Battlefield 1 (

2016

)

When it comes to video games, the first world war has been shamefully neglected. In a world where I can storm the beaches of Normandy in a few dozen different games, it's a bit perplexing that there are hardly any games that allow me to “go over the top” in the Somme. This is partially due to the increased media attention that WWII has always enjoyed over its predecessor. A war where the heroic forces of democracy (and the USSR) triumphed over an alliance of fascist dictatorships is not especially difficult to work into a traditional good vs evil narrative. Sure, if you really dive into the facts on the ground, the morality of WWII is a good deal murkier with the heroic western allies indiscriminately bombing civilian targets while their Russian allies raped millions of women. Even then you'll quickly find yourself dealing with a black and gray world as the Axis powers easily match the allies' atrocity for atrocity even before you start talking about the death camps and the Rape of Nanking.

By contrast, WWI is a much murkier affair. A war that began not with a madman's plot to conquer the world, but with an assassination of a crown prince and a local conflict in the Balkans. A war that spread due to the complex system of alliances and counter-alliance that had developed over the past century in order to prevent just such a war. Alas, there was a tiny flaw in the plan: “It was bollacks” and over the next four years millions of young men died on miserable battlefields, fighting over insignificant scraps of land. In such a war, there is precious little room for grand heroic narratives, and even though the propaganda of the time gave it the old college try, people across the world quickly realized that all the war did was destroy everything it touched, leaving the world battered, bruised and on the brink of embracing the totalitarian ideologies that would touch off the next war.

Yet there is certainly a possibility for artistic representation in such a conflict. Films like Paths of Glory (1957) and 1917 (2019) demonstrate that clearly enough. Though the soldiers trapped in the trenches of the Western front may have been placed there by a callous government that threw away human lives by the thousand, they were nonetheless still human beings with their own moments of heroism and cowardice. If anything, the artistic possibilities of the first world war are greater than the second because everyone acknowledges that the conflict was a senseless slaughter that claimed the lives of millions for little practical reason. Indeed, unlike WWII, the first world war gives developers the unique opportunity to present both sides of the conflict and emphasize the common humanity of the soldiers on each end of no man's land. Of course, you could always technically do this with a world war 2 game, but the chorus of historically illiterate jackals in the press decrying how the game “normalizes fascism” would scarcely make it worth the effort. Yet Dice, for reasons I cannot even begin to understand, has made the central powers the opposing side in each of their six campaigns! Dice, you understand that while Hitler did fight with the central powers he did not command them, right?

I could understand this decision if the game wanted to give the campaign a very narrow focus, hovering over a single squad of soldiers or a single battle in the war. However, instead of that, we have a series of micro-campaigns (the longest having only four missions) that toss the player all across Europe and the Middle East. This has the advantage of giving players a variety of locations and mission objectives, but it barely gives the player any time to get to know each campaign's characters and setting. The emotional climaxes of the stories are all rushed out as quickly as possible, sometimes without even properly introducing us to the key characters in said emotional climaxes. The Italian campaign is the worst offender here as it ends with the player's character cradling his dead brother, who has never appeared onscreen before the moment of his tragic death. At best these campaigns feel rushed and half-thought out. At worst, they feel like we caught the last thirty minutes of a war movie and have to fill in the blanks on all the events from the first hour that we missed.

What's more, despite having six stories devoted to the allies, not one of them is from the point of view of the French. The country that suffered more casualties than any other allied nation except Russia (which had more than four times their population). I know that everyone likes to make fun of the French (and they give as good as they get), but this exclusion is as egregious as every WWII shooter that neglects to include a Russian campaign. Indeed, given the crippling effect that WWI had on Russia, and the century of totalitarian rule it would endure as a result of the conflict, forgoing a Russian seems nearly as galling here. As if rubbing it in Dice gives its two longest campaigns to the British and includes British officers as NPCs in two more. Somebody needs to tell these guys that people who didn't speak English also fought in WWI.

Fortunately, the short campaigns do manage to deliver on a variety of gameplay, with each short story mapping neatly onto a different aspect of the multiplayer gameplay. So in one campaign, you learn about tank combat, in another air combat, and in the others, you'll be introduced to one of the four multiplayer classes. Depending on your preferences these campaigns will be as fun or tedious as you can expect. If you're like me and have little interest in vehicle combat then spending four missions in a slow-moving tank or difficult to control airplane will be about as much fun as a kick in the head. Personally, the best bits in the game were all located in the Bedouin campaign where I was plopped down into a massive sandbox (the term being more literal than usual here) given a horse and a laundry list of objectives, and told to figure something out. If the entire game had been this open and this engaging then Dice would at least have a minor classic on their hands. However, the fun bits of the campaign are few and far between, which is a damn shame when it's so pitifully short. I know that the focus here is on the multiplayer but still I miss the days when campaigns for FPS games were more than glorified tutorials.

Obviously, the developers over at Dice took some creative liberties with the technology of the time. I am by no means an expert on the subject of WWI combat, but I think it's reasonable to assume that every other trooper at the Somme was not packing a sub-machine gun. Man-portable automatic weapons existed during the conflict, to be sure, but the vast majority of soldiers were armed with bolt-action rifles. Still, at least automatic weapons did exist and were useful during the conflict, the same cannot be said for the juggernaut armor that Dice has borrowed from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009]. Sure, the Italians did give some (extremely unlucky) soldiers a suit of Faria armor like the one that features prominently in the Italian campaign, but in real-life that thing was closer to a death sentence than a tactical advantage. Moreover, only Italy did this yet in this game you'll regularly see Turkish and German troops outfitted with the same gear. Don't get me started on the obnoxious flamethrower troops you encounter everywhere that are all but immune to being shot in the head. These changes are meant to keep the gameplay as close to previous entries in the Battlefield series as humanly possible because god forbid that EA accidentally fund a little bit of innovation with their lootbox millions. A thrilling FPS could be made with slow-firing bolt action weapons interspersed with the occasional machine gun nest, but Battlefield 1 is not that. It's a modern Battlefield game with a WWI skin.

However, not all historical inaccuracies were put in because of lazy game design, there was also a bit of good-old-fashioned tokenism at play as well. Having the first war story focus on the Harlem Hellfighters as they push back a wave of German storm-troopers is perfectly fine. Especially as it constitutes the game's only real depiction of the footslogging combat of the Western front. Sure, I would have chosen to highlight the Indian troops fighting for the UK before focusing on the black American troops, if only because black American troops like all American troops were not in the war for very long. However, this was a real unit that did see real combat and as a result, it's perfectly reasonable to see them here. No, the problem with the forced representation comes during the Bedouin campaign where the player takes on the role of Zara, a female guerilla fighter working alongside the famous Lawrence of Arabia. This is absurd on the face of it. Bedouin society had extremely strict gender roles, to the point where the infamously strict gender roles of modern Saudi Arabia could actually be considered liberal by way of comparison. The mere fact that Zara is even accepted by her fellow guerrillas is hard to believe, but the fact that she's operating in a command position is just absurd.

What's more annoying about this was that if Dice wanted to put a female playable character into the game they had ample opportunity to do so. Why not give the Russians a campaign and focus on their Woman's Battalion of Death? That would fix two of my issues with the game in a single stroke. Or rip off the story of Mulan and do a story based on one of the several real-world incidents where women disguised themselves as men to fight in the war? I suspect that the problem was that Western liberals like the staff at Dice just cannot resist the siren call of putting a female Muslim (with their highly distinctive headgear) into their work. Yet if that was really the case, why not just make a campaign from the Turkish perspective? Unlike the Bedouins, they actually had a few female soldiers.

It's obvious that the seeds of Battlefield V [2018] with its amputee, female British soldier armed with tactical cricket bat were laid with the success of Battlefield 1. Dice saw that nobody gave a shit when they put juggernauts and female Bedouin scouts into the campaign and decided that a similar divergence from history would be fine for the follow-up. The problem is that outside of a few enthusiasts, nobody really knows much about World War 1. The generation that fought in this war weren't dubbed the “lost generation” for nothing. There are few films about the conflict and the bulk of those focus on trench warfare, an aspect of WWI that is conspicuously absent from Battlefield 1 (a bit like having a WWII shooter and no beaches of Normandy come to think of it). As a result, players were far more willing to accept these changes either as necessary to gameplay or just aspects of history they didn't know about. The same cannot be said for WWII, a conflict which everyone has seen endless documentaries on, played dozens of video games set in and watched scores of movies about. The general populace may not know what WWI looked like, but they certainly know about its more famous sequel.

It's a shame really because WWI as a conflict has remained painfully unexplored in the medium of video games despite there being a clear an obvious demand for just such a game (as indicated by Battlefield 1's massive sales success). There is a heartbreaking, and brilliant campaign waiting to be put together with Dice's various ideas, indeed it seems to be lurking in the very first introductory mission which ends with two soldiers coming face to face and then dropping their weapons in a mute acknowledgment of their shared humanity. All you would need to do is wind the clock back to the very start of the war and give us a tighter campaign focused around a group of British soldiers trying desperately to hold back the German advance, the viewpoint shifting back and forth to give us a sense of what the war was like on both sides of the trenches. Ending with the Christmas truce of 1914 where our German character and our British character gradually emerge from their fortifications for an impromptu game of soccer amid the rubble and mud of no man's land.

If I grade Battlefield 1 too harshly, it's only because of the potential this game showed. It could have been something brilliant. Something unlike anything that's been achieved in military shooters, historical or otherwise. It frustrates me to no end that game with this budget and this opportunity decided instead to wallow in mediocrity rather than take a few minor risks that could have resulted in greatness.