The sentiment around Battlefield 6 has been on an upswing for a little while now, but the launch of Season 3 a month ago is when the game’s trajectory became clear.
Season 3 launched to incredibly positive sentiments from players, and plenty of us have been looking forward to the mid-season update, which arrived 9th June. But while the Grand Bazaar map remake – now Cairo Bazaar – has been generally well-received, elsewhere the update itself has been causing trouble.
From the moment patch 1.3.2.0 arrived, players have been reporting a bevy of issues, big and small. It’s customary to expect a small number of problems with each Battlefield patch, but this one has more than usual.
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Immediately after the patch went live, players started reporting a number of major issues. The most visible and consistent has been the deployment screen bug that causes the cursor to dart all over the place. This makes it hard to actually pick a spawn point and can’t be fixed by changing the map zoom level. Then, when attempting to use Custom Search while in a squad and find Cairo Bazaar Breakthrough, the user interface breaks.
However, Battlefield Studios confirmed on the same day that it was aware of the two issues, and that it’s investigating a fix.
The problems continued with the unlock criteria for the PP-19, the new weapon introduced in this patch. Battlefield 6 usually offers an easy mini-battle pass that allows players to earn the new weapon quickly. This Bonus Path does exist for this SMG, but completing it does not earn you the weapon as it should. However, Battlefield Studios solved the weapon unlock issue relatively quickly, deploying an update that fixed it the next day.
Patch 1.3.2.0 is also responsible for a random assortment of some of the most out-there bugs we’ve seen in years. Some players are unable to quit out of matches as the game simply shows the BF6 logo, or throws them into a black void. Restarting the game is the only way to recover.
Meanwhile, others have discovered that installing/uninstalling packages like the campaign or higher-resolution textures from the in-game menu, rather than from your PC/console’s front-end menu, doesn’t work and may break the game. Both of those issues remain, as Battlefield Studios continues to look into solutions.
While game modes appear to work as intended, Strikepoint specifically has been hit with a bizarre logic bug that completely breaks the mode. Players have been reporting winning rounds they should’ve lost, and losing others they clearly won. While the developer works on a fix, Strikepoint has been disabled entirely.
Then we get to a variety of random issues reported, including one whose existence is somewhat confusing. The settings menu is no longer accessible from within the firing range. The cog icon is there but clicking it just flashes a black screen. This is annoying as players typically go to the range to test changes to their settings and experience their impact, hence why it’s available there to begin with.
The Laser Designator, an item used to laser-tag vehicles and other objects for teammates to help destroy, has had its HUD inexplicably vanish. Looking through it, you can still tag objects if you know where they are, but the HUD won’t help you actually see them, or indicate how close you may be to tagging them. Interestingly, placing the Designator down and looking through it remotely works fine.
Perhaps the strangest of the bunch, though, is a change to the in-game text description for XP Boosters. Since the launch of BF6, boosters have always counted down in real-world time, not in-game time. As much the system hasn’t been well liked, this has been the way it’s always worked in most modern shooters.
To this end, the most recent update changed the description to indicate that it now counts down using in-game time, but it doesn’t actually seem to do that. Boosters continue to count down in real-world time, so nothing has changed, leading us to wonder what brought on this change in description. Battlefield Studios acknowledged the issue, promising a fix in a future update.
In Redsec battle royale, some of the bugs introduced in earlier patches have reappeared alongside new ones, too. The infamous bug that completely breaks the game’s lighting when visiting certain areas of the map has returned. Battlefield Studios said that while it had “implemented an initial change” to reduce those instances, it clearly didn’t resolve the underlying issue causing it, promising to continue working on finding a fix.
Shortly after the patch went live, the developer also had to take the Traverser MK2 vehicle out of Solos mode, because it was too powerful. Most of the other issues are standard launch-day hiccups such as laggy menus, inconsistent time-to-kill and other server-related issues that typically resolve themselves quickly.
1.3.2.0’s buggy state at launch put a bit of a damper on the enthusiasm many in the community had for the mid-season update. It’s especially bad as it’s been a while since a Battlefield game has seen such a buggy release. Hopefully this doesn’t portend the state of future updates for Battlefield 6.
