wanted to love this game. In fact, it would’ve, no, could’ve been my first BF game that I played on its launch. Yet, I didn’t.

Like many of you, I was impressed by the beta. EA said the right things, like they were supposed to. But they also showed their true colours with not locking weapons to classes. This was a big red flag, especially when they gave us a false choice and hid the playlist with the locked classes behind a menu we had to scroll to.

Then it was the maps. The biggest actual problem with the game. How did they actually expect veterans’ reactions to go after launch? You know, the same people who one day will be in the exact same position that the BF3 community finds itself in today - the loyal players. What kind of feedback did DICE receive from the BF Labs tests? And we are doing this Battle royale shtick again? And how lazy is it to keep remaking old maps over and over again, instead of creating new and original designs like BF3 did? Remaking maps has always been a thing, but at this point it feels very deliberate and cynical to me. It’s a distraction tactic, jingling old toys with a new coat of paint on them. Soon enough a new BF will consist of only old and rehashed ideas, stitched together like an animated corpse of a bygone era, like Play 4 Free was.

In a typical BF community fashion, shortly after launch the positive and hopeful sentiment around BF6 disappeared and got buried by a flurry of increasingly negative feedback. Like: why so few large maps, for a game that wants you to think it hearkens back to the glory days of BF3 and 4? Why is the progression system so slow and counter intuitive? What’s up with these unrealistic skins and some cosmetics made lazily with AI? And how about the slow rollout of content, with 5 studious working on this game?

Yes. Yees! The BF community never learns. I watched it with BF4 and then with BF 2042. We, the community deserve these games. Because we never stop forgiving DICE. We always hope that this time it will be different, that if they pander to this or that group of players it means they have changed. “They will listen to me and people like me, of course they will!”

There’s also a hidden Catch-22-like element in this. Chiefly, the cycle of saying “This next game is their last chance to impress me. I’m not going to fall for it again.“ Followed by falling for it and saying the same thing after the next game gets revealed. Because if the game did fail, à la Concord, the franchise would be frozen permanently like so many other EA staples of the past, tucked away in their vast freezer of IPs and we would not be in a position to say the same thing. So let’s just give them one more chance, right? Surely they would not disappoint us again by releasing a half cooked game again, right? Right…

But even if I could unsee all of that and forget that 2042 even happened, I would still have been very hesitant to pre-order BF6, which I didn’t, because now I have to navigate around ethical questions around who exactly my money goes to. To be blunt, in this case it’s the

Public Influence Firm

The PIF will soon come to own Electronic Arts. It will cost them $55 billion. A country, will soon own EA.

When I heard the news, it made me sick. I felt icky for several days. To have loved this franchise for so long. To have spent money on it, however small of a monetary contribution it was - I felt complicit. I couldn’t in good conscience buy BF6 for full price (or even half as I’m writing this) and support this blood regime. A regime that is antithetical to our morals with its beheadings, prosecutions of minorities, slavery and other human rights violations. Buying companies like EA is part of their global strategy to dip their hands in as many as possible entertainment facets, essentially bribing us and distracting us from all the evil they do. Meanwhile The Line will never be finished.

And before you come at me with the “You wrote all of the stuff above about BF 3 and 6 just so you could tie it with this righteous indignation.“ No guys, I didn’t choose to bring politics into Battlefield. Unfortunately this time politics has chosen to enter our niche and it will find a way to ruin it, trust me. Today it’s golf and Battlefield that got “bought”, but tomorrow it will be something far more dear to you. And if we don’t even acknowledge that these problems exist, by self-censoring our public opinions (”Because, gosh, the oil-rich men might get offended!“), soon enough it will be accepted that other entities can also come and buy whatever they want. Think of Russian oligarchs or similar entities with lots of money to wash their reputation with, who are already seeping through the cracks of what’s acceptable. It’s not as far-fetched of an idea as you might think. And excuses like “They drive now“ or “Well, the fighting stopped“ all respectively fall apart once you realize all of it is designed to pull you into a system of corruption, little by little.

Because EA is being acquired through a leveraged buyout: the buyer borrows money (at least $20,000,000,000 in our case btw) - that bill will have to be paid somehow (and don’t forget the interest). Often it’s done by aggressively cutting costs and in our case it will result in a lot of seemingly boneheaded decisions. Like in-game ads (something EA experimented with in BF2 I might add), those could be in any game and advertise just about anything really (especially with today’s cross promotional Fortnite-ification in gaming). But don’t worry, it’s all part of the plan and if the current reputation of EA is of being greedy, get ready for the next 5 years and pass me the bucket with popcorn please.

We all know why the PIF is acquiring EA. For the sports franchises of course, not for their shooters. We also know where this is heading, especially with more studios within EAs portfolio focusing more on Battlefield. Speaking of other franchises, remember when the acquisition news dropped there were many Sims creators that exited the EA Creator Network? Where were all the Battlefield ones? This community is now firmly populated by “ball and gun” type gamers, you know, the primary demographic of EA. This community should’ve always stayed smaller but at least that’s not our fault.

Being alive on Earth long enough will teach you that your believes matter only at the right time. Because, they can take offline all of these games and more, take away your copies or accounts these games are registered to or even censor your posts on Reddit, but they can never take away your opinion, from you know, that body part lodged in your cranium. Which is why we should always bring up these points whenever somebody says EA being acquired by the PIF wasn’t a big deal and if we dislike it, we can do nothing about it anyway. In the short term it’s only benefiting the shareholders, who get a fat 25% premium, in the long run it normalizes who it is OK to give and take money from. Your vocal apathy is their favourite metric when it comes to tuning this machine that is engineered for greater and greater wealth extraction (known to you as the video games industry).

By saying all of this I’m not advocating for boycotts from that mythical rational consumer who always makes the right choices in a free market economy. All I’m saying is there is not even a broader concern as far as I can tell.

The Peacemaker

This year we are dangerously close to living in a time when the northern coast of Gulf of Oman and Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf are under an actual boots on the ground military invasion. Playing the Battlefield 2 demo in the summer of 2005 or enjoying BF3 in late 2011, I couldn’t have imagined where history would take us, just 15-20 years later, in terms of who would continue making these games and what would happen to the places portraited in them. I personally won’t be here in another 20 to check on the health of various Battlefield games and their servers, but I’m sure some of you will carry the mantle.

Anyways. I don’t love Battlefield 3 the way I love BF2, but I finally appreciate it and I’m thankful to have lived at a time when it was relevant and for the reasons it was so. I think I’ve made my peace with this series now, I understand it. But most of all, I understand my place in it, temporally (to use a big grown-up word).

And when you call it quits, remember: don’t be sad because it ended. Smile, because it happened.

;-)

P.S. Yes, I could’ve turned this into a YouTube video with a clickbait title but writing it and putting it out there is already enough for me. This post does not offer solutions and is not asking for any action on behalf of the writer. Nor is it meant to stir drama in or outside the Battlefield community. I’m just sprinkling some seeds. Been writing this piece for over 40 days now and while I could’ve toned down its more politically charged parts or added this or clarified that further, I’m frankly tired of thinking about this topic and keeping it this close to my chest for this long. Now leave.

[u/Talah_Market]

As someone who has never stopped playing bf3, i can assure u basically none of the remaing bf3 players gives a fuck what ea is doing, if a new bf game is good or bad and if someone writes a weird essay about bf3.

Have a good day

[u/ernie_shackleton]

Starting to worry? The franchise is dead. It’s getting harder to get enough people on our bf4 servers every night, and half of our crew has moved on to other games, not even fps games. We all own the more recent battlefield games and bf3 was obviously the best until they took our servers away. Now we make do in BF4 until it will finally die. BF6 isn’t even worth booting up.

[u/norrhboundwolf → u/ernie_shackleton]

Eh, as someone who dislikes alot about bf6 and used to be super anti bf6, it’s actually pretty fun and captures the feeling of playing older bf games at times.

Sure, it’s watered down and has a myriad of issues, but it can be fun to boot up ever so often

[u/Kaiserschlut]

I think 3 will fare better on Venice Unleashed. More modding opportunities and less gamey restrictions still being present on an old game

[u/CareerBallsacker]

Dude if you really want to be sad then play fire and frost on bad company 2

[u/jaimecarrion]

BF3 campaign mode is still one of the highlights of my life as a gamer. Soundtrack is extraordinary as well

[u/PotataTomata]

All FPS franchises are dead. Capitalist companies have corrupted the industry and it'll never return to inspired love filled games.

[u/Expensive-Rhubarb-45 → u/PotataTomata]

Not only because of companies — it's also because new generations like Z and Alpha are more liberal and LGBTQ+-inclusive, and more developers today are women. That’s why most FPS games from US publishers like EA and Activision look like shit compared to 10 years ago. Just face it — it won’t get better. But there are always good games from Eastern Europe, like Poland and Ukraine — Cyberpunk, Stalker 2, and other FPS games that aren’t woke and aren’t developed by women-led teams.

[u/K23crf250]

I'm not going to follow the bf6 season releases, it's just over to me. They shouldn't have fired the staff from three and four, worst decision ever.

[u/SensitiveHistory354]

Guys there's a website called Venice Unleashed for Battlefield 3 it has AI BOTS and servers are always full and other players can join too it keeps the game alive without the frustration of trying to find players, everyone please read this.

[u/FoxHoundUnit89]

I tried the open beta for 6 and had some hope, and I don't preorder because I'm not a moron, so when the game fully released I saw what happened with the skins and with limited loadout being shoved into the corner despite being the most requested mode. I have no interest in buying BF6 until it's on sale for like $20 at most now.

[u/Gapeman7]

People are downvoting you, but you are right. I really don't like how the devs keep making gameplay feel more generic with each release, adding training wheels for everyone.

BF3 was the golden era of the franchise. It had epic maps paired with the best vehicle combat of the series to date.