The story around Battlefield 6 right now is that its time to kill is excruciatingly fast. You’ll pop into a game only to die seconds later. The game feels aggressive in a way that everyone keeps comparing to Call of Duty. But what if I told you things in Battlefield 6 don’t have to be that way? And that you might already have the secret weapon necessary to change your experience in your arsenal, just waiting to be used?
The smoke grenade is one of three available throwable weapons in Battlefield 6, a list that also includes the tried and true frag grenade and the blinding flash grenade. Most people gravitate toward the immediately deadly option, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the stealthier options have their use as well.
Want to advance and capture a point? Smoke grenades. A teammate has fallen amid the chaos, hoping to be revived? Smoke grenade ’em and drag ’em to safety. Need to retreat from all the bustle before your entire squad gets wiped out? Smoke your way out. Snipers keeping the team pinned down, half blind from all the scope glint? S m o k e g r e n a d e s. Fellow soldiers, it’s time to stop voluntarily walking into the meat grinder over and over again, hoping that this time, the bottleneck might play out differently. Be the change you want to see (or not, in this case).
Don’t be shy about getting creative with smoke grenades, either. You can create some killer moments when you combine smoke grenades with vehicles or shields to help push your infantry forward, if not make the enemy team feel like a tank somehow spawned on top of them. Hell, even if all you care about is pumping up that K/D ratio, smoke grenades are indispensable for flanks as well.
Arguably, the smoke grenade could use some tuning. When an enemy gets spotted, should a teammate be able to see exactly where they are through the smoke? Also, wouldn’t it be great if the game actually acknowledged your contribution when you throw a smoke that helps your team? There’s no incentive to use smokes right now, and little recognition of the difference a well-placed smoke grenade might make in a match. Smoke grenades are also not a cure-all; throwing one won’t necessarily save or help you if you deploy them senselessly. And no smoke grenade is about to stop a cheating jerk. Still, I encourage you to explore what might be possible when you’ve got a smoke launcher equipped.
Some people already have the memo here. Every so often you’ll load into, say, Liberation Peak, and it’s just a non-stop party of gray dust where no one can see anything. “I think smoke might be the most critical accessory in the whole beta,” one beta user wrote on a gaming forum. ” I had amazing moments of smoke, advance, cloister, smoke again, advance,” they continued in a later post.
“Smoke Grenades are the Meta, The Players Just Don’t Know it Yet,” declares one post on Reddit, where the Battlefield 6 fan recounts the way the tactical accessory helped them completely turn around a match that felt hopeless. That is, until they got the entire team using smoke grenades.
“We flooded the battlefield with smoke, setting up supply bags behind the initial crop of rocks with multiple players lobbing them non-stop,” the player wrote. “We broke their sightlines, pushed up, capped points, and forced snipers to abandon their nests. It was a complete turnaround, and believe it or not, we won offense on Liberation Peak, a feat that I’ve seen a few Redditors say is impossible.”
Hilariously, though, if smoke grenades do become the meta, it won’t necessarily make Battlefield 6 feel less like Call of Duty. Just last year, Black Ops 6 fans were complaining that they were getting tired of never being able to see anything in the game due to the prevalence of smoke grenades. It got bad enough that some people started spamming smoke grenades just to make everyone else miserable.
Then again, Battlefield veterans will tell you that smoke supremacy has been true all along, across all games in the series. And while that might be the case, there’s also been an influx of newbie and lapsed players in the well-regarded beta who might not know why they should consider a smoke grenade at all. Hopefully that changes when the BF6 beta returns this weekend, from August 14-16.
