The first Battlefield 6 patch of the year is almost here, bringing a smattering of changes, including one that doesn’t quite make sense.
Battlefield 6’s promised, season-extending update has been officially detailed. The patch, version 1.1.3.5, arrives tomorrow, January 20 right when Season 1 was supposed to end. Part of the update’s goal is to extend the current season, until Season 2 kicks off in the middle of February.
Update 1.1.3.5 does, of course, have a change log of its own that goes beyond just the season’s extension, but the changes fall somewhere between not very exciting, and a bit puzzling.
Patch 1.1.3.5 is, for all intents and purposes, a smaller update. When Battlefield Studios announced it earlier last week, the developer didn’t promise any major changes or fixes, so expectations never got out of hand.
The patch is mainly made up of bug fixes, but it does have three key areas of improvements to gameplay. There’s a big focus on melee combat, how responsive/unresponsive it is with the various melee tools, and how melee behaviour interacts with sprinting and other animations.
The end result should be faster attack speeds for the knife, and clearer wind-up animations for both the knife and the sledgehammer. The timing dictating when melee damage gets credited has also been made more consistent in different environments.
Interestingly, sprint is now only interrupted when the melee attack reaches its target. As it stands, sprinting is only interrupted after the full duration of the animation has been completed, which adds to the that perceived feeling of sluggishness.
The other major, and arguably most confusing is the nerf to jet cannons. The patch is going to make jets far less stronger against other air vehicles, requiring 40% more hits to destroy a target. This is puzzling because jets – and air vehicles in general – are already the least survivable in Battlefield 6.
And, considering how the rest of a jet’s arsenal is either situational or nearly ineffective, the cannons were really the one guaranteed way of downing other air vehicles, so long as you manage to land your shots consistently.
