#639: Battlefield 1
No, not Codename Eagle
Initial release: October 21, 2016
Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, XBox One
Developer: DICE
I admit it: I’m that bitch who plays Call of Duty games for the story. They’re not usually all that epic, sure — but who cares? I’m here for jingoism (and weird psychological thriller shit if Treyarch is doing it) and a little bit of tacticool manshooting. Battlefield’s a little different, though — while some of the titles in the long-running franchise have story campaigns, the focus has never really been on those campaigns, which are often even shorter than Call of Duty if you can believe that. Where Call of Duty started with a rather cinematic singleplayer campaign alongside a multiplayer that — let’s be honest — didn’t really take off until Modern Warfare, Battlefield started with Battlefield 1942, a multiplayer-only World War II shooter that had a lot to offer over your Calls of Duties and your Days of Defeats.
Actually, that’s not completely true. It really started with Codename Eagle, a now-obscure World War I alt-history shooter from 1999. The game itself centered around some shenanigans with the Russian Empire, but the big draw was the multiplayer, which despite — or perhaps because of — some really crazy Eurojank was surprisingly innovative, taking the basic deathmatch/CTF formula and throwing in vehicles and huge maps. While the game itself wasn’t super successful — moving only about 20,000 units, which paled in comparison to the nearly 720,000 copies of Roller Coaster Tycoon sold the same year — it was enough of a sleeper hit to get Stockholm-based Refraction Games bought out by DICE the following year, in so doing inheriting the in-development Battlefield 1942. And the rest, as they say, is history… and with the World War I-themed Battlefield 1, we’ve come sort of full-circle.
Battlefield hasn’t fundamentally changed from its 1942 days. The basic premise is still the same: big maps, big vehicles, big battles, big fun. Sure, there’s a lot of dumb shit now like battle passes and lootboxes and whatnot but that’s happened to everybody, an unfortunate sign of the state of AAA gaming; at its core, Battlefield 1 is still recognizably Battlefield, at least on the multiplayer front.
Battlefield 1 isn’t the first in the series to feature a single-player campaign, of course. Battlefield 2 all the way back in 2004 had one. The series had moved (rather quickly) into the modern-warfare space (beating Call of Duty by about 3 years) and its storylines mostly seemed to all share a universe (minus maybe a couple outliers.) Battlefield 1 winds back the clock to World War 1, and while there are no direct connections to the modern-day storylines beyond a character with the same last name, it also doesn’t really matter, because the framing of the story is very similar to the early Call of Duty titles: that of a series of disparate war stories with different main characters, all taking place in various battlezones around the world. The campaign opens with “Storm of Steel,” a single-chapter intro that serves as a framing device of sorts as you jump around from various troopers in the Harlem Hellfighters (a real all-black regiment) fighting off a German attack during the Meuse–Argonne offensive, one of the last big pushes before the end of the war. You aren’t expected to survive, and so every time you die, you jump to the next guy. (The fact that they chose to use this mechanic during a segment where you play a unit staffed entirely with people of color is one of those things that commenting on is best left to smarter people than me.) The narrator, meanwhile, survives, and he has a lot to say on the nature of war and the pointlessness of it all, and the human will to survive. Afterwards, five more stories open up, and they feature, in order: an experienced tank crew fighting alone behind enemy lines in late 1918; a hotshot American volunteer pilot who bullshits his way onto a plane and takes part in the air war over Europe; an Italian shock trooper fighting in the Alps and hoping to find his twin brother; a cynical Australian veteran trying to protect an idealistic young hero-worshipper during the rout at Gallipoli; and a Bedouin rebel working alongside T. E. Lawrence himself to secure Arab independence from the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
While we’re not given a lot of time with these characters, some of them are more interesting than others — aside from the tank crew having splendid chemistry with each other, I also particularly liked Blackburn, the American pilot, who proves to be a deliberately unreliable narrator; I also quite enjoyed the story of Zaya, the Bedouin rebel, whose arch-enemy, at least for a little while, is a sinister senior officer of the Ottoman Empire, dressed in black with a shaved head and who takes a particular delight in describing, in detail, what he — and the Empire — intends to do to hurt the rebels and Zaya personally. A creepy, strutting little proto-fascist bastard, he’s the kind of guy you love to hate, and I would have liked to have seen a fuller story between him and Zaya.
Gameplay-wise the campaign feels a bit like the multiplayer in microcosm — each story has a different focus, giving you the chance to experience different aspects of what you can do in the multiplayer, from driving tanks to flying planes to sneaking behind enemy lines and so on. Many of the missions are fairly open-ended, especially the stealth-based ones, and while it’s far from an immersive sim I can’t help but feel like DICE took a few cues from the classics in terms of mission design.
I enjoyed my time with Battlefield 1. It’s actually kind of unique, really — the World War I setting is deeply underutilized outside of really grognardy strategy games and silly alt-history stuff like Iron Storm; while its extensive use of lightweight, personal submachine guns is a little anachronistic for some of the campaigns set earlier in the war, that’s a detail only a nerd like me would care about (for the record, submachine guns didn’t really become a thing until 1918 and even then they were still in their infancy.) It also really proves the lie of the idea that a World War 1 game wouldn’t sell because trench warfare is supposed to be boring in a video game context, doesn’t it?
While the 100th anniversary of the war has come and gone, I’m hoping that with the WWI-themed entertainment that it generated — not just Battlefield 1, but also the film 1917, and quite a few horror-themed games and movies, among other things — we’ll see this war, this brutal, pointless, destructive war that was all for nothing, finally take its place in the public consciousness the way its sequel did.
In the meantime, I’ll see you on the Battlefield.
