Fans of shooters will be spoilt for choice in 2016’s pre-Christmas offering.
Want to bash up your mates in a giant mech? Titanfall 2 has you sorted. Maybe you find planet Earth and its annoyingly persistent gravitational pull too restrictive? Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is blasting Jon Snow and Conor McGregor into space with its intergalactic shakeup of the genre.
And then there’s Battlefield 1, the latest entry in EA DICE’s massively popular, military FPS series, and a game heading in a very different direction to its peers.
This year Battlefield is going all the way back to the The Great War. After doing just about all there is to do with modern warfare and its tech-heavy gizmos, EA DICE are dropping players into some of the most brutal and harrowing battles on record.
WW1 was a truly global war, where empires fell and were replaced with new political orders. Unlike WWII, where history remembers a clear line between good and evil, the idea of enemy in The Great War is more ambiguous. This is perhaps why in video games it’s still a relatively untouched period, but EA DICE are hoping to change that.
JOE was lucky enough to get some hands-on time with the massive 64-player multiplayer mode (were played classic Conquest and the new Operations mode) at DICE’s Stockholm HQ, and we can confirm that Battlefield 1 is a bold addition to the franchise.
For a more detailed rundown of our thoughts ahead of the game’s launch next week, read on.
1. There’s much more variety in weaponry than you might think
Battlefield 1 is set in WW1, but there’s still plenty of fully customisable weapons at your disposal. A lot of the guns in the game were the first versions of their type, and they’ve all been carefully recreated.
There are six weapon categories: Shotguns, SMGs, LMGs, Semi Autos, sidearms and Sniper Rifles – as well as a range of melee weapons and several grenade types. The guns obviously aren’t decked out with the technology that present-day or futuristic shooters can boast, but you can still tweak the reticles and zooms to your heart’s content. Most guns have a bayonet attachment that you can charge enemies with. It’s nasty and visceral, but will no doubt be a popular gameplay tactic.
We found ourselves repeatedly picking an Assault class with the Hellriegel 1915 SMG, which felt great to use. DICE have increased the “bullet velocity” in the game, which basically means everything is sped up to allow gunplay to become more frantic. Oh, and every weapon sounds absolutely fantastic.
When building Battlefield 1, DICE decided that any supposed limitations of the war could be turned to their advantage. As Design Director Lars Gustavsson tells JOE: “It was about embracing the possibilities of the era. Where there aren’t IR sights and extreme scopes, locking missiles and so on – instead of seeing that as a negative we decided to bring combat distances closer so you see more of your enemy. It was about looking at the strength and weaknesses.”
2. Dynamic weather has a genuine impact on gameplay
The Frostbite engine was a game-changer for the Battlefield series, with the technology bump allowing the player to destroy and reshape the world around them in combat. Want to sneak away from the action for a few minutes? Your call, but just be aware that the roof could come down on your head at any second.
Those spontaneous, unscripted moments stop things from getting stale and repetitive, and Battlefield 1‘s dynamic weather adds yet another level of unpredictability to the carnage.
In one match we were picking off enemy players with a sniper, feeling pretty cocky about our vantage point. Then a huge cloud of fog rolled in. There was no thermal imaging in 1914, so our scoped out rifle became pretty much useless. Battlefield 1 is full of moments like this. Any tactical planning goes out of the window in the midst of a random, raging storm (and these storms really hang around), but you can always use the chaos to your advantage.
3. The vehicles are still great, and you’ll want to master them all
Battlefield is renowned for its vehicle combat, and 1 is no different. Expect battles in giant airships (yep, you can fly a Zeppelin), planes, trains, tanks, boats, motorbikes, horses and more.
Spawning into a game as either a Tanker or Pilot lets you choose which type of tank or plane you want to to play in, so you can tailor the vehicle to the situation.
Each vehicle type is intuitive and simple to operate, but the nimble little planes in particular will take some mastery.
“My favourite this year by far has to be the bomber,” explains producer Aleksander Grondal. “The reason for that is because I can bring two friends along in that bombing plane and go on strategic bomb raids. I haven’t really been able to do that in what I call the “beeps and boops” of the digital world. Here you pull the trigger and the thing lands where you’ve aimed it to land, not where the system tells it where to go. There’s a certain amount of clarity in gameplay and skill involved which I truly appreciate, and playing that role in a meaningful way excites me a lot.”
4. You’re going to enjoy it a lot more with your mates
Battlefield has always been a social shooter (weird as the term sounds). With so much going on it’s a lot easier if you’re able to coordinate with your team about who plays as what.
You need to know where your medics are, who rushes in gung-ho and who hangs back with a sniper rifle to lend covering fire and advice. We didn’t have voice chat in the matches we played against the insanely accurate development team, and it showed.
We got our asses kicked.
That’s not to say you can’t have fun as a lone ranger in Battlefield 1; racking up a solo killstreak is still possible. But this game is really designed for teamwork. Either assemble a squad with friends or be the guy that gets a bunch of strangers talking.
5. Operations mode is a going to be very popular
A new mode for Battlefield 1, and certainly the one that stood out for us in testing, ‘Operations’ tasks attackers with pushing a defending team back in a battle for territory.
The game mode draws inspiration from real WW1 battles, and matches span several maps. If your team is successful in one siege, then that score carries over to the next map. The historical context provided in each match is a nice touch that really makes the battles feel epic as they play out. The stakes just feel higher here.
6. Single-player makes a strong case
If we’re being blunt, the single-player campaign has tended to feel like a bit of an afterthought in previous Battlefield titles. You’d always wonder why you were doing that and not jumping online.
Battlefield 1 is taking its campaign more seriously. Rather than putting you in the shoes of one character, they’ve decided to tell a number of different stories.
‘War Stories’ moves away from the point-scoring and levelling up that dominates the multiplayer portion of the game, and instead focuses on the human side of The Great War. The world around these characters was undergoing rapid change. It was a war fought by many sides, and the loss to human life – each time you die in the game the name of the fallen character appears on screen – was truly devastating. EA DICE hope that using these alternating perspectives will help players better understand an incredibly complex war.
As far as gameplay is concerned, we weren’t shown the mode during our time at DICE. We have, however, spent a bit of the time with the EA Access trial (available to all Xbox One owners with a subscription right now) and a particularly standout moment had us controlling a carrier pigeon. Having a birds-eye view of the devastation below leaves a bit of a lump in your throat.
The developers assured us that War Stories would adopt the open-ended nature of the multiplayer mode; always trying to give you more than one way of approaching a situation.
In multiplayer, there’s inevitably going to be an awkward contradiction in trying to approach the subject matter with the sensitivity it warrants, but then showering you in XP and upgrades for slaughtering your opposition. War Stories attempts to capture the horrific consequences of the First World War, and it might just be the mode that lives longest in the memory.
7. There’s a lot of diversity in the game maps
The Great War was centred in Europe, but conflict quickly expanded right across the globe – something that is reflected in Battlefield 1‘s varied range of locations.
The first match we played took place in the crumbling city of Amiens in northern France. It’s a claustrophobic map, with many skirmishes occurring in narrow alleyways, and any cover we thought we’d found was quickly blown to pieces.
We were then dropped in Monte Grappa, a mountain above the clouds in the Venetian Alps where the Italian Army fought the Austro Hungarian Empire. This map is all about verticality, with one team pushing up the hill as the other fends them off hulking cannons. The wide open spaces meant that swooping planes were always a threat.
The final Conquest match we played was in Argonne Forest. Whether you’re trying to find yourself a camouflaged sniping spot in the woodland, or tearing around the labyrinth of bunkers, it’s a map that’s all about quick reflexes and knowing when to use your melee.
We only played a handful of maps, but graphically they all looked incredible and each served up notably different experiences. You’re not going to get bored of this one.
Battlefield 1 is released on PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One on 21st October.