Battlefield 1

DUH DUH DUH DUN DAH DAH!

The king of multiplayer shooters is back. And instead jumping even further to the future (2143? Perhaps down the line? My personal favorite) they took a step back and instead of “rebooting” WWII genre, they went one step further, WWI.

I’ll be completely honest, when the rumors back when started that the next Battlefield game was going to take place in WWI, I instantly thought “that can’t be” because to the modern gamer, WWI was slow, stressful, and a lot of sitting around waiting for a whistle to jump over the top of a trench just to get killed. So I figured, because a year or so before this, they asked the community “Why did you like Bad Company 2?” so I figured like BC2’s starting campaign in WWII, this new game’s story would start out in WWI and lead to something modern. I was honestly thinking perhaps Bad Company 3 but was obviously surprised when the rumors turned out to be true.

Quick matching makes finding a game so much easier instead of having to search for servers manually. That and the fact that you get to setup and keep your squads before finding a server.

I honestly thought they couldn’t make WWI, from a game play standpoint only not historically/ethically/etc., fun. Because all I could think of was the games Verdun and Red Orchestra. Verdun the more or less realistic version of WWI and Red Orchestra the more or less realistic version of combat in general. Neither one of those games (Unmodded of course) are entirely run around shooting like crazy, jumping over walls, tank/plane map dominance, etc. etc. From my personal experience with Red Orchestra (1 and 2) it’s a very slow, stressful, panicky, interspersed with pure moments of frantic sprinting across a street or running from one tree to another trying to find the enemy only to be shot at by someone from you don’t know where or being burned to death by someone who’s just spamming the flamethrower in front of you and killing all his/her friends in the process.

Behemoths can change the battle if they have the right crew.

Don’t get me wrong, the above games are fun in there own right and I do like them, it’s just those games are just that, there game play is intentionally doing that for the sake of being the game it is for all the above reasons. Battlefield however, since the very first (1942) has always been about teamwork, those “Rambo” moments of saving your team/friends, and of course the running, gunning, and doing something every 3 seconds. While Verdun and Red Orchestra are slow and meticulous, Battlefield, especially there most recent games, are all about running and gunning. So the only thing I could think of with Battlefield 1 was that they would have to do something to keep there signature game play working. Because if they kept the Verdun/Red Orchestra type of game play, people would by it yes but not enough for EA to make money off of of course.

Well if you haven’t guessed by now, that’s exactly what they did. They sacrificed the slow and painful realistic game play and kept the running, gunning style they’ve been known for, except they took away your assault rifle, handed you a Winchester and a horse, and said “Have fun.”
Now they give you a sub machine gun, a bundle of grenades, a hatchet, and a 1911 and say “go blow up that tank.” Related note: To say that tanks are overpowered in this game is an understatement but to say you feel like a million bucks when you are able to finally blow it up, that is also an understatement.

Buttercup is my horse. There are many like it but this one is mine.

The classic game play of Battlefield is still here, the “Battlefeels” is still there, both the positive and negative “feels.” Positive being “Holy crap I shot down a plane with a tank” and the negative being “As I sniper I ran away from tank and got blown up because I wasn’t an anti-tank.”

New spawn screen, can’t see what you’re spawning into.

Again, the tanks are very powerful now, in the realm of “they just showed up on the battlefield and we have to figure out how to deal with them.” There are many ways to hurt a vehicle, sniper K rounds, regular grenades (yay BF1942 grenades again) and of course anti-vehicle weapons like AT rifles and bundle grenades. But unlike the ‘olden days’ of battlefield where one engineer could take down a tank (Thinking of BF3/4), it’s fairly hard to take down a tank single handed. If the tanker is smart, he/she will blow you up before they manage to disable you and just be on there merry way, especially since now they can self repair. You’re team needs to work together in order to take down one tank otherwise that tank will own your team. They can’t repair when they take any kind of damage so snipers can annoy them with K bullets and give the AT people time to set up and hit the tank.
Planes on the other hand, in the right hands, are either flying cardboard boxes filled with soon-to-be-dead crew members, or a flying death machine that no one seems to be able to take care of short of ramming them out of the sky. But overall planes are very fragile as they can be damaged by every gun in the game, yes your main gun will damage them. The added bonus is if you hit there wings they will lose a lot of maneuverability so the added icing on the cake is if you damage a wing when that plane is diving on something, more than likely they won’t be able to pull up out of it and just crash.
And before you ask, kamikaze is no longer a very good tactic anymore. Since said planes are indeed made of wood and only go so fast, crashing into a tank won’t kill them. Yes it will kill you and yes it will hurt the tank but unless that tank is already near death, it’ll just shrug off your attempt at “WITNESS ME!”

Planes are very fun to fly.

The current load of maps range from close quarters street fights with shotguns to wide open desert fighting with snipers trying to out snipe each other. While vehicles in previous games felt more like “if you’re smart you can go 99-0” and basically owning the map, the vehicle combat now feels very much like “if you’re smart you’ll shoot that tank, blow it up, and run for your life or else everyone that just saw that tank blow up will now shoot you.” And planes, specially bombers, will either be good in the right hands, or live long enough to get a couple kills then die. The main thing about vehicles in BF1 is that, other than the fighter and the light tank, all other vehicles require more than one crew member to actually be effective. If you get in a land ship or bomber all by yourself, you are basically screwed, you need help, period. You can do the rapid seat switching (or in the case of planes slow seat switching because of animations) but that will only delay the inevitable.

Customize screen is quick and simple but limited number of items.

Customizing your gun is simple as well but again limited in the amount of customization.

Speaking of animations, it’s nice to see animations for getting into vehicles which means you can get shot off the vehicle before you get into it and, as mentioned above, moving about a plane from seat to seat is also nice, if not a bit scary when you’re desperately trying to go from the anti-ground gun on the front of the bomber to the rear gunner to take down planes but it’s still cool to see nonetheless.

As for kits and setups for the game, vehicles are a bit different this time round. Instead of being able to choose what weapons and such you want on your vehicles (lock-on shells, heavy MG, etc.) you get different versions of the same tank to “buy” with in game currency. So a standard land ship (driver gets MG, gunners get canons on each side) you can by an anti-tank version (driver gets AT rifle, emergency repairs and gas grenade, gunners get canons on each side) and Squad Support tank (driver gets MG, track repair, drop med/ammo packs, gunners get canons on each side and two more passenger with MGs.) All the vehicles have a difference such as that, other than armored cars which have no differences. With the added bonus that if you’re not careful, you can deflect rounds off a tank, from others or infantry.

Tanks are only as good as your crew.

The weapons you use in ground combat are still, classic battlefield, good. They feel like they all have a purpose, there’s no more long range firefights with assault rifles, the sub machine guns and the like do very much feel like they’re “new” and don’t really work well but have there place in the game. The support class now has repair tool, there is no engineer class unless you count the tanker/pilot class that you can only pick up if you spawn in a tank/plane. Assault class is now only assault with shotguns and sub machine guns, no having to choose between medic and attacking (a la Battlefield 4.) The medic gets access to “DMR” like rifles, including sniper variants along with rifle grenades. Sniper is exactly that, only rifles, nothing else. The closest thing they get to not a rifle is the experimental 1903 which is a semi-auto rifle with no scope. Support gets only LMGs all ranging from close range fights to long range suppression but with the added problem of all the guns can overheat very easily.

GAS GAS GAS! You’ll be using your mask a whole bunch.

The new comms panel is still something I have to get use to.

But like all game nowadays, there are some problems. I personally hate all the SMG’s they give you, shotguns are very much overpowered and they seem to kill you from 50ft away no matter what. Separating all of the same gun into there own versions is a bit of a headache because it’s not easily explained what the difference between “factory,” “trench,” and “storm” of the same weapon is. And of course, if you haven’t heard as of yet, the bayonet charge is either loved or hated 100%. It’s either loved because you can charge and get a kill and that’s it, or hated because you can’t avoid being charged (because the game said “you’re close enough, take this knife”) or you charge and miss because the game decided you weren’t close enough so that guy you missed just turns around and kills you.

With the recent “balance patch/free map patch” things come in line a bit more but people still love there shotguns with 53 service stars or planes with 66 service stars (seriously not kidding…lolwut?)

Thomas the big gunned tank engine

I’m personally having driver issues because Nvidia somehow broke them from the open beta to launch since I didn’t have this problem during that time. Sooner or later they’ll fix it (they better do it faster, it’s really pissing me off because that I can’t play a whole round without it crashing or even stay in the game longer than 15 seconds after done loading.)

Overall, Battlefield once again went in a good direction by “rebooting”…for the lack of a better term…war shooters. Instead of getting more modern or going into the future with warfare, going back and starting over with the basics is very refreshing. Now the next Battlefield title can either go full WWII or they can do what I was hoping they’d do originally before BF1 was announced…2143? I would love a sequel to that one, I loved that game.