#battlfield 1

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time with DICE’s Battlefield 1, more time than I usually would with a game like this. I will admit, when I play a game that I really get into, I tend to play it to death. I can’t even begin to count how many hours/days I’ve played The Orange Box and more recently, Doom 2016 (both excellent games). In Mass Effect 2 alone I’ve had 17 playthroughs, more than Mass Effect 1 and 3 combined. No small feat considering a basic playthrough without DLC takes around 30 hours. 

Have I played Battlefield 1 that much? No, not in the least, but it has been focused upon because I won’t be able to play it as much in the coming months. 

Here’s the rub: I’m away from home at college, where my internet access is unrestricted for the most part. At my house, I have a datacap, which any online play burns up pretty damn quickly. I live in the middle of a forest off the main road on a private drive. I have a wifi-hub, that’s all I can get without paying thousands of dollars for a cable hookup or satellite internet (which is spotty at best). 

So, if I’m going to play the multiplayer for Battlefield 1, I have to do it when I’m away. Or at least until I get absolutely sick of it, which so far hasn’t happened. Battlefield 1 is a good game. But not a flawless one. 

The big draw for me was the setting: Battlefield 1, as the name poorly implies, takes place during World War I (honestly if it used a roman numeral instead of the stupid number this title wouldn’t seem confusing), a setting that has been utilized in videogames, but the market hasn’t been oversaturated with. World War II videogames used to be king until around 2007 when Call of Duty started it’s Modern Warfare franchise. So in a way, it’s a return to a sort of historically based first person shooter with a setting that makes it more unique than its predecessors. To be honest, I’ve been longing for a classic WWII shooter, and while this isn’t exactly that. it’s something a little more interesting than that. 

However, it isn’t all that historic. The conflict and battles portrayed therein are true events, but the gameplay is a mixture of exotic and rare experimental weapons put in the hands of footsoldiers. Really, it’s no different than most FPSs around today, with soldiers charging with automatic weapons and bolt-action rifles are few and far between. Whatever, I can live with that. 

The second biggest draw for me was the fact that Battlefield 1 had a campaign attached to it. Most big multiplayer games include campaigns as either an afterthought or just ditch it and are multiplayer only. Such games do not interest me, because, like I said, I can’t always play the multiplayer portions and if I’m gonna play a campaign, I want it to be fun and interesting, not tacked on for the hell of it. And after hearing the campaign didn’t suck, I thought, why not, and bought the game. 

Does the campaign not suck? Well... sort of yeah.

You see, Battlefield has been at war with Call of Duty (how funny that is) and they’re basically fighting over who can be the top dog of the multiplayer shooter genre. The multiplayer is always polished to a mirror sheen but the campaigns- which used to be the main draw- have suffered. Battlefield didn’t even do campaign focused games until it released Bad Company and its sequel, both of which were unique because they were a lot more tongue in cheek about it. The characters were goofy and memorable and that made them fun. It wasn’t until Battlefield 3 (which came before Battlefield 1, see how stupid the name is?) that they decided to ramp up their competition with Call of Duty and essentially made a really stupid and boring campaign with tight multiplayer while Call of Duty made stupid but fun campaign with tight multiplayer. George Weidman of Super Bunnyhop made a really nice video describing why the campaign failed.

So now, they actually made a fun campaign, but it suffers from being really formulaic and despite its variety, kind of comes across as bland. There are six campaigns (more like five) that all focus on different theaters and armies during the war, from the trenches, to tanks, mountain combat, desert warfare, planes trains and automobiles. The campaigns are terribly short, however. Fun, but short. All in all, the campaign mode can be completed in about five hours if you put your nose to the grindstone and charge through it. The first two campaigns, which are vehicle focused, are the most conventionally fun. The last three are more conventional- charge that hill, take that outpost. They’re fun, but they’re short and it’s hard to really care when you’re only in their boots for 45 minutes. It also doesn’t help that these characters are underdeveloped compared to the first two protagonists- the tank driver Edwards and pilot Blackburn.

Edwards is a former chauffeur turned tank driver, still wearing his white driving gloves in the hell of the Western Front, a battlefield of mud and blood. There’s not much else to go off of, but it’s those little touches that really make the character seem somewhat believable. It also helps that his arc is basically the same one of Logan Lerman’s character in Fury, a fresh faced kid crammed into a deathtrap tank in the last days of the war who fights for his brothers in arms. 

Blackburn is a little more complex. He’s a self described pilot and gambler who lies his way into the British Royal Air Corps after stealing an officer’s identity. As he says, he’s “not a very honest person.” He takes part in a raid on a German ammo dump, gets shot down and is forced to sneak across No Man’s Land carrying his wounded gunner. He’s arrested as soon as he makes it to the British trench line and just before he’s about to be shipped out for stealing a plane, London is attacked in a bombing raid. He gets in a plane and has his shot at redemption by taking out the bombers and the zeppelins. But here’s the thing, this is all bullshit. At the very end, it’s hinted at that he did cross No Man’s Land, but he killed his wounded gunner (as he would have been dead weight) and he managed to escape trial during the chaos of a bombing raid on London. Admittedly, taking down a zeppelin single handed is far fetched, but that’s the point. As a viewer of the story, I was bamboozled and just went along for the ride. A very fun ride. 

The other characters don’t really stand out, with the exception of Zara, but that’s mostly circumstance. She’s a female bedouin fighting alongside Lawrence of Arabia. That’s cool and all, but I can’t really say anything else about her. It’s kind of clear that DICE wanted to at the very least insinuate that she might have been the real Lawrence, but realized there would be backlash and tacked on Lawrence himself without changing anything else really. It also doesn’t help that her campaign is stealth based, which is fine and makes sense, but it’s made boring since there was an abundance of stealth missions earlier in the game. Her first mission is also incredibly dull: take out this squad of ten Ottomans. They want you to do it silently, but there is a light machine gun on the map that can be used to blow them all away very quickly. Ten soldiers are basically pipsqueaks by the time people get to this mission so it can be finished in five minutes by anybody who’s even remotely competent.

Did DICE deliver with Battlefield 1? Yes. Could it have been better? Yes. Is it worth playing? I’d say so. In a world dominated by modern settings and future war, playing in the past is refreshing, even if it’s a flawed game. But with Battlefield 1, it’s kind of troubling that that’s the only element that makes it stand out. At the end of the day, though, all that counts is how fun it is to play.

War is Hell #youtubegaming #livestream