When Battlefield 1 was announced back in May, its cinematic reveal trailer coming to a thumping, distorted remix of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army, there was understandable concern that this game was going to take the setting in vain and not give it the respect it demands. EA seemed to have gotten the message, and since then, the game’s single player in particular vindicated the decision to adopt WWI as a setting with some emotionally charged stories and incredibly powerful moments that give the war its due.
Battlefield’s Twitter account didn’t get the memo, posting a tweet depicting soldiers being burned alive by a flamethrower, while saying “Weekend goals,” and having the hashtag #justWWIthings. The tweet has now been removed.
Or how about this one where you’re challenged to survive longer than an RFC combat pilot?
The average lifetime of an RFC combat pilot is 17 days. Time to see how you hold up. #GoMakeHistory pic.twitter.com/IJBZNuQbMK
— Battlefield (@Battlefield) 29 October 2016
I get it, it’s a game. There’s also a divide between being able to tell those stories in single player and having something that’s fun, engaging and action-packed in multiplayer, but trivialising the horrors of this war into a hashtag for a dumb marketing campaign throws all of that out of the window. It’s exactly what people feared would happen when the game was announced. It’s a shame, because again, the single player handles the difficult subject matter incredibly well.
Sensibly, Battlefield’s tweets with that hashtag have been deleted since I started writing this post, but not before people could start correcting EAÂ on their tone-deaf marketing.
Update: EA have now apologised.
We apologize for any offense taken to content posted earlier. It was not at all our intent to show any lack of respect to the WW1 era.
— Battlefield V (@Battlefield) October 31, 2016
Tuffcub
ouch
The Lone Steven
EA, you may have been better off just going with just going with the WW1 setting and doing their own thing instead of pretending to be respectful when well, the gameplay kinda contradicts it. FPSes are not really the genre to handle that due to the nature of gameplay. Doubt anyone would mind if they just did it as a WW1 themed one only. I mean, WWII shooters didn’t cause any issues and most were just using the setting only.
RFC2007
Internet in ‘people offended’ shocker. Fuss about nothing really.
ron_mcphatty
Silly bastards, why risk the fury in the first place? I think it’s insensitive and unnecessary.
Andrewww
I kept quiet about this game so far. I may be a different generation. But as much as I enjoyed some shooters in the past (e.g. Killzone, etc.), I mostly don’t get them in real-world settings just for that reason. Maybe I cannot switch that part of my brain off as others can do.
Starman
That’s pretty bad timing. It would be easy to promote the game in a more respectful manner so those tweets are particularly daft.
hazelam
i want off this fucking planet, is there a sign up for musk’s mars colonies yet?
apparently, the fact the game doesn’t exclusively feature white dudes means, according to the more repugnant sections of the gamer “community”, that it’s “blackwashing”.
yeah, one fps out of about a fucking million features a black guy on the cover and it’s a fucking sjw conspiracy.