Hands On With Battlefield 1’s Destructive Historical Warfare

Battlefield 1 is a much faster paced game than you might expect. When it comes to studying World War I, the image most commonly planted in the heads of your average secondary school kid is one of bitter, gruelling trench warfare, of the interminable, maddening, Black Adder-esque waiting for the whistle to blow and for thousands of soldiers to climb up rickety ladders and charge into a harrowing hail of machine gun fire.

The trench warfare of the Western Front was, of course, a major part of World War I, but even in this theatre, Battlefield 1 interprets the war in a more fluid and dynamic fashion. Nevertheless, that pace is still quite surprising, but it shouldn’t be. This still feels very, very much like a Battlefield game – it’s just that the scope of the warfare, the weapons you run around with, and the vehicles you drive all call back to the war of a century ago.

Of course, as soon as you step into a 64 player game of Conquest – Battlefield’s go-to game mode – any notion of lines of battle and coherent assaults of enemy trenches goes out of the window. It’s chaos, as you and your team try to take control of the objective points dotted across the map.

The St. Quentin Scar map takes a battle from the very beginning of World War I, that was part of the Retreat from Mons in August of 1914, and centres around the village of Travecy. It’s a map that starts off almost idyllic, but this game and the latest iteration of the Frostbite engine leads to unparalleled destruction. It’s not long before buildings have been levelled, the ground has been pockmarked with craters, and much of the greenery has been turned to mud. On top of this, a new weather system will mean that it could be raining early in the battle, before the fog rolls in and completely changes the atmosphere and tone of the battle.

The showstopping moment, of course, comes as a huge airship slowly flies over the battlefield, able to drop bombs from up on high. It’s there for the losing team to use to try and turn the tide of battle – it’s not quite clear what the trigger point is, outside of this – with space for several others to use heavy machine guns to shoot down incoming airplanes and rain bullets down from above. Naturally, it’s up to the winning team to try and maintain their ascendancy, shooting it down with planes or with AA emplacements, until it comes crashing down to ground in a spectacular and devastating ball of fire.

Interestingly, there’s a new game mode called Operations, with one side on the attack, while the other will try to stand their ground and push them back. What’s interesting here is that it will tie together several battles, so as the attackers win, the defenders fall back to the next map and try to stem the tide there.

Coming from Battlefield 4, you’ll find four classes that will, at least, feel fairly familiar. You have one to take out enemy vehicles and engage at close range, one to revive teammates, albeit with a magical syringe instead of defibrillators, another to lay down fire and resupply teammates, and finally a sniper with a bolt action rifle. They’re four pillars to the Battlefield series that don’t need to be altered all that much, except for with some creative thinking about how they work in a historical setting such as this.

Similarly, you have the squad-based combat, with up to five players in a squad and the ability for the squad leader to issue orders. Playing on your own and without coordinating with teammates, Battlefield 1 can still be a daunting and lonely feeling game, as the map stretches off into the distance, but this is a series that has always engendered cooperation and coordination. Being able to spawn on your squad mates remains the fastest and most effective way of getting back into the fight.

However, a lot of that changes when you spawn into a tank or a plane. You’re no longer some grunt who’s decided to fly stick for a few minutes, but a dedicated pilot class or tank commander class, and you take on that role. Thematically, it works, with the “tanker” having the tools to hop out and fix up his own vehicle, instead of having to rely on engineers, but it also works from a gameplay perspective, to stop snipers simply using a biplane to quickly get to their favourite sniping spot, as so often happened in the last few Battlefield games.

In many ways, that makes this a very logical step forward for the Battlefield series. The gameplay is familiar, within this very grounded and realistic setting, but I’m curious to see what more DICE can do, both in terms of exploring different locations and theatres of war, but also in trying to represent the grim reality of what was an appallingly brutal war. This kind of gravity is nigh on impossible to represent in the multiplayer side of things, but I have hopes for the single player.