Battlefield 6 is about the real world, but it doesn’t take place in it. At some point in the Battlefield series’ version of history, events diverge from their proper path and there’s a fictional 21st-century conflict between the United States and Iran, Russia, and China. In the latest game, a faltering NATO is up against an enormously powerful private military company called Pax Armata. The names and political tensions are sometimes based in reality. More often they’re World War III nightmare scenarios, brought from imagination to screen. Battlefield 6 isn’t set in the real world, in a literal sense.
And yet, its fantasy of near-future catastrophe looks recognizable. The guns and uniforms are familiar. The military acronyms and vehicle designs are, too. The soldiers talk like modern people and the world they live in is a lot like our own. Battlefield 6 is a ‘modern military shooter,’ with the references and aesthetics to match that description. It hews closely to aspects of the world we live in, even as it splinters off in different directions more amenable to high-stakes action scenarios.
There’s always something not being said in Battlefield 6. In its near future, NATO exists and it's crumbling, as Pax Armata assumes control of various regions across the world. We’re told this has led to breakdowns in alliances as current spheres of influence shift—different states taking advantage of the turmoil to seize control of neighbours that would otherwise be off limits. The implication here is that Russia, next door to Georgia, where the game begins, is eager to regain its old empire amidst the breakdown. Presumably, China is doing something similar, along with other American rivals.
Throughout the game, you mostly play as members of Dagger 1-3, a Marine Raiders squad that hops around the globe at fighter-jet speed to crack the case of how, exactly, Pax Armata was able to launch its surprise attacks. Battlefield 6 ends with the well-telegraphed ‘twist’ that the CIA is responsible for assisting Pax in its goals, the big clunky idea being that all of the United States’ enemies would band together as NATO falls apart, forming a sort of anti-American superpower that would serve as a single Ur-enemy. As ridiculous as this is, it’s a more suspicious and non-patriotic viewpoint than is typical for modern shooters. It also makes the game's troops look a bit like dopes when they're revealed as CIA pawns, their bravery and loyalty taken advantage of by ambitious leaders.
There’s some power in the specificity of this. Battlefield 6 evokes the CIA’s real willingness to enact mad scientist schemes to further American interests, evoking the agency’s history of larger-than-life subterfuge. Still, the game only evokes this history, rather than including it as text.
Like Ed discussed in his recent article on Mafia: The Old Country, and as I’m sure has been brought up too many times over this website’s life, videogames train (or have trained) their audience to accept certain conventions as ‘normal.’ In a specific narrative sense, this can also involve omitting or obfuscating reality in ways that other media aren’t as eager to do—barring kids’ movies and superhero movies, maybe a distinction without a difference. It’s a market-trained artistic outlook which scans for anything that might offend or make uncomfortable a significant demographic of consumers, and erases or blunts those elements to avoid losing revenue. So: no overt political or cultural messaging that strays from accepted norms and no references to the real-world that might make anyone feel funny. In Battlefield 6’s case, we have a modern war thriller based around the creation of an anti-American bloc of nations, where none of the nations within that bloc are actually named.
What is acceptable in Battlefield 6 is a reassurance of old narratives. At one point, during part of the Gibraltar level, the characters fight through a museum installation devoted to the British military during the Second World War. Later, in New York City, the US president is holed up in a firehouse, with monuments to those lost in the September 11th attacks covering the walls. Here, Battlefield 6 points at World War II’s Allied forces and September 11th first responders as uncomplicated heroes, finding in them an object of broad, safe consensus—a touchstone that can be included because the audience is unlikely to bristle at calling unarmed aid workers and military opponents to nazism valorant.
Similar references to the real world, past and present, would sharpen the rest of the plotline, but players aren’t meant to expect that in a big-budget videogame. Instead, the audience has to fill in the blanks themselves, reading more from the experience than it is willing to provide. It all gives the impression that creator and player are at odds with one another.
Not every story needs real-world specificity to function, but mainstream videogames’ tendency towards avoidance is a pattern regular enough that it chafes, especially in genres like a modern military shooter that wants to model some aspects of reality while avoiding others. Where past Battlefield games were sometimes able to specify countries, political systems, and—especially in the case of uncontested WWII narratives—historical events by name, the latest entry takes place in a landscape of partially redacted or blurred representation.
With Battlefield 6 publisher Electronic Arts’ sale to Saudi Public Investment Fund, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake just before the game’s launch, it seems unlikely that future games in the series will be more pointed—even with claims that the company will retain “creative control” over its output going forward. A cliffhanger ending that suggests a sequel spent hunting down a villainous CIA in revenge for the Pax Armata plot doesn’t seem like a path that the new ownership would be keen on exploring.
Instead, it’s probably better to expect that Battlefield will drift further away from the real world, another series of mainstream games with increasingly thin tethers to reality.
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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and posts on Bluesky.