Capturing the point is the backbone of many multiplayer games, and it’s often the most exciting moment of a match. It’s when Zarya drops a Graviton Surge that glues the entire enemy team together, ready to be obliterated by D.Va’s Self-Destruct. Or when your Super gauge finally fills and you’re able to unleash your Guardian’s point-clearing powers. Or when you unlock the perfect Killstreak that rains down a warehouse-worth of munitions, obliterating the opposition seconds before they can capture the zone.

But no one does capture points like Battlefield.

I recently played a Conquest match of Battlefield 6 that saw a point on Operation Firestorm gradually attacked and seized over a couple of minutes. At first it was just on-foot soldiers, charging in and popping smoke to conceal their assault. Then the tanks turned up. Cannons roared, chunks of masonry scattered. Sparks fizzed as engineers patched up armour. And then, like some kind of finale fireworks, a jet screamed overhead, its deployed payload securing the objective from the final enemies who were holding out.

As this was happening, the internet’s favourite Scorsese meme came to mind. “Absolute Cinema.”

Battlefield’s large-scale, combined arms, destructive multiplayer is unlike anything else. “Cinematic” is a quality that typically feels antithetical to multiplayer shooters, which are generally required to be more clean and precise. Clear sightlines. Hard counters. Precision-engineered, three-lane maps. Intense competition. There’s no room for spectacle, which is reserved for single-player campaigns. Not in Battlefield, though. To play Battlefield 6 is to be an actor in a war movie. And what a feeling that is, especially after years of sweaty battle royales and esport tactical shooters ruling the charts while prior, lesser accomplished Battlefield games languished on the sidelines.

Battle royale has reigned supreme for almost a decade now, and it’s not difficult to see why the fight-to-the-last-player format has endured. Sure, the never-ending churn of brand crossovers that feeds Fortnite and Warzone plays more than a small part in keeping the masses entertained, but it’s undeniable that every match has the potential to tell a story of nail-biting survival. The one-life-only, you-versus-everyone nature of battle royale makes it an inherently tense experience, a trait the genre shares with the extraction shooter’s breakout successes – the pressure that builds across a match of Hunt: Showdown or Escape from Tarkov is unrivaled.

That kind of stressful, hyper-competitive design is also the fundamental fuel of Counter-Strike, the most-played game on Steam, and Valorant, Riot’s incredibly popular tactical shooter. Their tightly designed maps, painstakingly calibrated balance, and high-stakes, single-life matches are the ingredients for exhilarating digital sport. And while sport can indeed tell stories – the epic highs and lows of high school football, to reference another meme – there’s a significant difference between those stories of clutch victories and “cinema”.

Battlefield 6 is the complete opposite of games like Valorant and Fortnite. While it certainly has rules and parameters, Battlefield is equally dedicated to immersion. Where Counter-Strike’s maps are clearly artificial constructs designed to promote the most competitive play, Battlefield aims to ship you off to war… or, more accurately, a war movie set. Each map’s pathways may have been laid out by a level designer with multiplayer engagements in mind, but they feel like slices of crumbling conflict zones rather than sport arenas.

Those maps, and the objectives within them, create moments of big, loud, messy drama. Yes, that drama may often be rooted in clutch victories similar to what we see in the big esports games, but they’re made from the components of explosive action movies rather than streamer skirmishes. Battlefield’s dramatic because a tank is unloading shells into the building you’re trying to hold, and the walls are creaking and the whole thing is about to collapse, but your squad’s medic has finally arrived to resuscitate a nearby engineer, who’s able to fire off their RPG just in time to destroy that tank and save us all. That kind of combination just doesn’t exist in Counter-Strike or even Fortnite, despite the latter’s attempt to throw everything in existence onto its deadly island.

Battlefield’s design allows emergent stories like these to happen in every match, and every time it feels like a scene from Black Hawk Down. The squad and class systems only reinforce that. You’re all characters in a war movie, each doing their part. Laying down covering fire. Repairing a tank you’re huddled behind. Scoring a headshot on the sniper that’s got your group pinned down. The new drag-and-revive mechanic is perhaps the best example of this. Having my broken body pulled to safety, bullets striking the ground around my legs and explosions ringing in my ears, is one of the most heroic, brothers-in-arms things I’ve ever experienced in a game.

Many of the competitive-focused shooters that dominate the charts are seemingly governed by “the meta” – viral builds and strategies that threaten to make every match feel the same. It’s a phenomenon that really cements them as online video games rather than, say, counter-terrorism simulators or superhero showdowns, and in turn further divorces them from Battlefield’s sense of messy spectacle. And while we all know that the meta will eventually infest Battlefield 6 in one way or another, it can never truly control Battlefield, because its greatest strength is those emergent, cinematic moments, not its weapon stats or KDA ratios. No wonder “only-in-Battlefield” moments have been a core part of the series’ marketing for many years now.

Back in the summer, I wondered if Battlefield 6 was playing it too safe. As fun as its preview demonstration was, I had concerns that EA wasn’t pushing the series in any interesting new directions. And while it’s true that the final product is the very definition of classic Battlefield, and often feels like a game I’ve played for hundreds of hours before, I’m enjoying it more than I have any other PvP multiplayer game in years. In many respects, that’s simply because, as our glowing multiplayer review explains, Battlefield 6 is fantastically layered and smartly designed. But more than that, it’s those emergent stories. Those player-created, war movie-like sequences that simply don’t happen in any other game.

It’s a shame none of that can be found in the single-player. Our campaign review quite rightly criticised it for not just being incredibly dull, but also for making next to no use of Battlefield’s iconic components. There’s no interesting squad dynamics, limited use of vehicles, and its destruction is all too frequently scripted rather than improvised. It doesn’t feel anything like Battlefield. Rather, its linear mission design makes it all too clear that it’s using Call of Duty as a blueprint.

But why Call of Duty? Put the multiplayer suites of these series’ side-by-side and it’s clear they have almost nothing in common beyond their military theming. While there’s long been a rivalry between the two franchises, it’s because they’re both fighting for different visions of the post-Medal of Honor FPS, rather than scrapping over the same idea. And so you’d think the same would apply to the campaign, that Battlefield’s single-player would be a distinctly different beast to Call of Duty. But they’re not. They’re the same tightly-controlled, linear shooters. Well, almost the same. Call of Duty is, more often than not, pretty good at this kind of thing. Battlefield… less so.

In an alternate timeline, things may have been different. Back in 2022, EA established Ridgeline Games to develop Battlefield 6’s campaign. The studio was led by Marcus Lehto, one of the co-creators of Halo. With that history, you can see how Battlefield would have benefitted from his guidance. Halo’s campaigns are, afterall, built on a bedrock of wide open levels that allow smart use of infantry and vehicles – some of Battlefield’s vital building blocks. But the studio was struck by industry restructuring woes and shuttered in 2024, leaving Criterion Games and Ripple Effect Studios seemingly scrambling to piece something together in time for Battlefield 6’s 2025 release.

The hollow results left me wondering how Battlefield could have captured the cinema of its multiplayer without resorting to copying Infinity Ward’s homework. Considering its trademark components, Battlefield seems like an ideal place to recapture the ideas of EA’s own, long-abandoned Mercenaries. With their sandbox open worlds, vehicles, artillery, and completely destructible buildings, Mercenaries seems an ideal template for what a modern Battlefield campaign could look like. But I’d take anything that actually reflects the series’ long-established identity. We can only hope that the development pipeline for Battlefield 7 is less troubled and more ambitious.

But for now, we have Battlefield 6 and its joyously destructive, noisy multiplayer. The game where every objective is the stage for a war movie, packed with explosions, smoke, sparks, and the rattle of a dozen rifles. Where jeeps screech around the corner carrying much-needed reinforcements, and jets scramble to drop tide-turning payloads. Battlefield is most definitely back, and it’s absolute cinema.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.