Call of Duty could learn a thing or two from Battlefield 6's smallest map

Have you seen this Battlefield 6 map? It's called Saints Quarter, and I wouldn't blame you for forgetting (or only now realizing) it exists. Until yesterday, I'd only played on it by accident.

Saints Quarter is an anomaly in Battlefield 6's map pool, because it's the only map that's exclusively infantry-only. The most popular modes like Conquest, Rush, and Breakthrough are incompatible with Saints Quarter, so you'll only encounter it in 8v8 playlists like Team Deathmatch, Domination, and King of the Hill. (If you also forgot Battlefield 6 had those modes, you're forgiven twice.)

I don't fire up Battlefield 6 looking for cramped city streets and small teams—it's all about the big maps, baby—but I have to give Saints Quarter credit. It's not my favorite Battlefield 6 map, but it might be its most successful.

In essence, Saints Quarters represents Battlefield Studios' best stab at the Call of Duty experience. It's designed top-to-bottom for 8v8, unlike every other map on the Close-Quarters Combat playlist that are literally just chopped up Conquest maps.

You can feel the benefits of that focus immediately: borders are clearly defined (no invisible walls), sightlines are tight, and there's no empty space where vehicles would usually be. Most of all, the map's geometry was actually designed around a handful of focal points that serve as Domination flags or KOTH hills—a central courtyard, a long side street, a corner stairwell overlooking a storm drain. They're equally spaced with well-considered sightlines.

Saints Quarters is, surprisingly, a darn good CoD map. Actually, it's even better than that, because your average Black Ops 6 map is boring, and Saints Quarter is weird in a way that CoD hasn't been in a long time.

For one, you can actually breathe in it. It's the smallest Battlefield 6 map by a mile, but by CoD standards it's huge. It's got loads of buildings with second floors, destructible floorboards, and the whole thing is on a slope similar to Modern Warfare 2's Favela.

With its slanted streets, abundant alleyways, and stacked buildings evoking an old district of Gibraltar, Saints Quarter is a stark contrast to modern CoD maps. For years, CoD (and especially Treyarch) has been married to a "three-lane" map structure that, for some reason, dictates everything must be shaped like like this:

That's Exposure, one of the maps featured in the Black Ops 7 beta earlier this month. Yellow arrows are mine.

This is Imprint, another Black Ops 7 launch map. Would you like to run down the middle, left, or right? Or maybe mix it up by jumping between lanes at set intervals.

This is a birds-eye view of Saints Quarter in Battlefield 6 (yellow highlights are multi-floor buildings with destruction):

Way more dynamic. No matter where you are, you have options, and you have space to think. Notice how Saints Quarter is designed more like a circle players revolve around than a box with rigid paths? That used to be common in arena shooters like Quake, Halo, and even Team Fortress 2.

Circular or oblong layouts are convenient for dynamic spawn points, and they also have the effect of making the map's center a stronghold that players try to lock down—unlike in CoD, where folks tend to move like a two-way freeway. That's why BF Studios plopped the biggest and most destructible building on Saints Quarter right in the middle.

To be fair, Saints Quarter is larger than Black Ops 7's beta maps, so of course it has the room to provide more options, but that's the point! CoD maps weren't always so boxy and restrictive. They used to be weird in similar ways, though not quite as bananas as classic PC shooters. Nowadays, when a genuinely interesting map comes out of a Treyarch game, it's a minor miracle.

In case you're getting the impression that BF Studios has released a map with zero faults, know that Saints Quarter has its problems, too. The spawns in Team Deathmatch and Domination are a bit of a mess at the moment, and while the east courtyard is a contentious hot spot in King of the Hill, it's an unpleasant Domination flag.

So even though my number one Battlefield 6 complaint remains a lack of big maps, I have to admit Saints Quarter makes a strong case for 8v8 Battlefield.