It's been three years and 11 months since a Battlefield game came out, and if you ask me, that's the sweet spot. It was long enough that DICE's last entry, Battlefield 2042, had time to live up to its potential (eventually), and not so short a gap that the coming of a new Battlefield is just another Friday.

Battlefield 6 feels like an event. It's quickly become the most-anticipated FPS of the year, fueled by an extremely positive open beta in August and promises of a return to what made Battlefields 3 and 4 really good (simple classes, pretty maps, 64-player lobbies).

I've had a great time in multiplayer this past week, but I'm eager to play more humans and fewer bots. I'll be here chronicling Battlefield 6 happenings all launch day, so check back often to see what's new.

One hour until Battlefield-o'clock

Battlefield 6 launches globally in one hour. Here's the exact release time for your region:

• West Coast US: 8 am PDT
• East Coast US: 11 am EDT
• UK: 4 pm BST
• Europe: 5 pm CEST
• Australia: 2 am AEDT (October 11)
• New Zealand: 4 am NZST (October 11)

Everything set? Let's go over the ready-up checklist:

• Game pre-load complete?
• System requirements reviewed?
• Install that Battlefield 6-specific video driver?
• Headset charged?
• Sick day secured?

EA is warning players via X that Battlefield 6 is likely to have a login queue when it goes live in less than an hour.

"Battlefield 6 launches today at 15:00UTC and we anticipate many of you to login at the same time during this initial moment. To help ensure a smooth and stable login experience for everyone, we’re adding a queue system during this and other peak moments."

We also had to contend with a login queue during the busiest hours of the August beta, though it wasn't the headache that queues typically are. The line moved quite fast, so maybe we can hope for the same today.

Read our Battlefield 6 review-in-progress

While we wait for servers to go up (and subsequently melt), be sure to check out the Battlefield 6 review-in-progress we published yesterday. We won't be giving our final, scored verdict until we've played more multiplayer with actual humans, but there's still plenty to talk about.

TL;DR? Multiplayer rocks, campaign stinks, and Portal has promise (but we haven't gotten to play with it yet):

"Place your palm on the pavement, and you can feel the low rumble of a hobby yearning for the return of what we loved 15 years ago: the spectacle of scale, the unserious chaos of vehicular warfare, red grunts vs. blue grunts, the permission to make your own rules, and an environment where the guy obsessed with metas is having the least fun. That is the pitch of Battlefield 6, and so far, it's a bullseye."

'This is what a well-optimized game looks like in 2025'

"After all the furore surrounding Borderlands 4's performance woes last month—and a year that seems filled with games designed to give mid-range machines a thorough kicking—it's truly refreshing to test something that feels like it's been designed from the ground up with smooth frame rates in mind."

PC Gamer's Andy Edser placed Battlefield 6 under the microscope in our performance analysis and found that yes, it's impressively optimized for a big-budget game that looks this stunning.

Servers are live, go go goooooooo