I love Battlefield so much I got a PhD in it. Most people I know can’t see the appeal and I can’t blame them. Neither did I when I started. I started cause my boyfriend was Swedish and wanted to convince me to move to Stockholm with him. We were video game professionals and Stockholm only had one game studio. A studio that made Battlefield. I gamely tried the game, and spent 10 hours dying from snipers I couldn’t see while having no idea how to even find anyone.
This is how empty one of the maps looked (Heavy Metal). If you selected the wrong spawn point, it could take you a literal minute to run to where the action was, and snipers would kiss you goodbye before you got there.
It took me a long time to “get” this game and now I believe I see a lot in it almost no one else does. I truly believe Battlefield 6 Conquest Multiplayer on large maps is the Best Stealth Experience you can get in modern gaming by a very long shot. Here is why.
You might think a shooter is about shooting, and I’m not going to be so annoying as to deny that. But really every multiplayer shooter is a game of tag and hide & seek mushed together. We tend to focus on the “tag” part where you use your cursor to click on other players, and if you do this hard enough you drain their “health bar” and have tagged them to “death” (wow, narrative force much?). But the best antidote to getting tagged to death is to not be seen at all. And the best way to tag someone else to death is to get the drop on them so hard they don’t even know which way to run to make you stop touching them through the screen.
So I’d argue every multiplayer shooter is a stealth game in disguise (ha! See what I did there?) but Battlefield 6 takes the cake (and then hides it! Why the motherfucking why does it hide the fact it’s so good at being a stealth game?!). Now to understand some of that, you have to understand the basics of Battlefield 6.
Except that’s boring to explain. So I’ll skip it and link to this tutorial video for noobs the noble hearts of the virgin shooter players. The short version is that I’m only going to talk about the 64-player Conquest mode on large maps. Two teams of 32 players compete to drain each other’s 1000 ticket pool. You lose a ticket when anyone on your team dies (and doesn’t get revived) but you lose tickets every few seconds if the enemy team captures more flags than your team. A flag is a zone on the map that you own by having team mates on it (it remains yours if you walk off and no enemy shows up). You score points by doing actions useful to making your team win. One useful action is killing an enemy. But then there are 93,730 other useful actions, give or take. And that’s where things get interesting.
This is not me. This is Sibello’s Tank Repair Service, which outscores their entire team despite only having 1 kill. (K = Kill, D = Death, A = Assisted in a kill by a team mate, [flag] = flag captures)
See, normally people think about shooters as being about shooting. And you measure your skill by how many kills you get compared to your deaths. This is called your kill-death ratio (kdr). Now in Battlefield 6 Conquest, your kdr only marginally matters. What truly matters is how many points you score. And these points are awarded for any strategic action that helps your team win. That means you can opt out of the “tag” part of the Tag/Hide & Seek combo that is multiplayer shooters. And then Battlfield puts the Hide & Seek part on steroids.
That’s three enemies nearby. Imagine trying to notice them between plants or in the distance peaking a corner.
Battlefield games combine two things no other major multiplayer shooter does: realistic graphics and destructible environments. Realism means that it is actually hard to see and be seen. And destructability means the map constantly changes. You can blow a hole in the ground and then hide in it. And you can blow a hole in wall and then jump through it. And you blow a hole in a tree, a house, or a massive crane till it forgets how to be vertical and then you huddle in the rubble. Basically, the maps change all the time, and it is genuinely hard to see where people are, and you have to keep searching and thinking to figure out sightlines. That means every second in Battlefield is spent triangulating where you are visible from and which way you should be looking. It is the ultimate continuous mental rotation and tracking test as you subtract all the sightlines covered by friendlies and interpolate where the enemies might be in the gaps, and then check if that wall that’s normally there still exists even. Believe me, it feels a special sort of frustrating to die from walls not being where you expect them to be and a special sort of a glorious to be the cause of that and find an enemy huddling on the other side.
I thought about writing this as a game guide, but then you have a list of steps you’d have to execute to find out if I’m right or even more right wrong. So instead, I’ll tell you stories of fun I’ve had, and that you could be having too.
Like the one time I was our main intelligence officer. I ranked among the top ten players of my team by scoring over 80 assists and no kills. What did this look like? You select the Recon class and then you get gadgets that let you “spot” enemies. Spotting lets you put a red diamond above the enemy’s head. For a few seconds this diamond becomes visible through walls to you and all your friends. This is a major game changer. When you focus on spotting, you basically spawn into the match and spend your time avoiding enemies while finding a good vantage point on the map. Then you use your gadgets to spot everyone in sight. If a team mate then kills that enemy, you get points! You are basically fighting the “intelligence” war of the game.
Another time I was the sneaky ninja of the team. I took a flag by hiding on the back of a truck except the back of the truck bed was open. I saw enemies run past me within 1-2 metres, but they simply did not expect me to be in the truck. It was the most hide and seek glee I’ve experienced in a decade! Now during a flag capture, you can see a ticker of how many friendlies versus enemies are on the flag, so they knew someone from my team was somewhere in the flag zone. I could see them running around like mad. And I, as recon, put down a sensor under my butt so they couldn’t see its flashing light in their peripheral vision whenever they ran past my hiding spot. I also made sure not to move a muscle, so my movement wouldn’t give me away either. Keep in mind, if any of them looked my way, they would have seen me! But peripheral vision on a soldier in camo in a truck bed is just not very noticeable and none of them figured it out. Meanwhile, the sensor spotted enemies around it through walls and everything, so my team mates outside the flag area, started picking off the enemies around my truck like they had a sixth sense. Two minutes later, they stormed in and we all took the flag
Then another time I was the angel engineer of death. I was driving a tank on my own but came under fire. With almost no health left, I bailed and crawled under the tank to repair it. The enemy was smart and sprinted for the now empty tank, and jumped in. Except, when you use a repair tool on an enemy tank, you damage it! Now instead of lying under my own tank repairing it, I was lying under an enemy tank damaging it. It blew up in a manner of seconds as I lay on the couch wheezing with laughter.
So why is Battlefield 6 conquest on large maps such a good stealth experience? Cause you are competing against other humans in a massive game of hide and seek, in a realistic environment that changes with every match. And that type of true stealth is really just about getting in each other’s head: What can they see? What can they hear? What do they expect you to do?
And then you go and do something else.
The biggest kick comes from getting the jump on people who shoot faster and more accurately than you. If you get the drop on that 5.2 KDR player, you know you outsmarted them. And if you top the scoreboard with a winning team while only having a handful of kills, then you know it’s brains over “brawn” all the way.
The guns and war are all just fluff. It’s set dressing for a game of hide & seek with 5 layers of strategy layered on top. We haven’t gotten into counter-sniping, the intelligence war, and how to fend off (or acquire) air dominance. You can basically boot up Battlefield 6 and play each match as a different sort of mini-game. It advertises itself as a shooter or a war simulator, where you can drive or fly vehicles in epic battles. But no one tells you it’s really the only game where you can be a true ninja where stealth matters and will help you turn the tide of battle. They hide that part far too well.
