These battles get brutal and desperate, especially the longer they go on, as Behemoths - giant, tough-to-kill vehicles like battleships and zeppelins - arrive to sway the tides. Attacking players charge toward enemy positions with whistles blaring and the crowds of soldiers roaring, while defenders hope to brace themselves and survive the onslaught. Operations recreates historical battles as attack-and-defend-style matches in which one team hopes to hold ground and the other fights to take it, stretched over two maps for a lengthy engagement. The effects of Battlefield’s historical context become most clear (and fun) in Battlefield 1’s “Operations” multiplayer mode. Maps feel like warzones that change over time and require you to adapt constantly.
This isn’t just a series of maps with long sight-lines on one side, and plenty of cover on the other: Thanks to the series’ emphasis on terrain deformation and building destruction, they feel like warzones that change over time and require you to adapt constantly. Utter destruction is everywhere, from ravaged villages to artillery-blasted fields, and DICE has leveraged these locales to create maps that make use of terrain in ways that feel unique to each experience. The real stars of Battlefield 1, it must be said, are its period-specific, ruined maps and levels.
And it’s in multiplayer specifically that developer DICE’s focus on the past translates into technical changes that invigorate competition and set the game apart from a growing field of multiplayer shooters.
While the single-player campaign of Battlefield 1 is interesting in its own right, the focus of the series has always been on multiplayer. In dialing back to lower-tech infantry battles from a century ago, Battlefield 1 finds a refreshing, intense spin to bring to multiplayer battles - especially when it’s invoking its historical settings. That’s to the game’s credit, because while you might expect a first-person shooter that emphasizes sweeping 64-player gun battles to glorify its conflicts, Battlefield 1’s single-player campaign works to tell personal stories that feel (mostly) true to our conception of the Great War. Another soldier’s name, another set of dates.īattlefield 1’s prologue repeats this process again and again, making one thing clear: This isn’t a heroic game about saving the world. Before long, there, too, are you overwhelmed. Then it’s off to a new character, with voice-over narration setting the scene of a devastating war that changed the face of the world. Your soldier’s name appears like an epitaph, superimposed on the screen. Surrounded at the front line, your only hope is to keep firing - until a soldier carrying a flamethrower lumbers up, with most of his body covered in plate metal armor. The first-person shooter drops players into muddy ruins as a German charge roars, signaling a wave of soldiers pouring over the destroyed hills just ahead. In the opening moments of Battlefield 1, it quickly becomes clear that you won’t be getting out of the game alive.