Battlefield 6 devs are working to squash a bug that could be making your aim worse—despite already fixing it in the beta, because game development is a nightmare

Battlefield 6: A Recon crouched aiming a sniper, with two decoy dummy next to them in dirt ditches.
(Image credit: EA)

I do not envy PC game developers—any videogame that actually releases at all is a miracle, the result of the combined work of (in the case of big studios) hundreds of people to convince a fancy rock to not only think, but to run an entire simulated world on hardware they cannot predict. Battlefield 6's devs have re-affirmed my decision to not get into coding with its latest bug.

As spotted by Eurogamer, BF6 players have been suffering a weapon glitch that makes it harder for them to aim—see, in most FPS games, the longer you hold down the trigger, the worse your aim gets. This is called 'spread' or 'bloom', and it's usually accounted for by not shooting for a little bit, giving your poor virtual soldier's tired arms a li'l break.

Except, in Battlefield 6, it'll sometimes just not reset at all—as shown in the clip above. This was a known bug in the beta, leading some to thinking that the devs at DICE were potentially dragging their feet. Not so.

As explained by principal game designer Florian Le Bihan on X, "The Beta bug was actually fixed but we've identified another issue (two in fact) that impacts dispersion/bloom in an unintended way and will cause you to have more dispersion at times. The team is working on this and we're looking at general balance/tuning of dispersion too."

In other words, the developers at DICE successfully squashed a bullet spread bug ("related to sliding as you called out!", notes Bihan), only for two entirely separate bugs to pop up like a hydra sprouting two more heads, causing the exact same problem but this time with more issues to fix. Nightmare.

It's a humbling reminder that even the simplest things we take for granted in videogames are, in fact, a nightmarish house of cards that could collapse at any moment if the computer doesn't like a number you put somewhere. It's a cold comfort that sometimes these bugs are really funny, like hitting a drone with a sledgehammer and breaking the laws of physics.

Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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