My first match during the Battlefield 6 open beta was highly instructive. I learned that driving tanks is ridiculously fun; that the sun shines unfavorably on the scopes of snipers; and that if you detonate a remote charge indoors, the entire building will collapse on your head. But most importantly, I discovered a value I’ll carry into the Battlefield 6 launch in October: reviving allies is for suckers.
Here’s how I came to understand this valuable lesson. During a round of Conquest, my side progressed up the mountainsides of the Liberation Peaks map and captured more than half the objectives. Then the opposing team mounted a resistance. We were stretched across an open space, with a few makeshift strongholds set up in blasted-out buildings that dotted the landscape, but the other team figured out that if it kept our tank busy, it couldn’t provide support. Soon, it was just down to the foot soldiers to earn their keep.
My sole squadmate, a frontline fighter who called themselves Legoollas (a pun on J.R.R. Tolkien’s elf Legolas that I very much appreciated) was downed in an open space. I’m not quite sure how, as I was busy marking enemies and eliminating a few opposing snipers like a good recon unit should. The battle in this particular area quieted down, and it seemed safe enough to bring them back from the brink, which I did — just in time for an assault unit to shoot me dead and send Legoollas back into the void again.
Sorry, buddy. Guess you won’t be seeing the Undying Lands after all.
You might think that I brought this misfortune on myself and my ill-fated teammate. Well, I did. Running out into open space in a war game is just foolish and doubly so in Battlefield. When the enemy team includes 30-plus people, someone is bound to see the lone red dot traipsing across open land to rescue their downed ally, even if that dot thinks no one’s watching.
However, as the beta weekend wore on, I noticed that the more observant players developed a strategy. They would wait a moment after downing someone, then rush to that position, having correctly predicted that a teammate would be nearby, reviving their comrade. With Battlefield 6‘s short time-to-kill, the medic being defenseless in the moment, and the nearly dead ally being, well, nearly dead, it’s a given that this scenario never ended well for the reviver and the revive-ee, but it often turned into something much worse.
In the confused shuffling around, as others step in to fill the vacant positions, it’s easy for an opponent to take advantage of newly made holes in your defense and just bust right through. I saw entire squads go down in this way (and contributed to more than a few similar demolitions of opposing squads myself). It became obvious that you end up losing more lives by trying to save one. You win this round, John Stuart Mill.
I imagine the ideal revival scenario plays out when a medic or squad member drags the victim far enough away to avoid immediate danger if the opposing team gets closer, and one or more other allies step in to bolster defenses. Map design can thwart that plan; Cairo’s claustrophobic alleyways are easily overrun and make finding a safe spot for medical work a challenge, and Liberation Peak’s open areas, as poor Legoollas discovered, are too dangerous to venture into without someone dedicated to giving you adequate cover.
More often than not, though, there’s just too much going on for anyone who isn’t in a squad: coordinating well together and remaining aware of what’s going on around them, to keep up and mount the necessary defense. It’s just safer to let the poor soul depart and return a few moments later to take up the fight once more.
So if I see you fall in Battlefield 6, I won’t help you. It’s for your own good and everyone else’s, too.
