Battlefield 6 launched last week to much acclaim, especially for the flagship multiplayer mode, with the concurrent player count on Steam alone peaking at just shy of 750,000. However, despite its popularity, players are protesting against some of the game’s hardest challenges, which are required to unlock specific weapons. These challenges are so hard that players have started using custom matches created through Battlefield Portal to complete them.
Assignments are, essentially, Battlefield 6‘s permanent multiplayer tasks, as opposed to the regularly refreshed daily and weekly challenges. There are four categories of assignments, but where most of them only reward skins and a few gadgets, completing the weapon assignments is the only way of getting your hands on 12 of the 41 primary weapons available in the game, some of which may soon find their way into our list of the best guns in Battlefield 6.
Over on Reddit, players are understandably voicing their concerns about how difficult and grindy some of these challenges are. User 0uyaa highlights one of the most egregious, which is required to unlock the KTS100 MK8 LMG:
- Suppress 300 enemies with LMGs
- Inflict 10,000 hipfire damage with LMGs
“This challenge is so atrocious and completely out of mind, I want to gouge my eyes out,” is a quote that summarizes just how frustratingly difficult these tasks are. Suppression in Battlefield is weaker than it’s ever been in the series, so it doesn’t have anywhere near as many benefits in combat as it used to in previous games, and it only counts as suppression if you miss multiple shots in a row.
Meanwhile, hipfiring an LMG is wildly inaccurate and only works at extremely close range, which isn’t typically where you want to be. 0uyaa highlights the irony in the SMG challenge, to unlock the SCW-10, requiring kills while aiming down the sights, when that challenge would be much better suited to hipfire kills, and vice versa.
Another Reddit user, WorstSourceOfAdvice, highlights another ridiculously tough challenge, this time in the sniper rifle category to unlock the PSR:
- Get 150 headshot kills over 200m with sniper rifles
This is tough enough as it is, but there’s one more key thing to consider: most Battlefield 6 maps don’t even support combat at such a long range. There’s a healthy variety of map sizes, but since there are only nine maps in the game right now, it means you’re limited to playing New Sobek City, Mirak Valley, and maybe Operation Firestorm at a push if you want to snipe from over 200m away.
There is a workaround though, detailed here by user worldsurf111: the portal. The Battlefield Portal is a tool that allows you to make custom game modes on whatever map you choose, complete with bots. This means you can cheese the system… but it doesn’t exactly feel like it’s within the spirit of the game. But when doing the challenges in a proper game feels like anti-playing, since you have to play in such an unorthodox manner that doesn’t benefit you or your team, who can blame someone for grinding them out in a private match so teammates aren’t hindered?
It won’t come as a surprise if some of these assignments are made easier in the coming days or weeks, because if they’re not, some players simply won’t get their hands on the gated weapons. For more thoughts on Battlefield 6, specifically its single-player campaign, check out our review.
