New Battlefield game is Battlefield 1 (WW1)

I got my beta invite code today, so check your e-mail if you signed up for the early beta. I think there will be an open beta in a few days for people who didn’t sign up.

Played both Conquest and Rush tonight. Only one map, but had a blast.

I only got to play about 20 minutes of the beta so far but it is looking very promising. The best bit so far is how they are using the setting to influence the gameplay to make it different to the current crop of modern/near future shooters.

For example I jump on a field gun intending to blast a nearby building. First my view is restricted by the armoured shield then the gun is ponderous and slow to slew to the left. Having finally got the gun on target I fire off a shell which makes a satisfyingly large hole in the building. But there are still guys in there so I click again and nope can’t just fire again you have to reload. Which leads to an animation of you opening the breach grabbing a shell ramming it home and closing the breach. Now I’m ready to fire again and the guys I wanted to waste have moved on.

For me this is a good compromise between realism, in reality a gun like that would need a crew of at least three, and gameplay. This makes it feel slower than other current FPS games but with enough speed to keep the twitch shooter crowd engaged.

And I spent a few frantic seconds unable to use my scope until I realised that I was still wearing my gasmask, a little detail that adds just a bit more depth to the gameplay.

Is this the slower paced, bolt-action heavy WW1 game I wanted, no. But it is a WW1 themed game with enough run and gun full auto action that will keep the player base engaged at least until the next Battlefield release.

I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen so far - still a bit of work to be done and some tweaks to be made (planes are really hard to control and fly too quickly, for a start) but there’s an impressive selection of guns in there, even if they’ve taken liberties with them (as far as I know, the telescopic sight in the game for the SMLE rifle either never existed or if it did, it was a right at the very end of the way prototype; Lewis Guns are far too heavy IRL to use as portable LMGs, that sort of thing).

Also, enemies are quite hard to see - your guys have icons above their heads; pretty much the first you see of enemies is when they seem to appear out of nowhere and start shooting. It would help if the red “enemy” icon was visible at a longer range, I think.

The icon is present if they are “sighted” by your teammates.

Alas the servers have been attacked and are currently down.

Oh man…I suck at this game.

I’ll be definitely picking it up, though.

That looks more like Fallout than WW1 but either way it’s getting bought.

Having been enjoying BF4, we’re giving this one a try over the weekend. It seems a little more taxing on our 5-yr-old computer, but it’s managing.

We’re enjoying it. It’s a different play style than BF4 for sure. I won’t say one is better than the other. But we’re enjoying it.

I haven’t figured out how to bayonet charge. I get all lined up for it, hit F, but I end up just whipping around the beatin’ stick.

Looks like we’ve got an i5-2300 and a GTX760-DC2. I think it’s GPU-limited, but I’m not sure what we can upgrade to without the CPU bottlenecking. Anyone know?

How much a CPU or GPU will bottleneck is really game dependent. Something like Planetside 2 is very frequently CPU bound, but other games might only use 30% of the CPU available to them regularly. You can check the particulars by downloading something like MSI Afterburner and using their overlay to show CPU and GPU usage percentages - whichever one is near 100% while the other is low is the thing bottlenecking.

Different settings also increase the GPU or CPU load. Generally, even if your CPU is your weaker part, a GPU will let you turn up settings like resolution, AA, most post processing effects, SSAO, etc. because those are handled almost entirely on the GPU side of things.

A 2300 isn’t great but it’s not that bad. I suspect you would be able to max every settings (except shadows which are often cpu-dependent) in most games with a significant frame rate increase, but it won’t peak quite as highly as if you had a beefier CPU.

In any case, a GPU is going to be entirely usable in any new system - if you decide to upgrade the rest of your system in the future, you just stick your GPU into the new one, it’s like buying part of the new computer ahead of time and reaping the benefits in the meantime.

So anyway, I actually really like the game. I was concerned they were just going to make it a reskin of a modern warfare game and just use submachine guns and light machine guns in place of assault rifles, but they didn’t. The weapons have a significantly different balance than BF2/3/4 and that’s a good thing.

Submachine guns are only effective very close, as they should be. LMGs have a built-in inaccuracy that makes them useful for firing into groups, or firing them at individuals with a lot of suppression but relatively slow time to kill which forces people into cover but gives them time to do it. The medic semi-auto is versatile but relatively weak and takes a while to reload. I haven’t unlocked all the weapons, but I kind of wish they had non-sniper bolt action rifles for regular infantry. The sniper rifles are powerful, the only one shot kills in the game with headshots, but with a full ballistic model it’s not easy to pull off the kills.

The end result of this is that the time to kill in Battlefield 3/4, easily the worst part of the game, is significantly higher simply because not every weapon is a fast-firing low-recoil laser death machine like modern shooter assault rifles are modelled as. I’m really, really hoping that the full game doesn’t unlock guns that are just good at everything, because having every weapon have their niche and having people being able to live long enough to take cover or return fire is a lot more engaging than just constantly dying instantly.

The lack of modern warfare equals the lack of lock on weapons, which are just pure poison to gameplay and I have no idea why games still include it. It’s so much more fun to hop into an AA gun and shoot down a plane or fire tank shells at it and making the perfect shot than pulling out a weapon and waiting for “beep beeeep beeeeeeeeeep” and hoping the other guy has his flares cooldown down.

So right there, the game massively improves on the two worst parts of BF2/3/4.

The game strikes the right balance of being a little goofy (like bouncing around on the silly proto-jeeps) in the game and more serious. I’ve only seen one map but the aesthetics are really great - old timey uniforms, even the capes look awesome. The game looks amazing as per usual with the Battlefield/front series. The weather effects on the map are great and really change the battle - from a little dust being kicked up to full blown sandstorm - I hope they have something like that on all their maps.

I like the vehicles for the most part. I really love multi-crewing vehicles with friends so stuff like the goetha bomber and the landship where everyone can contribute meaningfully to the vehicle’s operation are really fun. Tanks are probably too good now, but I suspect that’s because people haven’t unlocked the array of anti-tank weapons that will be available to them. The air game is satisfying - I like the bomber options - but the fighter aircraft is too good at killing other aircraft quickly. I think the rocket option is probably a mistake. Makes it harder for your rear gunner to be useful when the fighter can kill you so fast.

The relaxed TTK and weapons with real limitations make the gameplay so much more compelling. You feel like you had a chance to save yourself most of the time when you died, not that you just keep instantly dying over and over like BF3/4 could be sometimes. As such this seems to me like the most fun BF game since bf1942, which is my favorite in the series. I’m really digging it.

And yet, the Battlefield pros are still pros and I’m still dying like it’s my job. Change the scenery and some of the mechanics and it’s still the same Battlefield it always was.

I was hoping it would slow down considerably. You know, like the totally immobile war it’s based in. Nope. Still fast, still detailed to the point where simply finding an enemy is difficult.

I’m going to try to get better, but right now I’m looking at 1-15 records every game and that is no fun at all. I simply don’t stand a chance.

To be fair it’s the Beta, so most of the people downloading it are the BF “pros”. Once the game is released and then the holidays come you will notice a significant drop.

I just played a round of rush where the attacking team thought they could take the points by all going sniper. So at least some things haven’t changed.