🔗 Share this article

Recently, Battlefield Studios introduced a new playlist titled Casual Breakthrough. To put it simply, this mode mirrors the standard Breakthrough format but includes several notable adjustments:

• Every squad has just 8 human participants, with the rest filled by 32 bots.
• Activities done by human gamers award complete experience points, while bot actions provide lower rewards.
• Just a pair of locations are available: Siege of Cairo and Empire State.
• Elements like Player tags, accolades, and career stat updates have been turned off.

So essentially, the playlist delivers on its title: it offers a casual take of Breakthrough. On the surface, one could assume there's nothing wrong, as it provides additional choices for gamers looking for alternative methods to have fun with the game. But, if video games have taught us anything, it is that you can't please everyone. Which is to say, many BF6 fans are mad.

Player Reactions: From Fury to Praise

"Gamers prefer human opponents. Avoid making the errors of your competitors," reads one reply to the official announcement. "Absolutely shocking concept," says another. At the same time, on the Battlefield subreddit, one user remarks, "I have no idea where we are going with this title," and someone else lists everything they believe to be broken in Battlefield 6: "Resolve glitches, address drone issues, fix IVF rockets, fix [the] bloom after sprinting bug, improve hit detection. We do not require this bot mode."

On the other hand, amid the criticism, there are players explaining how much they're liking the recent addition. "It's enjoyable to practice, human participants keep it from being a total farmfest but it's quite laid-back," reads a forum post. "The community fails to see that there are players who have lives and don't play this game all the time. Allow them to strike a balance," adds another. One reply via social media explains that as they're "a battledad with busy schedules, this is great for me," while another praises the mode for "avoiding intense competition."

Valid Criticisms and Player Input

All that said, players have valid points to criticize Casual Breakthrough. A few folks have pointed out that it could increase queue times even longer for other modes because of the large amount of options in the game already. On a similar note, certain regions often face AI-filled matches in the current modes. It also seems a little backwards that the mode does not begin without a required amount of real players, even though it primarily centers on combat against bots.

Lastly, a major complaints is that a previous feature was promised to provide full XP, including AI matches, but that got canned when they tried to eliminate XP farming from the mode. So this new playlist seems like the community meeting them in the middle, as per a Reddit comment. Another labels this addition as the developers "dropping the ball so hard, I experienced so much fun in the first couple of days, why did they feel the need to change it?"

Future Prospects: Will Changes Occur?

If the development team has demonstrated something to date with Battlefield 6, it is that they're paying attention and responding to feedback. Tasks that were overly hard got fixed very quickly, just like the required Redsec challenges. It is likely that, should analytics indicates this recent mode is underperforming to their standards, they won't be shy to change it again.