Battlefield 6 Gets a Quiet but Important Patch While Delta Force Tries to Steal the Spotlight

If you've been keeping an eye on Battlefield 6 ahead of its launch next Tuesday, there's a new update you'll want to know about. Update 1.1.3.6 isn't some massive content drop or big overhaul, but it is one of those patches that cleans things up in ways you'll probably notice once you're actually playing.  

On top of that, DICE and EA have shared some surprisingly detailed anti-cheat stats, and there's also a bit of side drama thanks to Delta Force rolling out a new season with a map that looks suspiciously like it came straight out of Battlefield's greatest hits. 

Starting with the update itself, 1.1.3.6 is very much a bug-fix-focused patch. You're not getting new weapons, maps, or modes here. Instead, it's about fixing issues that have been bothering players, some of which are more impactful than they might sound at first glance.  

One of the bigger talking points is player movement. According to the patch notes, DICE has fixed issues where sprint-jump momentum could be weird, sometimes giving you way more or way less momentum than intended. If you initially worried this was some kind of stealth nerf to movement, it doesn't seem to be that.  

The way it's described, this is more about correcting edge cases where movement was outright broken rather than changing how Battlefield 6 feels on a fundamental level. You won't be able to test this properly until the update goes live on Tuesday, February 3rd, but the intention seems pretty clear. 

The 1.1.3.6 update also tackles a handful of issues tied to RedSec Battle Royale, including insertions, parachute behavior, and redeploy UI elements.  

If RedSec isn't your thing, this might not mean much to you, but if you've spent time there, chances are you've run into at least one of these problems. It's the kind of cleanup that won't generate hype but should make the mode feel less janky overall. 

One area where you might immediately feel a difference is visuals and lighting, especially on the Eastwood map. The patch resolves several destruction-related visual and lighting issues that could lead to full-on blackouts or incorrect color rendering, amongst other things.  

If you've played Battlefield 6 for any length of time, you've probably seen some of this firsthand. There's a particularly nasty strobing effect that a lot of players have noticed, where the screen flashes outward from the center in a full 360-degree pattern. While the notes don't call out that exact issue by name, there's a good chance it falls under the fixes included here. 

Beyond that, there are fixes for UI, audio, and general stability.  

Crashes related to challenges, minimap accuracy issues, gadget audio playback bugs, and various platform-specific problems have all been addressed. It's the kind of maintenance work you want to see, especially so close to launch. 

Digging a bit deeper into the changelog, there are a couple of smaller details worth calling out. Under the player section there's also an update to certain cosmetics. The Objective Ace and Winter Warning cosmetics have been adjusted to better align with Battlefield's identity.  

These are the same cosmetics that many players suspected were AI-generated. One of them featured an M4 barrel with two barrels instead of one, which raised some eyebrows, and the other had a ghost-mask look that felt uncomfortably close to Call of Duty. 

Rather than directly addressing the AI concerns, DICE has quietly tweaked these cosmetics and framed it as a visual alignment change.  

You can read between the lines however you want. It's not hard to imagine why they'd prefer to handle it this way instead of turning it into a full-blown PR situation. Hopefully, the takeaway here is that paid cosmetics need a bit more authenticity going forward. 

On the maps and modes side, Eastwood once again gets some attention. Destroying buildings near the A flag could previously cause green or purple visual effects across nearby structures, while destruction near the B flag could trigger a complete lighting blackout across the entire map.  

There was also an issue where destroying certain objects near B would result in extremely bright lighting artifacts. All of that has now been fixed. That said, lighting still feels like a broader issue in Battlefield 6. Exposure shifts when moving between indoor and outdoor spaces are still pretty aggressive, and this patch fixes some but not all of that problem. 

UI and HUD changes include fixing a bug where downed squadmates would appear on the minimap even if your class couldn't revive them, which was misleading at best. On the audio side, an issue where UAV drone enemy detection sounds could be heard by all teammates instead of just the operator has been fixed.  

Performance and stability fixes are more platform-specific. On PlayStation 5, an issue where ownership validation could fail during certain system lifecycle events was causing connectivity problems.  

On Xbox Series S, an out-of-memory crash related to loading daily and weekly challenges has been resolved. If you're on PC, you might not have noticed these, but for console players affected by them, these fixes are a sigh of relief. 

And that leads nicely into the other big Battlefield-related news: anti-cheat. 

DICE and EA recently shared a detailed breakdown of Battlefield 6's anti-cheat metrics, and some of the numbers are genuinely surprising. Since the Season 1 update back in November, the teams have been closely monitoring discussions around cheating and realized that dropping one big update per season just wasn't enough to keep players properly informed. This is their second update on the topic. 

One of the key metrics they focus on is match infection rate, which represents the percentage of matches where at least one player attempts to cheat. Looking at December, that number started around 2.5 percent, dipped slightly, and then rose toward the end of the month, peaking around the holiday period.  

From December 1st to December 31st, the rate ranged from roughly 2 to just over 3 percent. Compared to October and November, where the rate peaked at 2.58 percent, December saw a slightly higher spike near the end. 

In December alone, EA's Javelin anti-cheat system blocked 580,389 attempts to cheat or tamper with the game before they could impact matches. That's an absurdly high number when you first hear it. It's hard to wrap your head around the idea that so many people are actively trying to cheat in an online shooter.  

At the same time, the percentage-based perspective paints a slightly more reassuring picture. If two to three percent of matches are affected, that means if you play around 100 matches in a month, you might realistically run into cheaters two or three times.  

The anti-cheat team also tracks over 200 cheat-related programs, hardware solutions, vendors, resellers, and communities.  

To wrap things up, there's Delta Force. Whether you're still playing it or dropped off once Battlefield 6 entered the picture, the game is rolling out a new season with a new map. And yes, it looks extremely familiar. A trailer made the rounds showing a towering glass structure that instantly reminded people of Siege of Shanghai. It was similar enough that jokes started flying about Delta Force beating Battlefield to its own remake. 

The map doesn't feel quite like Siege of Shanghai in motion. Instead, it has more in common with the Aftermath DLC from Battlefield 3. Earthquakes and aftershocks shake the screen during matches, debris falls from damaged buildings, and facades crumble as the round progresses.  

It's not good to compare it to Battlefield 6. After playing BF6 for a while, the differences in quality between it and Delta Force are very clear. There isn't much micro-destruction, and the big scripted destruction scenes don't feel very deep. The whole thing can feel cheap, like playing a mobile game on a bigger screen. Maybe it's because of Unreal Engine 4, or maybe it's just the way the game is designed, but the gap is too big to ignore. 

That said, Delta Force is free to play, and the new season launches on February 3rd. If you're curious, there's no real downside beyond spending some of your time. And if you genuinely enjoy it, that's perfectly fine. Not every game needs to compete at the same level.  

At the end of the day, Battlefield 6 is shaping up nicely. Update 1.1.3.6 won't blow you away, but it fixes real problems. The anti-cheat numbers, while a bit shocking at first, actually suggest things are more under control than you might think. And while other shooters are trying to grab attention with familiar-looking maps, Battlefield 6 continues to march on as one of the best shooters out there right now.