Call me cheap, but I hate EA and don’t want to give them any money on principle, but I’d like to try BF6 and see how it’s changed since the beta.
Call me cheap, but I hate EA and don’t want to give them any money on principle, but I’d like to try BF6 and see how it’s changed since the beta.
Nope.
Best advice would be to forget it exists. There are actually thousands of other games out there that are almost exactly like Battlefield, I doubt the Next New Thing™ will be worth giving up a little bit of sanity over.
Could you name a few that are almost exactly like Battlefield, came out in the last decade, and let me host my own servers?
Planetside 2, and it’s free
Planetside 2 gunplay is hot garbage and always has been, BF6 blows it out of the water in that respect
It doesn’t let you host your own servers, and it didn’t come out in the last decade.
Squad and Arma.
We have very different definitions of “almost exactly like Battlefield”.
Every game with a billion Dollar budget like battlefield will have a turd like EA attached.
If you want to be morally superior and boycott them you will have to make some drawbacks in production quality. No game by an Indie or AA studio can be “almost exactly like battlefield”.
Production quality has nothing to do with it. Battlefield 2 was made 20 years ago by a much smaller team than makes Battlefield today, and I’d be happy to see teams that size or smaller approximating the game mode, map size, and systems of a Battlefield game. The truth is that the genre evaporated. Everyone chases live service, and if you’re just making a live service, what niche do you fill that Battlefield proper doesn’t serve? I’m starved for some good shooters lately.
If you want good FPS, there are tons of really excellent. But I’m getting more that you are after arcadey military FPS.
What I don’t want is a live service, and I can’t find any multiplayer FPS made lately that are built to survive the servers being shut down. The most recent I’ve found is Hypercharge: Unboxed, which has a decent deathmatch, and even that was 5 years ago.
So being specific, you are looking for a local multiplayer FPS? Or are you open to self-hosted dedicated servers as a multiplayer option? Also do you want it to be military or are other genres ok? Just trying to really narrow it down so I can see if something I know would work.