Both men look each other in the eye for a few moments then lower their guns. Eventually, the sequence ends with one exhausted American standing alone amidst the rubble and gore of the battlefield.
The battle goes on, but the player controls a new soldier, then another and another as the grinder of the Great War turns on and on. The perspective shifts to a new Hellfighter who inevitably dies unceremoniously, too-from, say, being hit by a chunk of stone shrapnel or breathing in a lungful of unexpected mustard gas.
Instead of restarting from a few minutes before, hoping to get it right this time, the game displays the dead soldier’s name and his years of birth and death. But, before long, this character falls against the enemy onslaught. It begins in standard shooter mode, the soldier popping in and out of cover to put bullets through heads and hurl grenades into masses of advancing troops. Battlefield 1’s introductory mission, easily the most impressive part of the entire game, throws players into a suicidal defense on the Western Front, the American Harlem Hellfighters regiment desperately holding their position against a German offense. War shooters, typically, are more concerned with shooting and explosions than making a real effort to communicate why past events are still remembered today.Īt first it seems like developer EA DICE found a way to balance the demands of an action game’s relentless pace with an ambitious reinvention of genre conventions. These are action games before they’re anything else-excuses to pump adrenaline into historical scenarios. That isn’t entirely surprising given how war shooters usually play out. “In the opinion of one observer the welcoming attitude toward war owed something to the ‘unconscious boredom of peace.’”īattlefield 1 is a restless game.
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