Basically a lot of potential to get at least some stuff wrong. That’s a bit sad, obviously, but true nonetheless!Īnyways, if your eyes haven’t glazed over already, that’s a fairly long winded way of saying that Battlefield 1 had to walk a fair few lines – and really rather adeptly – for some people to consider it a success, and yet another set of lines for others to buy into what it was offering. Whilst I appreciate most people don’t leap into an FPS environment for nuanced, historically accurate treatise on, say, the legitimacy of conflict, or the abuse of power within the context of anachronistic and outdated systems, it was still a concern for me, and it would’ve been hard to enjoy the game if I was constantly rolling my eyes, or screaming at my telly because the game had fundamentally misrepresented certain aspects of events. Likewise, as most First Person Shooters seem Hell bent on disappearing into the distant future (in order to give players an interesting(/increasingly daft) arsenal of futuristic weapons and gizmos), Dice’s decision to leap backwards a century – to a time when even electricity was relatively novel – seemed somewhat anathema, and possibly even quite risky.įinally, on a slightly more personal note, as a former student of Politics and International Relations (and a fairly left wing one at that) I could happily bang on for days about WW1, about the injustice and absurdity of it all, so I was genuinely a bit worried that Battlefield 1 – were it to adopt an unthinkingly gung-ho, jingoistic approach – might just end up pissing me right off. On the one hand, The Great War provides ample Narrative opportunity (see the really rather excellent Valiant Hearts, for example), but on the other, given the conflict was most famously characterised by Trench Warfare, it seemed to many that this facet might prove difficult to reconcile with the large, sprawling theatres of war that have become the trademark of the Battlefield series.
Back when it was revealed that the next installment of EA/Dice’s ever-popular shooter series would actually be set in the First World War, a few people – myself included – found themselves somewhere between intrigued and sceptical.