People are flipping out over recoil in Battlefield 6 because of one gun specifically designed to have no recoil in real life
A clip of a particularly laser-beamy gun in Battlefield 6 is giving folks the wrong impression.

We're in that strange gap between the big Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal and the start of its open beta, which means it's prime time to overreact to everything. Right now, the overreaction is over recoil, or more specifically, the lack thereof.
Thanks to one particularly misleading streamer clip floating around online, some folks are having a mini panic over the possibility that every Battlefield 6gun will have so little recoil that everything will feel like a laser beam with no "skill gap."
As one of the people who played Battlefield 6 last week, I can assure you that's not true. BF6's guns kick, and just like in Call of Duty, attachments can make a big difference.
I have to admit, though, that clip of Optic Scump shooting an LMG with near-perfect precision without touching his right stick is eyebrow-raising.
Battlefield 6 seems to lack any sort of skill gap or skill ceiling in its gunplay on several different guns.This particular weapon has zero recoil and spread even while holding MB1 or trigger.Hopefully this all gets tweaked in beta. pic.twitter.com/6EtDYANce2August 3, 2025
Yep, that gun has near-zero recoil, but as no shortage of fans on the Battlefield Reddit will tell you, that is both realistic and by design. What Scump was shooting is the KTS100 LMG, which in BF6 is based on the real-life Ultimax-100, a weapon known for incredibly low recoil that previously appeared in BF4. Here's a video of FPSRussia laser-beaming with the genuine article in 2011.
Thanks to this helpful visualization from Reddit user TekHead, we can see that Battlefield 6's laser beam LMG is nothing new to Battlefield, either. Low recoil is this gun's whole thing—whether or not that's a good idea is up for debate, but it's not representative of how all, or even most, BF6 guns behave.
In fact, the KTS100 is a major outlier. Without investing in attachments, I had a much harder time controlling full-auto recoil in Battlefield 6 than I ever did in BF2042. For a clearer picture, YouTuber TheBrokenMachine uploaded a great video showing off a bunch of raw recoil patterns as they were in last week's build (as shared by redditor Kah0000).
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While I'm not worried about every Battlefield 6 gun becoming a laser beam, I do think its guns will overall feel more forgiving than CoD. It's an aspect of Battlefield I've always enjoyed, and one I expect to see plenty of tweaks before the full Battlefield 6 launch on October 10.

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Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.
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