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jp's Battlefield 1 (PS4)

[January 6, 2019 02:21:45 PM]

I've finished the campaign and played a fair amount of multiplayer both operations and "regular" maps/missions. I've really enjoyed it and I have lots of thoughts and feels about different aspects of its design and the overall experience. I'm not sure I'll be able to get them all down, but here goes.

a. The campaign is structured as a collection of mini-campaigns (2-4 missions each) that take place in different parts of the world and feature different characters. I thought this was a clever way to cover, somewhat, the breadth of WWI in a way that makes sense without having to worry about whether or not everything fits together. It also allows different characters from different backgrounds and viewpoints. I found the campaign shockingly educational for me - not so much in the "content" but rather in illustrating how little I know of WWI in the pan-European sense. I basically was left with a bunch of questions and things I wanted to look into more deeply. For example - I have no idea what the role of Italy was in the war and I have the vague sense that the current modern Italian republic was a result of the war, but I don't know if that's true or not, nor any of the reasons/forces/actors/etc. that led to this. I always forget that WWI meant the end of the Ottoman Empire, but the role of the British in that has always been on my mental sidelines as it where. I watched Lawrence of Arabia a loooong time ago, but I kind of want to read and learn more about it now. The austrian-hungarian empire also ended thanks to WWI, and I had a hard time not getting them mixed up with the germans. They're not, and I suspect a lot of people confuse the two as well - especially since it was the germans that were the "main" force lined up against the french, english, and americans on the western front. People forget about all the other fronts (including Gallipolli), including myself - and playing this game just made me realize how much I'd like to start better separating WWI and WWII from each other in my mind and imagination. This is despite the campaign missions being incredibly over-the-top fictions. They were fun, and maybe the locations were real - but I'm pretty much sure everything else was made up. Which is fine!

b. I had a lot of fun with the operations mode and it reminded me, in a good way, of the fun I had playing Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory back in the day (15 years ago now?). W:ET was, AFAIK, the first FPS game I ever played online that had distinct classes with special abilities - medics reviving and dropping med packs, engineers fixing things, support dropping ammo, etc. While I was initially turned off by the sheer amount of chaos and noise and speed - I decided to play a medic and just go for it. To slowly learn the maps, to learn how to play the class and so on. It was fun, and it really is the same game as before - but with lots of added wrinkles and sprinkles thrown in. Lots of fun and, as usual, the overall experience really depends on how lucky you are to get a team of randos that can play together. Eg. sticking together and chasing objectives, etc. The mode itself is also quite fun - the general rule is that offense needs to get objectives without losing too many respawns/lives and defenders must stop - but there's lots of different maps and such. I don't really see the point of the planes, and vehicles are fun to pilot, but not so fun to crew as gunners.

c. Probably the biggest change since the W:ET days is the meta- RPG elements - the leveling up, unlocking new weapons, options, etc. I couldn't tell how much of a power-difference things are, early medic unlocks are definitely no-brainers, but I never really bothered with weapons and stuff. I suspect there is a benefit to later weapons, but I'm not good of a player to really take advantage of them. As for the crates? Wow, I really don't see the points (other than potential in-game benefits), so I'm surprised if they've been able to monetize these as much?

d. The game opens in a UI wrapper that I thought was pretty interesting - it's basically a wrapper for other Battlefield games! Linking to Battlefield 4 and 5 - encouraging me to buy 5 for example. Presumably there's some sort of shared-across games profile? Is there a benefit to this for players? (overall stats?) I don't know - but I thought it was interesting from a marketing point of view. Weirdly, the game has a separate upgrade stream for the UI. So, when I first installed and updated the game I still had to update it again from inside the game - just for the UI.

e. Respawing works such that you pick spots on the map to respawn from, sometimes this can be inside a vehicle! There are two kinds: hard points (new ones open up when you capture points) and soft points - which are respawning on a team mate. This option is interesting, if you have a teammate who is in a neat location (deep behind enemy lines) or at a spot that needs support. It's totally unrealistic, but I think makes for interesting gameplay decisions - assuming a team that's coordinated.

f. I had a hard time identifying "war" in this game as significantly different from WWII, which was weird. The weaponry "felt" WWII, the tanks and such looked WWI, but felt WWII? Maybe it's just because everything was too fast?