I heard rumors that the next BF game would be WW1 but I thought it was a joke since it’s such a weird era to address with a blockbuster multiplayer fps game, but there it is.
And I’m actually a lot more excited about it than I thought I would be. Obviously it’s not going to be a history lesson. It’s going to be an action mishmash of ww1 concepts. Most of the fights will probably involve aircraft and slow tanks and poison gas and be fairly fast paced.
But I’m excited about it for a few reasons:
- Lack of lock-on weapons. Lock-on weapons are a complete bane to gaming and I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t feel that way. The whole point of competing against other players is that you aim/move/strategize/coordinate better than the other guy Lock on weapons are just “lol I pulled out this weapon for 5 seconds and ate some doritos, now someone is gonna die” - they’re totally against what makes a game fun and interesting.
The air game in the BF3/4 games is really stupid because of the prevalence of all the lock-on weapons. You were either flying high in a jet, traversing the map in 10 seconds to avoid everyone, which was not terribly compelling, or you were in a helicopter hiding behind a hill somewhere because when you popped out 19 people would look in your direction for 3 seconds with lock on weapons and you were dead. They didn’t even need to carry anti-aircraft weapons specifically, they put on so many devices that could lock onto stuff, and weapons that could target any lock-on (javelin, even guided tank shells) that uninstant, unskilled death came from everywhere.
Which leads to…
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A return of an interesting air game. Now people actually have to, you know, move and aim at each other and such. A return of dogfights in slow moving WW1 aircraft. Strafing runs on infantry, maybe primitive bombing runs with small bombs. Shooting down enemy aircraft by actually aiming at them with an anti-aircraft gun or heavy machine gun, not just waiting until you hear beep beep beeeeeeeeep and now they die. An actual organic air game in which air and ground interact in interesting ways. Very slow aircraft which make for suitable dogfights on the scale of something like a BF map.
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Different weapons than the standard FPS games we’ve had for a long time. Modern games basically have magic missile launchers as their guns - they get to fire 900 rounds per minute with almost no recoil and kill everyone instantly with a 1 second reload. They’re incredibly samey, too powerful, and require little skill to use. A WW1 setting would allow a return to interesting gunplay. Now they make fuck this up - maybe they’ll take the few manportable automatic weapons in WW1 like the BAR and just make them the equivalent of modern assault rifles, which would be a waste.
But if they do it right, we could have an interesting mix of primarily bolt action rifles, mounted machine guns with no mobility, lighter machine guns with limited mobility, shotguns for trench fighting, pistols, and…
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Flamethrowers. These get their own category because they’re so awesome. The Frostbite engine is the best engine out there currently and I bet they could model an actual sticky liquid flamethrowers instead of just the TF2 pyro style cone of damage flamethrowers. Maybe even have fire affect the environment and spread. This could add all sorts of chaos to the battlefield, including the guy wielding it taking a round in the tank and exploding amongst his allies. They have a chance to make them incredible.
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Naval battles. Not since BF1942 have there been real naval battles, where players man the ships and shoot at other ships. Ship to ship fighting, and ship to shore bombardment would add an exciting and fun element that we haven’t seen in a long time.
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Artillery. Artillery would have to play a big role in a WW1 game. The top-notch destructibility the Frostbite engine allows would make artillery barrages that could not only terrify and kill, but change the landscape of the battlefield itself. It would be fantastic if we could get a return to the player controlled artillery of BF1942, with a gunner and spotter system, but at the very least we should be able to get an artillery system like Red Orchestra where someone could call it in. Actual terrifying artillery barrages are something you rarely see in video games.
They also show poison gas attacks in the trailer. Those would be interesting as they add an element of area denial, but it’d be interesting too if they model gas masks. You could put it on for reduced vision and mobility and fight inside the obscuring, deadly gas.
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Early tanks. These would definitely provide something unusual, very slow moving clunky tanks. I’m not sure this is something to get excited over, but it would certainly be something different. I’m not sure what other sort of vehicles they could have. The trailer shows Zeppelins but I’m not sure they could make much in the way of compelling gameplay with that.
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Horse cavalry? Shown in the trailer. I would totally run around the battlefield on horse hacking at people with a cavalry sword if they had bolt action rifles. Sounds more novel than useful, but it’d be a fun inclusion.
I’m glad they decided to do something bold. I would’ve preferred another WW2 game - BF1942 is still the best in the series and obviously all the new technology since it was made 15 years ago could improve on it. WW2 is a more interesting genre because it had a much more interesting level of technology and different elements of battle than WW1. But barring that, I’m glad they didn’t just go the generic route and do another modern shooter, or follow Call of Duty into near future gadgetry. WW1 is a totally underserved niche.
I don’t know which studio is working on it. DICE LA turned a very poor BF4 launch into what is currently the best modern warfare game on the market. Star Wars Battlefront was a very polished and bug-free release, and just lacked content. I’m not sure which we’re looking at here.
The previous battlefield games have been made for PC first and then dumbed down for consoles (instead of just starting dumbed down to the level of the lowest common denominator and giving that to all platforms), so I’m pretty hopeful for this. There’s a lot of potential to dumb down a WW1 game too much and strip from it what makes it different from modern era shooters. And I hope they make a new game mode that’s more focused on assault/defense than the standard battlefield conquest style maps, since it fits the genre better. I know the game isn’t going to be Red Orchestra for WW1, but I hope they really try to make something different here, and not just a reskinned modern warfare game.
