As the Battlefield 6 Open Beta Wraps Up, Players Scatter to Other Games — So I'm Asking: What's Everyone Playing Instead?

Standing as one of the best-known shooters in gaming history, albeit with a bit of a diminished player count compared to its heyday, Battlefield 6 is still proving to be a hit with loyal fans and explosion enthusiasts alike. The developers recently opened the game to practically everyone with an "Open Beta", though it actually required a bit of foresight to play during its initial "Early Access" window — yes, it was all a bit confusing.

Nevertheless, we still saw around 40,000 people sitting idle in the game's menus before it was actually playable, which says a lot about the implied excitement around this entry's return to a modern warfare theme. Personally, I hadn't paid any serious attention to the series since Battlefield: Bad Company 2 consumed all my free time around 2010.

Well, after playing the Open Beta for myself, the rumblings of Battlefield having a serious chance to dent Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's hype in the war-themed sequel category are feeling completely legitimate. Even in this 'beta' state, itself more stable than a handful of other games I've played in early access, the bones of Battlefield 6 feel strong enough to carry it to a pretty spectacular release. Although now the first weekend is over, I'm feeling a little lost.

You see, that free "weekend" technically ran from the early hours of Thursday, August 7, until the morning of Monday, August 11, but it's only the first half of the Open Beta. The second half takes place this week, starting on the morning of Thursday, August 14, and ending on the following Monday, August 18. Why yes, it is strange to open up an anticipated game on a Thursday at peak working hours! I'm sure productivity will take another dive across some industries.

So, while I should be happy that I'm getting to take another all-encompassing adventure into the addictive chaos that is Battlefield 6 and join in with the community's gripes of snipers lining the hills of Liberation Peak like a gang of lethal mountain goats, there's a lingering worry — how am I supposed to wait for the game's proper launch on October 10?

It's not like I haven't played any other games in the series. In fact, I've clocked a fair amount of time in the highly praised Battlefield 1, set in World War I with a wealth of lesser-known weaponry and vehicles, but it doesn't quite hit the same thrills I get from modern-day combat sims.

For now, I'm biding my time with the pressing entries in my backlog like the Heretic & Hexen re-release, two of the only classic boomer shooters that I somehow missed in the 1990s, but where did everyone else go? Was there a general scattering to the previous high-ranking shooters like Call of Duty, or are Battlefield 6's predecessors showing signs of reinvigorated life?

As much as I loathe the cavalry units in Battlefield 1 with their Terminator-esque health pools and agile horses, I had fully expected it to be the top-ranking alternative to Battlefield 6. However, it's the somber themes of World War II in Battlefield V that apparently draw just a few more players overall, recently peaking at around 20,000 players. It's surprising, particularly when the like-minded among my friends seemed to drop 'BFV' rather quickly in its earlier days.

Not half as surprising as seeing Battlefield 2042 ranking in third place, even though it's with a pretty sharp drop-off to a recent ~9,000 player peak. In one way or another, I completely overlooked this futuristic release from 2021 that holds a "Mixed or Average" score on Metacritic, feeling a similar disinterest with it as I did with the likes of the much-earlier Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, from the franchise of its biggest competitor.

Did I miss out on BF2042? Was I too quick to overlook what might have been a stellar entry? I had fully expected the more modern-day settings of Battlefield 4 to rank higher than this, or perhaps even the bloom-soaked Battlefield 3 of my Xbox 360 gaming days would creep even higher, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Don't even get me started on my beloved Bad Company 2 — lurking down there, like a neglected pet.

It gets worse when I check on a previous fleeting fancy, the Roblox-stylings of BattleBit Remastered — an ultra-simplified take on the Battlefield game mechanics, boiled down to a blocky and almost untextured soup focusing entirely on mechanics rather than pretty visuals.

Proximity voice chat made BattleBit particularly hilarious; you'd hear your enemy's last words for just a second when you shot them and hear teammates cry out for help when they needed supplies.

Now it's a shadow of its former self. Not entirely abandoned, but compared to its 87,000+ peak in June 2023, BattleBit Remastered is just another collector of virtual dust in my Steam library. I'd hear rumblings of an abandoned development and something about "Operation Overhaul", but it's still a shame to see the game fall off so hard.

BattleBit - Operation Overhaul: Teaser - YouTube

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Perhaps its intended audience wasn't satisfied with the core gameplay, jilted instead for Twitch streamers highlighting the comical chaos of BattleBit's in-game voices in the same kind of fad that disappears so quickly with online trends. Personally, this is the game I'd like to see make a comeback, if only because it doesn't require any particularly demanding PC specifications or Secure Boot, à la Battlefield 6 — but I'm probably too out of the loop to comment on this game's status.

For now, I'm waiting for Battlefield 6's Open Beta to come back on Thursday. After that, who knows? I'll check back on SteamDB and see where the people go.