The new battle royale mode for BF6 is now available. However, the community continues to draw unfavorable comparisons with Warzone and criticize the intrusive Battle Pass.
Coinciding with the launch of the first season of Battlefield 6, DICE and EA also unveiled and immediately released the free Battle Royale spin-off Redsec on October 28. But after the first day of live operation, the conclusion of many players on Steam looks sobering.
In Valve’s game store, Battlefield Redsec currently has around 2,750 user reviews – but only 40 percent of them are positive. Not a good result for Redsec, considering that the developers wanted to use it to shake up the genre’s top dog, Warzone. But that’s exactly what Redsec is now being compared to time and again. However, that’s not the only problem with the new free game mode.
Let’s start with the positive news: As expected, the release of Redsec and Season 1 gave Battlefield 6 a boost in player numbers. According to SteamDB, around 550,000 players were on the Battlefield servers at peak times. That’s an average of around 200,000 more than during the best times of the previous week.
The new mode, reminiscent of Firestorm from Battlefield 5, brings some special features to the game, such as new gadgets and boats, which were not previously available in multiplayer. Of course, there is also environmental destruction. And some people obviously like Redsec – at least 40 percent of players.
Feels like Warzone
However, that’s where the good news ends, because overall, Redsec doesn’t seem to be blowing the community away. In the reviews on Steam and corresponding forum threads on Reddit, many players complain that the mode feels like a 1:1 copy of its Call of Duty counterpart, Warzone.
There are airdrops, armor plates, weapon crates, and even the different color grades for weapon quality classes are on board in Redsec. Since Battlefield players have been notoriously allergic to anything with Call of Duty on it for years, this naturally provides a lot of ammunition for criticism. The verticality that is otherwise typical of Battlefield is also largely absent from the Battle Royale map Fort Lyndon.
Intrusive Battle Pass
Another major point of criticism for the community is the Battle Pass, or rather Redsec’s unlock system, which is linked to that of BF6 multiplayer. We explain how the Battle Pass works in detail here.
In order to complete some of the weekly challenges in multiplayer and earn tokens for the Battle Pass, the game forces you to play Battle Royale mode – even if you don’t feel like it.
However, there also seem to be problems with progress tracking for the challenges, which has prevented some players from receiving their rewards. This has caused considerable annoyance in the community: Why is the Battle Pass I purchased for Battlefield 6 trying to force me to play this crap?
, writes one user on Steam.
And another user comments: “I wouldn’t hate it so much if I wasn’t forced to play it for challenges in the main game. But I am. So I do. That’s not why I bought Battlefield 6.” Overall, the launch of Redsec has been much bumpier than DICE had hoped. At least for the challenges and the Battle Pass, the developers should be able to find a solution quickly – for example, by removing the corresponding mandatory challenges. As for the criticism of the mode’s basic design, DICE will probably have some work to do in the coming months.
