FPS games have evolved a lot over the course of my life. When I was a kid, the most popular multiplayer shooters were almost always given a World War 2 setting. Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Call of Duty 3. They were stuck in the past, made by men obsessed with the glory and horror of yesteryear. Halo was the shooter of the future, and the Combat Evolved subheading made sure everyone knew it.
But we didn’t leap into the world of tomorrow straight away. Battlefield: Bad Company and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare brought shooters into the present day, grounding them in a newfound sense of realism as real-life wars in the Middle-East were televised for all to see.
These games coincided perfectly with my teenage years, so despite their political ramifications, I look back on them with a fond sense of nostalgia. I remember rushing home after school to jump into a lobby of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or Battlefield 3’s 24/7 Metro with all my friends – homework be damned.
Shooters then tried to have their cake and eat it, too. Battlefield went from the modern day back to the World Wars, and then went to the future with 2042. Call of Duty regularly flipped between the Cold War, Vietnam, and the future as well. Battlefield also went ahead to 2042. All this jumping back and forward in time, getting jetpacks in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare before returning to the past with Battlefield 1, was where I went off multiplayer shooters. Maybe I just got old and couldn’t keep up with the kids. I yearn for the simplicity of my childhood, and I think a lot of you do, too, because Battlefield 6 is set to be a return to the series’ modern setting.
Shooting backwards
Aim to please
While you wait to check out Battlefield Labs, here are the best FPS games you can play right now
In an incredibly short teaser, EA showed off some clips from a pre-alpha build of something cooking in Battlefield Labs. We’re all calling it Battlefield 6 because it looks like it’s set in the modern world and features that pure, boots on the ground destructive combat that we know and love classic Battlefield for.
Watching soldiers rally around a tank, running through a narrow corridor that’s having chunks shot off by gunfire, and seeing the entire facade of a building crumble as it gets shot with an RPG instantly took me back to those Battlefield 3 and 4 days. The video even uses the theme from Battlefield 3, showing this is an intentional callback.
It’s not just Battlefield that’s going back to basics, either. Fortnite made its OG mode permanent in December last year. Epic must have realized that a lot of us wanted to remember what it felt like to drop into Tilted Towers and play with all the old weapons and loot instead of having to keep up with the ever-changing modern meta.
Even non-shooters like Need For Speed have seen success in recent years by going back to what fans know. Heat and Unbound returned the series’ focus to street racing, neon-soaked streets, and hip hop. I’m not excited about Criterion being moved off Need For Speed to focus on Battlefield, but I’m glad the next game in the series actually looks like one I want to play.
One of the most crucial differences between Battlefield 6 and other modern shooters has been noted by commenters on YouTube and Twitter: there are no operators with out-of-place character skins.
This is where I turn into a really old man yelling at a cloud, but I cannot stand the way so many games have tried to ape Fortnite’s cultural IP soup. In Fortnite, playing as Rick and Morty or Ariana Grande makes… not quite sense, but I can accept it. This is a game with Chug Jugs and llamas and other nonsense – of course Godzilla is hitting the Griddy.
Tonally, not everything gets the same pass. Call of Duty loses its visual identity when it pits sharks in waistcoats against Nicki Minaj or a tatted up Santa Claus, and although clearly enough people are buying these skins to validate Activision‘s direction, it’s a little too silly for me.
Rather than continuing to push this trend or adding more jetpacks and wallrunning, Battlefield 6 looks like it’ll be taking the series back to its heyday. Modern performance combined with nostalgic, simpler gameplay sounds like a winning combination to me – but maybe I’m just getting old and want to return to my creature comforts, instead of embracing the here and now. The shooters of tomorrow have become the shooters of today – but now we’re in the skin-slinging present, the genre has lost a little consistently along the way.
Relive the glory days or find an underappreciated gem with our list of the best Battlefield games