Over the weekend, Battlefield Studios introduced a new playlist to Battlefield 6: Casual Breakthrough. To summarize, this is essentially the same as the standard Breakthrough mode, except for the following changes:
- Only eight real players per team, with 32 bots in total making up the rest.
- Real player actions will still grant full XP, but bot actions offer reduced XP.
- Siege of Cairo and Empire State are the only two maps available.
- Dogtags, accolades, and career stat updates are disabled.
So essentially, it does what it says on the tin: it’s a casual version of Breakthrough. At face value, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s nothing wrong with that, because it simply gives more options to players looking for other ways to enjoy the game. If video games have taught us anything though, it’s that you can’t please everyone. Which is to say that a lot of Battlefield 6 players are mad.
“People want real players. Don’t repeat the mistakes of your competitors,” reads one reply to the official announcement on Twitter. “Absolutely shocking idea,” reads another. Meanwhile, on the Battlefield subreddit, one user says “I have no idea where we are going with this game,” while another lists everything they consider to be broken in Battlefield 6: “Fix bugs, fix drone glitch, fix IVF rockets, fix [the] bloom after sprinting bug, fix awful hit registration. We don’t need this bot mode.”
However, for every complaint, there are players explaining how much they’re enjoying the new mode. “It’s very fun to warm up, real players keep it from being a total farmfest but it’s very relaxed,” reads one Reddit comment. “This subreddit doesn’t understand that there are gamers who actually go outside and don’t play this game 24/7. Let them strike a balance,” reads another. One reply on Twitter explains that as they’re “a battledad with limited time, this is great for me,” while another praises the mode for “not being overcompetitive”.
All that said, there are constructive reasons to complain about Casual Breakthrough. A few folks have pointed out that it will make queue times even longer for other modes due to the sheer number of playlists in the game already, while on a similar note, certain regions already encounter mostly bots in the existing playlists. It also seems a little backwards that the mode won’t start without a minimum number of real players, despite it focusing mostly on combat against bots.
Finally, one of the biggest complaints is that Battlefield Portal was promised to provide full XP, even against bots, but that got canned when they attempted to remove bot farms from the mode. So Casual Breakthrough feels like the community meeting them in the middle, according to a Reddit comment. Another describes this mode as the devs “dropping the ball so hard, I had so much fun in the first couple of days, why did they feel the need to change it?”
If Battlefield Studios has proven anything so far with Battlefield 6 though, it’s that they’re listening and responding to feedback. Assignments being too difficult got fixed very quickly, as did the required Redsec challenges in the battle pass. Chances are, if their data shows this new playlist isn’t performing to their expectations, they won’t be shy to change it again.
