Battlefield 1 - set in World War 1

[Wolfe]

No hype.

 

[Spectacle]

If you're subscirbed to Origin Access you can play right now. So far the game seems to be pretty much exactly as expected. Whether that is good or bad is up to the individual, for me it's awesome :D
No technical issues at all as far as I've seen, seems like they've learned from the BF4 launch fiasco.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Get hyped over shit? No more.

 

[anus_pounder]

I prefer to spend my money on games of a more cerebral nature, but I'll admit I was tempted at some point to pre-order this.

 

[Makabb]

Im never touching EA origin garbage, don't want to get cancer

 

[Daedalos]

Super ultra short-early-access review:

So I tried the game for 3 hours last night, and it's amazing.

Easily the best battlefield game and experience I've tried yet, and I've tried em all, from BF1942, to BF2142 to Bad Company 2 to BF3 and BF4 in a more modern setting.

The graphics simply looks the best I've seen yet in a MP shooter. Sometimes I forget to shoot at stuff, just because I stop and look at how the world looks. Mud, rain, sand, forests, grit, rust, everything comes to life. Battlefront was a clear step up in visual and auditorial department to the battlefield/battlefront franchise, and BF1 is no different. DICE outdone themselves with the frostbite 3 engine. Kudos!

Music and sound effects are all top notch, classic defining DICE quality. Everything sounds crisp, and big without drowning out the subtle ambience of the surroundings. Weapons pack a punch, and so does grenades, and the utilities each class gets.

The gameplay is great. Slick, finetuned, and fun. The action gets your heart pounding and the sound effects will get you screaming at your enemies in death troes before throwing that final big grenade to take out an entire squad full of soldiers.
The maps are varied between big open maps with lots of vechicles, planes, boats, trains, jeeps and so on. There's also small infantry maps.

Obviously there are some balance issues, but I won't comment on that much, since it's always bound to be fixed with patches n shit like that. I will say that no glaring bugs or balance issues seems to be for me as I'm playing. I'm having a great time.

Gon finish up my remaining 7 hour trial time, and wait for the official releases on 18th oct. Can't wait !

 

[J_C]

So I tried the game for 3 hours last night, and it's amazing.

Easily the best battlefield game and experience I've tried yet, and I've tried em all, from BF1942, to BF2142 to Bad Company 2 to BF3 and BF4 in a more modern setting.

The graphics simply looks the best I've seen yet in a MP shooter. Sometimes I forget to shoot at stuff, just because I stop and look at how the world looks. Mud, rain, sand, forests, grit, rust, everything comes to life. Battlefront was a clear step up in visual and auditorial department to the battlefield/battlefront franchise, and BF1 is no different. DICE outdone themselves with the frostbite 3 engine. Kudos!

Music and sound effects are all top notch, classic defining DICE quality. Everything sounds crisp, and big without drowning out the subtle ambience of the surroundings. Weapons pack a punch, and so does grenades, and the utilities each class gets.

The gameplay is great. Slick, finetuned, and fun. The action gets your heart pounding and the sound effects will get you screaming at your enemies in death troes before throwing that final big grenade to take out an entire squad full of soldiers.
The maps are varied between big open maps with lots of vechicles, planes, boats, trains, jeeps and so on. There's also small infantry maps.

Obviously there are some balance issues, but I won't comment on that much, since it's always bound to be fixed with patches n shit like that. I will say that no glaring bugs or balance issues seems to be for me as I'm playing. I'm having a great time.

Gon finish up my remaining 7 hour trial time, and wait for the official releases on 18th oct. Can't wait !

 

[Sam Ecorners]

It's buggy as fuck, it's slow, players are mostly retards, maps are smaller, but I'm having my fun.

 

[---]

 

[Sam Ecorners]

Nah, it's more fun that battlefront

 

[Daedalos]

It's more fun, and it also has better graphics than battlefront, which is a feat in itself, because battlefront looks AMAZING.

 

[Spectacle]

Bayonet charges in this game are fantastic fun! I thought the charges were going to be a bit of a gimmick when I read about them but they're actually a very useful tactical option in many situations.

Melee combat in general is a lot more important in BF1 than if BF3/4 where it was mostly used for trolling snipers. There's no fancy system of blocks and parries, just whoever strikes first usually wins. That's how I imagine close combat was in the trenches, so it fits the game.

 

[Black]

Holy shit that power armor sequence

This is how WW1 was fought after all. Thank you Sweden for telling how it really was. Heroic blacks and crackers in panzerkleins.

 

[sullynathan]

The beta was better than BF3 & 4. That's an easy feat because both games were pretty bad.

Still won't buy, better to wait till all the dlc is free.

 

[Dayyālu]

Holy shit that power armor sequence

This is how WW1 was fought after all. Thank you Sweden for telling how it really was. Heroic blacks and crackers in panzerkleins.

ITALIAN POWER ARMOUR YEEEEH




You'd be surprised, but the concept of trench armour is almost well-known for our national tradition of remembrance in WW1, mostly thanks to Emilo Lussu's "A Year on the Tabletop" and on the 1970 adaptation done by Francesco Rosi ("Uomini Contro", "Men Against"). Both works approach the subject in somewhat different ways (Rosi was a militant pacifist, and his movie is a dreadful story of the cruelty and incompetente of the Italian officers, and Lussu himself commented that war was indeed hell, but Rosi exaggerated quite a bit to push his view).

Nonetheless, as a result, our shared national view of the "Corazze Farina" is rather negative: they are shown as another useless and outdated way employed by the officers to kill their men.



It's an anti-war movie, right

From the point of the proper historical research, they were terrible (they failed to protect against heavier guns than our Carcano if closer than 100 meters) but if used with proper care, proved almost adequate in borderline cases. Interestingly enough, such armours were employed by all combatants (the models in Rosi's movie are British, for example, not Italian), but I don't know if they have reached the status of "common pop culture knowledge".

I still remember poor young me scared shitless while reading an episode about a sergeant of an armoured "Death Company" that survived a failed assault, and kept screaming for hours "Forward" in an autistic-like death mantra thanks to a head wound. No one cold put him out of his misery, as he was in the no-man's land, and he kept that going for hours.

Well, I'll leave you to your rants about blacks and "crakers". I'd prefer the term Dago, though.

 

[Black]

Did you miss the part where the power armored guy sprints in it like it's no thing and silly metal plates stop bullets like they're all bbs?
And of course it only goes to the player character, the rest just die like they're supposed to

 

[Dayyālu]

Did you miss the part where the power armored guy sprints in it like it's no thing and silly metal plates stop bullets like they're all bbs?
And of course it only goes to the player character, the rest just die like they're supposed to

War is boring. Any attempts at realism would make it excruciatingly boring, and I'm a sucker for realistic games, but some wars do not....translate well. And as far as I see everyone has automatic weapons and runs and jumps and shoots. Whatever. The Armour designs scream Wolfestein to me.

It's dumb as hell. Can be fun, and maybe can even get some bloodthirsty 12 years old to read on it. As a personal experience, it's rather difficult to get youngsters interested in a 100 years old conflict that shaped our history, and in Italy it's still narrated commonly through Fascist or Marxist lenses. If they give me something else to work on instead of painful "children's books", I'll take it as another tool.

This will be of course a pop history view of the war, it's done by Swedes for Anglo audiences after all. I'd like to see how they managed to paint it, if they took a fairy tale story made up or if they bothered to mimic some of the typical stereotypes that we have. I'll end up suffering some Youtube playthrough instead of playing it, as I don't care much for MP.

That said, the fact that someone dared to place a game sent local Italian authorities in full ballistic mode, with screams of "sacrilege". Luckily, no one cares.

Whatevs.

 

[J_C]

TB tearing the single player a new one, and asking, what were the gaming media smoking to say that this campaign is amazing:

 

[Sam Ecorners]

Media jiizzing all over AAA games? More news at 11.

Battlefield SP campaign is a la-la land fantasy about PC being a superman? More news at 11.

 

[sullynathan]

I was surprised to see so many 9s and 10s for the campaign. Gaming media trashed previous battlefield campaigns to praise this one.

 

[Anthedon]

Will be interesting to see how the player numbers for BF1 develop. Progression is super quick and there are barely any worthwhile unlocks to be had. Battlefront anyone?

 

[Machocruz]

Gotta circle the wagons around current gen AAA releases now. The emperor was showing a bit of skin.

 

[DosBuster]

Even Kotaku is calling bullshit on the Harlem Hellfighters:

Educational opportunities are missed as well. The game is narrated by a member of the ‘Harlem Hellfighters’, a segregated unit of African American soldiers. He exists largely to tick a diversity box for marketing. The game does nothing to tell his story. The campaign eschews opportunities to comprehensively explore the setting in favor of a historical smorgasbord that falls short at times, presenting history without exploring it in full.

I don't get the whole thing with it either, I thought they were going to be a focus in the campaign? Instead you just get your average fare of AAA military shooter protagonists like always. I have to wonder if the deliberate glorification of the stories individual protagonists is some sort of commentary on just how we romanticize the stories that come from all wars. After all, the only non-recollection of the war is the same part where not only do you die a lot but also the part where at the end two soldiers from different sides put down their weapons, some sort of "why are we fighting?" kinda moment. Whatever though, the campaign is just effortless military shooter with re-purposed multiplayer maps so it doesn't deserve any sort of focus for what it really is.

 

[Alienman]

Wow, Kotaku said that? Now if Polygon mentions it.

 

[sullynathan]

I don't get the whole thing with it either, I thought they were going to be a focus in the campaign? Instead you just get your average fare of AAA military shooter protagonists like always. I have to wonder if the deliberate glorification of the stories individual protagonists is some sort of commentary on just how we romanticize the stories that come from all wars. After all, the only non-recollection of the war is the same part where not only do you die a lot but also the part where at the end two soldiers from different sides put down their weapons, some sort of "why are we fighting?" kinda moment. Whatever though, the campaign is just effortless military shooter with re-purposed multiplayer maps so it doesn't deserve any sort of focus for what it really is.

It's the whole WW1 thing. People are so happy that a big developer is just trying anything different that they'll overlook problems. They just go back to hating COD.