Battlefield 6 releases to high acclaim, but will it beat Call of Duty this year?

Don’t mind the ominous rumbling outside, that’s just Battlefield 6 rolling into widespread release on PC, Xbox and PlayStation. Expect copious plumes of smoke and men in army fatigues knee-sliding over things it would be just as quick to walk over for the next few weeks.

BF6 has had a great start. Its metacritic ratings on all platforms are in the green: 83 on PS5, 84 on PC, and a muscular 87 on Xbox. Even more miraculously, given that this is not only a mass market multiplayer shooter but also one published by EA, is that the user ratings are high too.

Critics are praising the game’s renewed focus on what was generally considered to be the series’ great strength: rollicking, large-scale firefights in big destructible maps where ground and air vehicles share the carnage with infantry units.

There’s a solo campaign in this game too, the first time a Battlefield title has fully committed to such a thing for the best part of a decade.

Inevitably, there are problems. PC players on slightly older systems which don’t allow a specific BIOS boot setting find themselves out in the cold and unable to run the game due to the anti-cheat software’s stern demands, and there have been instances of players working their way out-of-bounds and exploiting the maps. On the whole, though, this is a big event: a triple-A, multiplayer shooter releasing without an accompanying major backlash, crippling performance issue, or depressing controversy.

For its part, Call Of Duty’s making some big promises about Black Ops 7, which is due to release on 14 November. An innovative co-op campaign which “redefines the Black Ops experience”, for one. There’s also a new 6v6 multiplayer mode called Overload, two new 20v20 multiplayer maps, and of course the usual jamboree of wave-based Zombies chaos.

Thing is, COD hasn’t had much direct competition lately. When each new title trots out on a yearly basis, the conversation about its merits is generally ‘Is it better than last year’s?’ rather than, you know, whether it’s any fun in its own right.

When Black Ops 7 releases, then, we could have a real fight on our hands. Will BF6 show up the old veteran with its new tricks, or will COD respond to the pressure by genuinely innovating for the first time in years? Either way, we, the players, win.