Battlefield 1 Revealed in Launch Trailer

[RicoADF]

I have wanted a WW1 FPS for a long long time. Why did it have to be EA and Battlefield...

That's pretty much how I see it, friggen awesome to see but EA of all publishers......

I'll have to wait and see how they do this.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

I mentioned earlier that I thought it would be cool to see the Battle of Beersheba where the Australian Light Horse famously rode the last great horse mounted cavalry charge of the 20th century but that's the provincialism in me as an Australian.

What this game really should include, is The Somme Offensive.

 

[GonvilleBromhead]

I mentioned earlier that I thought it would be cool to see the Battle of Beersheba where the Australian Light Horse famously rode the last great horse mounted cavalry charge of the 20th century but that's the provincialism in me as an Australian.

What this game really should include, is The Somme Offensive.

100% with you with Beersheba, and as a Brit I have some defence against provincialism on that front. The most intriguing thing about it is that the Light Horse weren't a cavalry regiment - they were mounted rifles (who used horses as a mode of swift transport, and dismounted and fought as infantry). They had no swords or pikes, and used their bayonets - I have heard different accounts as whether the bayonets were used on their own as swords, or attached to their rifles and used as lances. A very brave action indeed.

 

[Jute88]

Interesting time period. I just hope they include the Russian Revolution, and how it affected not just the war, but the independence of several countries from the Russian Empire.

 

[direkiller]

The tonal dissonance is strong with this one. A serious question though, for anyone who has reputable knowledge, how many, if any (I luv commas) African men distinguished themselves during the "great war" and in what theater?

The French did recruit troops from their African colonies and they did see action against the Germans on the Western Front. The Germans themselves largely used African colonial troops for General Paul von Lettow-Vorbek's campaign of causing a nuisance for the British in East Africa that lasted the entire war. If you're talking African-American, then you'd have a much harder time finding one, the only one I can think of is a pilot that flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, as squadron made up of Americans that flew for the French Air Force before the USA officially entered the war in 1917.

Ah, some good information in there. I am actually surprised by das Germans using African soldiers back then, it just never crossed my mind. Were they recruited via normal means, paid, treated respectfully, etc?

Vorbeck had about 14,000 Askari under his command in German Africa.
That said Vorbeck was not exactly kind Africans who were not in the military.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

My son showed me this on the weekend and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm much more excited about this WWI scenario for this than I am the space setting of the new COD.

 

[Worgen]

Its interesting that they have set this in a time we dont see often in games, especially aaa games. But, I have doubts as to how much fun it will be and keep historical. I mean pretty much the best infantry weapon was a bolt action, I know they show someone running around with an lmg, I want to say a Lewis gun but I dont care enough to look it up. Plus "realistic" military shooters didn't really go mainstream till players got a bit more usability from the guns. While its fun to mock red dot sights, they sure do make guns more usable.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Oh, and they should definitely have a brain and put a bit of an anti-war message in it. God, WWI was a fucking stupid big war.

The melee system has me slightly worried, since BF4's Knife/Counter Kinfe is almost game breakingly inconsistent and the one thing DICE haven't been able to improve at all since release. Making it a central mechanic seems a bit rash.

As for the tone, Battlefield games have always been extremely gleeful in their violence. I don't expect this to treat the horrors World War 1 any more respectfully than it did the Battles of Berlin, Guadalcanal, Hue, Jalalabad and so on.

Why have respect when you can make a tank do back flip?

 

[Bob_McMillan]

The melee system has me slightly worried, since BF4's Knife/Counter Kinfe is almost game breakingly inconsistent and the one thing DICE haven't been able to improve at all since release. Making it a central mechanic seems a bit rash.

Ah the counterknife... I'm not sure why they never bothered to remove it, especially with all the other improvements they have made to the game over the years.

But people who went to the BF1 event said that there are different melee weapons with different damage and attack speed, so I'm guessing the melee combat will be more similar to Hardline.

 

[GrumbleGrump]

Yeah, it looks promising, but DICE has always been good at making trailers, in my opinion. We'll have to play it to know if it's worth it.

It's going to be weird though, because WW1 was brutal fucking conflict, so if they make a campaign that depict it as is then it's going to look weird.

 

[TotalerKrieger]

So...if that bizarre trailer is anything to go by, BF1 will be just another mass produced run-and-gun shooter that will largely fail to capture dynamics and feel of the Great War. It almost looks like they were making a steampunk game but then decided to switch to WW1 at the last minute. Also, the name BF1 is really stupid, why not something like BF 1917? Still, this is the first Battlefield game to pique my interest even slightly since BF2...

You want a good WW1 FPS? Look no further than Verdun. Before playing that game, I didn't think it possible to make an enjoyable FPS that is based around trench warfare, but those guys nailed it. Relatively historically accurate, very nice graphics and truly unique, if unforgiving, gameplay.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

Well it takes balls to do that, kudos to them. WWI could actually make a far more interesting and diverse game than the same "shoot nazis" kind of game that nearly every WWII game devolves into.

I just hope they manage to actually capture the conflict in its entirety, because WWI was in many ways a far more complex situation too. It also creates a whole lot of opportunity though.

 

[Hawk eye1466]

I'm interested if only because WW1 is really interesting and hopefully they go into some of the more obscure fronts like other people have said, I also love Lawrence of Arabia so that could be cool, but here's my worry, the only time you see the player shoot a gun it's fully automatic.

And fully automatic guns at the time were like the most advanced technology on the battlefield, they were also heavy as shit, needed a team usually of 2 or more to use and some even needed water cooling making them impractical to carry or use for mobile warfare.

I'm interested but I want a WW1 game where it's a little slower paced and you can really see how the toll of war affects different fronts, like the European front is slow and brutal but in the Middle East maybe it's fast hit and run stuff where you use swords and calvalry charges? I just don't want your soldier to be given an "advanced lightweight prototype machine gun" and then be told to just go apeshit in the trenches.

 

[TotalerKrieger]

I just don't want your soldier to be given an "advanced lightweight prototype machine gun" and then be told to just go apeshit in the trenches.

It will happen, no question...I can just see exceptionally rare or prototype weaponry like the Fedorov Avtomat, Mle.1917 & MP18 becoming standard weapons just to keep the core Battlefield demographic sufficiently entertained. It will be far too jarring for BF players to go from modern automatic weapons equipped with half a dozen attachments to primarily using bolt action rifles, low capacity handguns and stationary (or crew-served) MGs. What about the unlock systems that mainstream FPS players have come to expect? You got bayonets...and what else? No reflex sights or IR scopes, just iron-sights.

 

[OneCatch]

Nice to see some of the more dynamic parts of the war getting coverage. Arabia, the Eastern Front, maybe Turkey. Not everything was trench warfare and stalemates, and those trench battles were often a lot more dynamic than is commonly depicted in media.

Unfortunately, we have ingrained in our collective mind that every battle of WW1 was a bunch of people charging over a trench, getting immediately killed, and then the other side repeating it until tanks were invented. There was a lot more to the war, in urban warfare and cavalry charges and beach assaults and fairly fluid modern warfare in some areas. Those Trench battles weren't always immediately slaughter either. Often, they penetrated the first few trenches and entered hand to hand combat before a counterattack pushed the assault back. It's the Lions led by Donkeys thing. Not true, but it makes a good story.

Now, obviously it's fucking Battlefield and everything will become a Hollywood movie in game form, but this may do a lot to combat a lot of misconceptions that many people have if only by exposing people to the other parts of the war.

I think that arguing that this will combat misconceptions is kind of like arguing that Glen Beck good for combatting misconceptions on the hard left. You don't challenge existing misconceptions by making up even more extreme bullshit on the other side of the spectrum.

The 'fluidity' experienced in the early stages of the Western Front was basically a result of everyone using the 1812 playbook with modern weapons and massive armies. It resulted in far more obscene casualty figures than the trenches. It wasn't heroic and exciting modern warfare, it was complete blundering incompetence - all these old generals trying to Austerlitz their way around seeking decisive battle which couldn't exist on a front which featured proper logistics and defence in depth. The trenches were intended to preserve life, and outside of the very largest offensives they did.
That said, the mythology of the trenches is broadly speaking correct - if anything it tends to spare the truly grim details - and I'd be very cautious about claiming that a mass-appeal first person shooter is going to be anywhere near capable of seriously challenging misconceptions in an honest manner.

I mean are we going to have entire missions which simply involve being shelled and gassed? How about battles wherein the only equipment available is a bolt action rifle (as bnout 98% of front line troops were equipped)? Are 90% of fatalities to be inflicted by anonymous artillery fire or indirect machine gun fire? I know that much of this is also true to WW2 (where shooters are accepted) but there is a difference. In WW2 platoon and squad actions are far more common and combat is far less static - at a squad, platoon, company, or regimental level. Small unit tactics exist Simply put, FPS is all about mobility, novelty, and heroic achievement. You can shoehorn that into WW2, but you just can't for the First World War, except in a very small number of specific cases.

Portraying it as some kind of globetrotting special forces vacation with gas grenades and light machine guns and machine pistols and trench club QTEs is just bullshit of the highest order.

 

[OneCatch]

I just don't want your soldier to be given an "advanced lightweight prototype machine gun" and then be told to just go apeshit in the trenches.

It will happen, no question...I can just see exceptionally rare or prototype weaponry like the Fedorov Avtomat, Mle.1917 & MP18 becoming standard weapons just to keep the core Battlefield demographic sufficiently entertained. It will be far too jarring for BF players to go from modern automatic weapons equipped with half a dozen attachments to primarily using bolt action rifles, low capacity handguns and stationary (or crew-served) MGs. What about the unlock systems that mainstream FPS players have come to expect? You got bayonets...and what else? No reflex sights or IR scopes, just iron-sights.

The BAR will probably be the standard assault weapon, probably see a plethora of magical machine pistols as well.
Oh, and you've not even got to the good bits yet. What about the vehicles? Tanks with one crew and implausible visibility. Maps which allow them to drive around freely. Absurdly agile and tough aircraft. Ridiculous accuracy and rate of fire for both. Oh, death-defying horses. Looks like they're even working on some kind of killstreak bollocks - that machine gunner at 0:30 looks like a fucking Juggernaut, and I'm calling the use of gas-related perks now.

Maybe it'll be ok.. Actually that would be fantastic - if they were to do a Spec Ops: The Line and market it as the usual COD crap but make the game utterly brutal, with near instakill for leaving cover, random artillery scatter, no equipment, poor aiming, no fast movement. I'd pay for that.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

I am not a fan. I know it's only fiction, but The Great War is a sticking point for me, and the trailer's glorification of "epic" battles makes me really uncomfortable on a moral standpoint. By all means, make your game, but I really don't feel comfortable with any of this.

Should we really be feeling comfortable with war in general, no matter what the time period is? Just something to think about it.

Men have this idea that we can fight with dignity. That there's a proper way to kill someone. It's absurd, it's unaesthetic. We need it to endure the bloody horror of murder.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Urgh, I really don't want to have to buy back into the Battlefield series. Last Battlefield I played was 3, and I was far from impressed. The campaign AI was bugged as all hell, it was riddled with QTEs, the plot was horrible, and the multiplayer (which I bought the game for) crashed my 360 every time I tried to load it up.

This does look good, though.

 

[Grayjack]

Having looked at the trailer a few times now I really appreciate the diversity of terrain. Sure there's the Western front with its horrible trenches, but I also see snowy mountains and men in khaki wearing brazier helmets, so that means its probably the Italian front. I can't remember a single game that has ever shown the Italian front of WW1 in the alps before. The Western Front, The Alps, Tannenburg, Arabia... That's already some pretty nice variety.

Also about the African(-american?) man statuette and cover art. I'm not entirely sure what nation he's supposed to represent. Sure almost every European power had men from across their empires come over to fight their battles for them. Heck, even Belgium did. He seems to be wearing American puttees though. So he might be a bit like Freddy from "Valiant Hearts: The Great War"; just some random american volunteer in some army way before the US entered the war, months before it ends.

Probably a Harlem Hellfighter, an American unit that spent more time in combat than any other American squad.

 

[darkrage6]

Blech! This looks awful, I wanted Bad Company 3, not whatever the fuck this bullshit is.