Zero Punctuation: Battlefield 1

[nightowlc]

I didn't think there were that many machine guns in WWI either. Yeah, the dog at the end got me too.

WWI doesn't sound like anything that would make material for a shoot-em-up game. Maybe a game that tries to get the player to consider the grimmer side of life, or the strange oddities that can happen in life (Alvin York's story is about as odd as it can get). It's amazing to read about the numbers of deaths in even a single day in some of the battles. I used to read a lot of Robert Service's poems and he wrote about the Great War quite a bit. A lot of things in his poems and in the histories that made me stop and think, but nothing I'd want to play a game about.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

If you want an historically accurate FPS, try Gears of War. Hey, it's set in the future. The future could be exactly like that. We don't know.

 

[Atratzu]

I got completely distracted and derailed when I remembered "wait, birds can't fart."

 

[Dangeresque]

"the apocalyptic global conflict that will accompany the new American presidency"

Don't look at me - I voted for the blue team.

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

Probably one of Yahtzee's more delightful reviews in a while, I am equally baffled at why you would even bother setting a game in World War I if you were going to ape all the weaponry from the future. This is why I usually only play shooters set in the future; you can go as crazy with the weaponry as you want and no one's going to be asking questions. Not that the average Battlefield player probably cares, but I have a hard time getting past it.

 

[mrdude2010]

If you pretend Verdun doesn't exist, this is quite an original idea.

 

[ToastyMozart]

And they really still have automatic weapons like from WWII for this game? Why not the single-shot rifles they actually had in the war? I've played WWII shooters that had those.

Yep, people just rat-ta-tatting all over the place. They found any automatic some shop-worker kludged together in their garage and put it in as standard equipment. Presumably so as to not alienate the sprayers, or because close-quarters aiming is a ***** on controllers and a single shot would make melee the defacto fight winner at any range below 5 yards.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Press X to bail out trench water.

 

[Ugicywapih]

Last frame of the video, who is the imp riding?

This guy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner]

 

[Alex V.Sharp]

What I'd like to know is: Where the Hell is my Serbian campaign?!

 

[Dalisclock]

Probably one of Yahtzee's more delightful reviews in a while, I am equally baffled at why you would even bother setting a game in World War I if you were going to ape all the weaponry from the future. This is why I usually only play shooters set in the future; you can go as crazy with the weaponry as you want and no one's going to be asking questions. Not that the average Battlefield player probably cares, but I have a hard time getting past it.

What's funny is I had kind of the same feeling about Darkest of Days. They go to the trouble of setting up this whole thing where you work for a time travel agency in the future and you go back to historic battles so you have to be careful who you shoot and to use period weapons in order to not change history, except then the game occasionally goes "Fuck it" and your co-worker gives you a future assault rifle and tells you to go to town. It doesn't even lampshade it either. To make it worse, the last mission is in Pompeii just before the town is buried by the Eruption, so all those futuristic bullet casing are gonna look kind of out of place when the archeologists dig them up in about 2 millenia. No changing history my ass.

 

[Elvaril]

This was my first Battlefield game because I was really excited about the setting. Was really hoping for some missions as the Central Powers since there was no good or bad side in this war. Instead we got this super short Allied Powers campaign. Consequently this was also my last Battlefield game.

 

[Terminal Blue]

For those wondering, submachine guns were briefly used right at the end of the war by Germans, but they were not produced in large numbers and only used by elite trench-assault troops. There are also some weapons used before then which resembled submachine guns a bit, but were not designed as such or were cobbled together variants of other weapons. In general, though, these were extremely rare as well.

The problem with world war 1 is that it kind of straddles the line between early modern and modern warfare. It's the point where old ideas like soldiers fighting in formation with rifles and bayonets met new technology like machine guns and massed artillery. That's why you get ludicrous things like people being told to walk, not run but walk across no man's land under machine gun and artillery fire so as not to break formation.

It's something which always struck me playing Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars. In the Napoleonic wars soldiers fought in rigid formation, with only specialist light troops being accorded any kind of freedom or initiative. The job of most soldiers was to stand in these formations firing and reloading and maybe form the occasional square, but because of the way players naturally play shooting games, what people actually do is to spread out and skirmish in a very modern way which creates a kind of dissonance between setting and gameplay. The same is going to be true, to a lesser extent, of any world war 1 game.

 

[Shymer]

The single player campaign, in comparison to the one from Battlefield 4, was very good. I think they got a lot right. It was quite a low bar to jump over. BF4 suffered from numerous technical and design issues - such as enemies popping into the level next to you or behind you if you ran forward faster than the campaign was expecting you to and seemed to offer a single pace and type of play. Also following a single uninteresting protagonist through meaningless levels is worse than following a selection of different protagonists - with some effort made to provide some context and meaning for each character's motivation

It was always going to be a monumental challenge to get the tone right and to avoid disrespect and they've clearly compromised to land the correct side of respectfulness. I felt that some of the characters and their stories were much more memorable and interesting than previous titles and, for the most part, the missions were varied and offered some challenges with some effort made to change the pace and the style of play from story to story and within each story.

Clearly it's more of a "Boy's WWI action comic" than historical reflection and judging the campaign harshly for its failure to educate the audience about the realities of that era's warfare given the limitations of the genre, the franchise, and the conflicting demands of the audience, developer, publisher and critic is, I think, as unrealistic as the game.

 

[Bindal]

This was my first Battlefield game because I was really excited about the setting. Was really hoping for some missions as the Central Powers since there was no good or bad side in this war. Instead we got this super short Allied Powers campaign. Consequently this was also my last Battlefield game.

If you bought Battlefield for the singleplayer, you did something wrong to begin with.
But honestly, did anyone really expect anything beyond "it's actually just another shooter with a different coat of paint"? I sure didn't.

 

[Squilookle]

This was my first Battlefield game because I was really excited about the setting. Was really hoping for some missions as the Central Powers since there was no good or bad side in this war. Instead we got this super short Allied Powers campaign. Consequently this was also my last Battlefield game.

If you bought Battlefield for the singleplayer, you did something wrong to begin with.
But honestly, did anyone really expect anything beyond "it's actually just another shooter with a different coat of paint"? I sure didn't.

If you'd played Battlefield 1942, you'd know there is a standard another historical Battlefield could at the very least match, which would make it a lot better than the most recent Battlefields, but yeah... nah. They didn't even really go for that either.

 

[Elvaril]

This was my first Battlefield game because I was really excited about the setting. Was really hoping for some missions as the Central Powers since there was no good or bad side in this war. Instead we got this super short Allied Powers campaign. Consequently this was also my last Battlefield game.

If you bought Battlefield for the singleplayer, you did something wrong to begin with.
But honestly, did anyone really expect anything beyond "it's actually just another shooter with a different coat of paint"? I sure didn't.

I bought it for both single player and multiplayer, but only because WWI is a time period I really like. I've never played any Battlefield before so this was going to be a potential jumping off point to get me into the series as I do generally tend to enjoy fps games. Campaign didn't sell me, so I'll just enjoy the multiplayer for a while then move back to other fps series I enjoy more.

 

[Dalisclock]

This was my first Battlefield game because I was really excited about the setting. Was really hoping for some missions as the Central Powers since there was no good or bad side in this war. Instead we got this super short Allied Powers campaign. Consequently this was also my last Battlefield game.

If you bought Battlefield for the singleplayer, you did something wrong to begin with.
But honestly, did anyone really expect anything beyond "it's actually just another shooter with a different coat of paint"? I sure didn't.

I was kinda hoping this would be worth a try for the campaign. Hell, I enjoy the average CoD campaign despite basically being video game version of an action film, because it does it well. The last battlefield game I tried was Bad Company 2 and it didn't exactly win me over. Instead, I kept thinking "This feels suspiciously like someone at EA saw CoD:MW2 and decided they needed to make the same game but with just enough changes not to get sued".

So yeah, it looks like lack of a good campaign means yet another game I don't have to bother with.

 

[4Aces]

I will bet a tenner for the Airlock making a brilliant recovery in the last ten to take it into overtime.

Oh, and You Bastards!

 

[Fireaxe]

To be completely fair it's relatively historically accurate that a lot of the campaigns in WW1 had a bad case of "what the f*** happened to the backup" -- the first time the Germans used Chlorine Gas for instance they put a 4 mile hole in the French line and followed up with two tenths of bugger all.