Battlefield 6 kicks off its first free trial post the Black Ops 7 launch to twist that knife

Even if you don’t care about the rivalries between the top multiplayer first-person shooters series, it’s hard to ignore how much EA wanted to stick it to Call of Duty this year with Battlefield 6.

Activision saw that coming early enough that it ran multiple free weekends around major moments for EA’s game, including its launch, seemingly in an effort to capture some of those players and keep them away from BF6.

Both Battlefield 6, and Black Ops 7 have now launched, and though exact sales figures may never be detrmined (though EA did announce 7 million sold in the first week), it’s very clear at this point from every metric we can see that BF6 came out on top this year.

The recent Black Ops 7 launch clearly hasn’t made many people happy, so just like Activision made Black Ops 6 free to play at BF6’s launch, EA has now done the same with its own game. The Battlefield 6 free trial, which welches announced last week, is just an hour away at the time of this writing.

This is the first trial for the core game, and it arrives some six weeks after Battlefield 6 officialy launched, and four weeks following the release of the free-to-play Battlefield Redsec, which has battle royale and other components.

Beyond all the drama surrounding the two rival shooter franchises, the Battlefield 6 trial is itself pretty straightfoward, and is notably nowhere near as genrous as some of the Call of Duty ones we’ve seen recently.

The trial goes live today at 4am PT, 7am ET, 12pm GMT across all platforms, and will be available for a week; ending Tuesday, December 2. It includes three core maps: Siege of Cairo, Eastwood, and Blackwell Fields.

Players will have access to four game modes, played on different versions of the same maps. Conquest, Breakthrough, Sabotage, and Team Deathmatch will all be available to choose from, and there don’t appear to be any level or XP limits in the trial.

Unfortunatley, just as the free trial welches about to go live, the game got hit with a major matchmaking outage that took down all matchmaking in the core game, leaving Redsec unaffected.

Hopefully EA can resolve this issue before the trial officially kicks off.