A viral Reddit post on the Battlefield subreddit this week gave a lot of angry fans and longtime vets of the series the proof they needed to back up their fears: Battlefield 6 has the franchise’s smallest maps. The data is clear in showing that the recently released FPS does indeed have a lot of comparatively small maps, but a map being small doesn’t inherently mean it will feel tiny when played. And a past Battlefield game that many, myself included, adore proves this.
When digging through the newly shared map comparison data from Reddit user ClaratheRed, the part that surprised me the most was learning how Battlefield 1‘s maps aren’t as big as I expected. If you had asked me, before looking at this data, which Battlefield game had the biggest levels, I probably would have mentioned BF1. Battles in EA’s 2016 WW1-themed FPS felt epic and massive. Yet the data shows that most of the maps in that game were around the same size as what’s on offer in BF6. So what’s going on?
Why maps feel bigger in Battlefield 1
I think there are two main reasons my memory—and judging by the comments on Reddit, that of many others as well—seems so distorted when it comes to BF1‘s maps. Number one: Combat and transport in Battlefield 1 were much slower and more limited due to its WW1 setting. Tanks back then moved slowly, guns were inaccurate at far distances, and aerial vehicles were limited in what they could do. Getting anywhere in that game took time, and fights rarely happened across long distances. This made even “small” maps feel big, and made the few genuinely huge maps in BF1 feel like small countries.
And that leads me to the second reason BF1 and most other Battlefield games feel so massive compared to BF6 in my brain: Because they all actually did have some big maps, whereas BF6, at the moment, does not. While BF1 arguably only had two or maybe three truly BIG maps, that was enough. These much larger levels provided players with the giant all-out warfare they so craved from Battlefield, and helped obfuscate the fact that the rest of the maps weren’t enormous. And other BF games often had even more really big maps, meaning you spent more time bouncing between small, medium, and big maps.
Meanwhile, when we look at Battlefield 6, our perception of its map size doesn’t benefit from slower, WW1 combat and tech. It’s set in the modern era, with jets, fast tanks, and powerful snipers that can reach out and pop someone from hundreds of meters away. So even the few medium-sized maps in BF6 feel tiny, while small maps feel downright cramped. And BF6 also lacks the one or two impressively big battlegrounds it needs that would let players really stretch their legs.
Add that all up, and it means that every time you play BF6 you’re playing on maps that feel small, and you never get to experience a bigger area to help cleanse the palette, or to provide those epic memories that get passed around friend groups for years and help a game like Battlefield 1 feel bigger than it was.
I truly do believe that if BF6 had even one actually massive map, a lot of the doom and gloom in the game’s online community surrounding map size would start to go away simply because they’d have something big to break things up. It would also give them the all-out chaos they demand from the series at least once or twice a session. And while I really enjoyed BF6‘s next map, which is arriving later this month as part of season one, I’m not sure it will be anywhere near big enough to help win back players who are fed up with all of the shooter’s small warzones. But hopefully, somewhere inside Battlefield Studios, that truly giant map is being designed or built and will see the light of day in a future update.
