the differing trench and fence design – from linings of British raw-cut posts to German fully planked-up and wired for electricity to Russian woven twigs holding back frozen earth – is one of my favorite things about Battlefield One and I can tell people put work into it
I’d enjoyed Battlefield 4 and find it really interesting how AAA games are exploring history these days, so of course I got the early-release version of Battlefield One, the first of the big military FPS franchises (Battlefield, Call of Duty, I guess Medal of Honor’s defunct now) to be set in WWI.
As gameplay, solid - took me a second to get used to the changes in weapons, vehicles, and scoring, but that all makes sense either for flavor or balance improvements, which I appreciate.
As for the theming, heard a lot of people thinking the tone would be tricky to nail but I think they got it decent. They’ve got the same ominous-to-elegaic orchestration as Valiant Hearts, so I guess bog-standard there. The breadth of the visual design is great, and really gives a sense of the scope of the war. Empires field troops from all their colonies so character models are diverse and varied, when you spawn as an American sometimes you’ll find yourself giving orders in a Harlem bass and sometimes with an Irish lilt.
The maps likewise, ranging from the Belgian trenches to Italian mountains to the Sinai Desert. Fields, forests, villages, proud brick towns - and cratered moonscapes and rubble-grey ruins, with several maps set along a “front” so you experience the passage from bucolic to hellscape. It’s that most of all that I think “gets” the vibe of WWI: a recognizably modern world - distinguished if at all by a higher degree of pastoral charm - that abruptly turned into a steampunk apocalypse.
And it’s not just the aesthetics, the gameplay also “feels” more WWI-ish. It’s more infantry focused for one, which is not to say vehicles are weak - if anything, foot soldiers feel even more weak and vulnerable by comparison to these early tanks and warplanes, but limitations in speed and maneuverability limit their utility solo in favor of support roles.
Poison gas grenades and bombs make an appearance - deadly but trivially defeated by gas maks that limit situational awareness and take hands and time to equip, and smoke grenades can lay an even thicker and larger screen than I remember. The Battlefield franchise always boasted of its terrain deformability and with a heightened role for indirect fire artillery that makes a big difference for ground cover, especially in open areas.
Which is to say, I’ve already spent quite a bit of time cowering in an impact crater with my gas mask on, either keeping my head down for fear of snipers or anxiously scanning for the forms of flame troopers emerging from the smoke.
The single-player campaign… someone must care about that. I played the intro and two segments, and I don’t know what other notes you’d hit in a WWI story, but it’s kind of grim. You’ve got “determination rewarded with death”, “fraternity rewarded with death”, and “the interplay of naivete and cynicism, resolved with death”.
Also as far as I can tell, airplanes, M.A.S. boats, the Alpine and Adriatic campaigns and no Gabriele d’Annunzio. BOOOO. Maybe in something I haven’t played yet or in an expansion - campaign seems modular. Also compared to BF4 (which I got on discount with all expansion packs, probably to build hype for this) the base unmodified game seems awful limited in weapons and modes (there’s a new “release the pigeon” one that’s fun though), but I guess that’s the business model.