DICE’s Battlefield 1 looks awesome- the game seems to be eschewing the modern military setting typical of most shooters on the market these days, including the past few Battlefield games, and instead seems to be returning to a historical setting. But it is also going back further than any major shooter has in history- DICE and EA will be taking us all the way to World War 1 with Battlefield 1.
World War 1 had a unique flavor to the combat- it was the first industrialized and mechanized war, with a lot of fighting being done in the trenches, yes, but also a marked and pronounced use of tanks and planes. How will DICE recreate that in the game?
“Scaling from the scout planes to the bombers to the big airships, and to do all this- of course, all these lived their own lives in the sky,” Patrick Bach, General Manager of DICE, said in an interview with Engadget. You can just spend your day in the sky, fighting it out. And then of course, like any Battlefield game, it’s the ground to air combat is important, and the goal is to do a representation of what it would feel like to actually fly one of these planes. And again- these planes were actually pretty good. They weren’t bad. People might think that they didn’t know how to make planes back then, but they did.
“I would say the tanks, even though they are quite different, they do have a lot of stopping power, and you would probably behave the same way when you saw a tank as you would when you saw an 880.”
So it sounds like combat will be thrilling and dynamic, just familiar enough that players don’t have to spend too much time trying to figure out where to go and what to do, but different enough to give players the thrill of something new, too.
Battlefield 1 is due out in October, on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.