EA now lets you pre-order battle passes in Battlefield 6 for exclusive rewards, because of course it does

At its core, Battlefield 6 is a great multiplayer shooter. But EA has consistently fumbled it since an explosive launch that should have put the series back in the spotlight—it did for all of a month, give or take. Now BF6 is in its 'we've heard your feedback era', adding seven maps this year (including fan favourites), reintroducing naval warfare, and more.

Despite this newfound vigour, if you boot up the game right now, you'll see a notification that you can actually pre-order Season 3's battle pass and BF Pro (the upgraded pass) before it launches on May 12. The standard pass is 1,100 Battlefield Coins ($9.99), while the Pro version can only be purchased with hard-earned cash, costing $24.99.

In typical fashion, there are some incentives to splashing the cash early. For one, you'll instantly get access to the 'Verdant' L110 weapon package, which is just a green version of the LMG with some attachments. At launch, you'll obviously get the pass you paid for, but also two free tier skips.

And if you pre-order the Battlefield Pro token for Season 3, you'll get the previous weapon package as well as one for the P18 pistol right away, two additional tier skips and XP boosts at launch, and everything else normally included in this premium pass—25 tier skips and exclusive cosmetics.

Pre-ordering games is one thing, but pre-ordering a ticket to grind through a battle pass that you haven't seen yet is another. For one, the incentives aren't even very good unless you were always going to purchase the pass anyway. And, frankly, I don't think I want battle pass pre-orders to have good incentives.

It's certainly a very interesting move in the game's people-pleasing era, but I'm not too surprised to see heightened monetisation after EA laid off staff behind "the biggest launch in franchise history". Since its whopping 750,000 concurrent player launch on Steam seven months ago, BF6 quickly dropped to around 100,000 daily concurrents by January, which is now sitting at around the 50,000 mark. The Season 2 update made little impact on the player count, at least on Steam, so eyes are on Season 3 and beyond to deliver.