Battlefield 1 got its first trailer for the single player campaign yesterday, and we really liked what we saw- enough that, in spite of DICE’s repeated failure to make compelling single player modes in the past, we are now officially excited for the game’s campaign.
But the one thing that did intrigue us about the campaign was the structure that DICE have chosen for it- specifically, the anthology style that the campaign will apparently take. Posting on the game’s official website, DICE attempted to explain why they decided on this format.
“The Great War is diverse. We knew we wanted to embrace that variety. There were so many different perspectives and characters in World War 1 and we wanted to cover as much ground as possible,” they said. “This made us reconsider the format of what we’d offer in Battlefield 1 single player. We felt that to have one character hopping through those different settings wouldn’t be as immersive or totally respectful to the setting. So we decided on an anthology format; a set of characters with their own more focused stories. That way we can have immersion and variety – a double win.”
In the end, I think the path they chose may have been the best one- and it also, in many ways, echoes the single player modes of the old World War 2 era shooters that we used to get a decade or so ago, which often used to have multiple campaigns to cover different sides of the war. This sounds like it’d be a lot like that.
Battlefield 1 will be available next month on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.