Battlefield 1: Short Campaigns and Reward Systems

A Brief History

Battlefield has always been a game defined by multiplayer gameplay, large scale warfare, and destruction spread out across grand—this should seem obvious—battlefields.  Fields of battle if you will.  That does sound like it should be obvious but, Battlefield has also been recently defined by campaigns that don’t capture the grandiose feeling of playing Domination in multiplayer.

What says grandiose better than a flamethrower?

A brief recap of the last few games for anyone who hasn’t tried them is as follow: Battlefield Bad Company 2 was wildly loved, but that’s an entirely different article. Battlefield 3 and 4 campaigns were regarded as mediocre by most, with 3 held above 4, but both disliked for not capturing the magic of the larger multiplayer maps. I did love the third game, biases up front. Hardline was an attempt at a cop drama that was entertaining to a good amount of people, but why did that need to be a Battlefield game when it could have been an entirely different IP*?  

Battlefield 1 dropped with six different playable clusters of missions surrounding different characters and circumstances of the war, allowing players to tackle different missions in any order they would like after the prologue. We know the story of World War 1. If you don’t, it’s on Wikipedia and usually has its own section in bookstores. Instead of retelling that story, these missions focus on specific characters set within the different gameplay styles—tanks in the mud, planes and dogfights, trench warfare, stealth executions and silenced sniping, etc.—to offer interesting arcs with an emotional resolution rather than another boring and drawn out ultimate soldier conspiracy campaign.

Battlefield 1: Short Campaigns and Reward Systems

The prologue opens up with you approaching a building that is barely standing. The spoilers here aren’t too bad, but I’ll analyze and describe the first two stories out of six.  I’ll say story to refer to a cluster of missions that represent one character. The first story is the prologue and the second consists of 4 mission that add up together to somewhere between 90 minutes to two hours of gameplay. I would encourage you to not be afraid of spoilers here because the events of the story, I believe, mean nothing until you play through it. If you really care, I encourage you to play it and then read this. If Battlefield campaigns are just wasted data in your opinion, I get that because the series has always been about multiplayer, but that doesn’t mean it can’t try until it gets it right.  

The fun part about the prologue is that it’s friendly to all players. New players can experiment with the controls in the easy scenario of enemies-approaching-shoot-them.  Experienced fans will just know what to do given a gun and enemies. Should you die, the game provides a name to the Harlem Hellfighter that you were playing and the years of his life before snapping instantly to a new character with a different gun. You can die a few times thus moving through various Hellfighters to get experience with different weapons in tight scenarios. The game does a good job of letting you learn quickly and easily with a light hand while making a clear point about the number of soldiers lost every few seconds in the war. At some point, the battle around you gets bigger for a few minutes and you fight until the mission ends brutally. From my perspective, it was a brutal gameplay scenario that made me want to jump into the next mission.  

The first full-length story is from the perspective of an entirely different character on a different battlefield—get it—who gets the task of driving the tank. My bias here is that I did this mission during the trial and then again on the full game on a different platform.  Then my data wasn’t saved and I had to do it again so I’m tired of the mission, but from the first time, I thought it was kind of clunky. The responsiveness of the tank and its power are fun. The playable map is pretty wide even in the tank. On top of that, the map has many destructible environments to blow through, areas that slow the tank, and enough enemy infantry/tanks/anti-tank guns to get a feel for efficient destruction.

The butter on this bread is the constant charge happening on the sides of the tank by friendly infantry and the distinct characters inside the tank that started the interest in what it’s like to operate a tank as a unit. It’s all got the right, fun feeling so this is a layered level, but I thought it moved too slowly for the first real mission of the game. The prologue was very clearly not a full mission, and it might have been more fun to launch the first full mission with a boots-on-the-ground perspective.  Perhaps if you were with the infantry alongside the fleet of tanks rushing the enemy lines it would have had more of a first mission feeling. The tank has all the makings of a fun vehicle, but vehicles usually enter the scenario to shake-up the main gameplay. Here we never really got a chance to dive into the core gameplay. We were prepared for it through the first story and then thrown in the tank. 

The second mission puts you through hardships that make the return to the tank later on in the fourth mission well deserved. Now you’re asked to escort the tank by taking out camps in an effort to preserve your vehicle. Those anti-tank guns are pretty powerful. The game gives you a pistol, leading you to believe that this part can happen somewhat stealthily. The level design leads you in the direction of the camp no matter which path you take, but there are side paths to sneak into the camp and melee the enemies silently. It’s forgiving enough to give you a few seconds to hit someone after they’ve seen you and before they start shooting or yelling. The enemies are clearly not speaking English. In addition, the foggy atmosphere and time of night let's the tension set in. Should you mess up or decide to go loud, the tank rolls up and starts bringing down walls. If you succeed, there are caches of weapons and equipment to stock up on, located with mild exploration. Just don’t run past everything. A few rounds of that has you end by making a stand against some enemy tanks while supporting yours from the ground. I absolutely ran around throwing dynamite. I also absolutely sneaked behind the enemy, stole their weapons, and then blew them up with dynamite.

Tanks: For when something has to be dealt with, absolutely.

The third mission asks you to now gather materials from an enemy occupied village to repair the tank. It’s a small sandbox that they let you loose in. Again you can scout and mark enemies and stealth it or you can just guns blaze it. If they sound the alarm, a truck of enemies shows. After you fix it, the game finally lets you get back into the tank. Now after two missions of having to sneak around or take out hordes of enemies, you are finally rewarded with the tank. This is when I felt “hell yes please give me this tank I deserve it.” The missions leading up to it made me feel like I earned it, like engaging with the core loop for as long as I did was worth the effort. It came as the prize instead of teaching you how to play the game with guns and then forcing you into a tank for the story. You could have learned to use the tank right here in this fourth mission when you have both a gameplay and story reason to be in it. Perhaps, the first mission could have teased it with a section in which the tank can’t move and you’re needed to stop fighting on the ground and shoot the cannon instead. But, there is sufficient time to learn the tank here when you’re just fighting one armored vehicle at a time. Either way, they let the hordes loose on you in the form of low to high powered tanks and an army of people that think they're going to stop you. Don't let them stop you.

In the end, your character is still just on his way to the town they were headed to in the first place. Sure the tank roster has been shaken up and there has been some change in how the characters feel about each other, but the characters are just headed back out to fight more of the war. According to the facts in end quote, there wasn’t much left of the war after that. It’s not a bad story, it’s a thin story. I don’t want to explain the cutscenes in detail because I don’t believe they matter unless you fight your way to them, but they all focus on tensions between the gunner, the leader, and you, the driver. The thinness and straightforwardness of the story lets the gameplay and mission structure sit in the memorable spot of this mission. The whole thing, as with the prologue, was a flashback to the war anyway. So there was no tension in whether you live or die. In the end, it was more about fighting in the tight space of the tank and taking care of it through the battle. You were in a tight environment, but there were options. It was much more enjoyable to walk away from that first story thinking that was super fun and rewarding before the scenarios became repetitive.

To end on a positive note, after I finished the first story, I immediately started the second one, which is about flying. At least, after some online time.

Somewhere, over the online servers...

- Ben R.

Player of games

P.S.  

There are many fun bits I skipped because there is fun to be had thereby player’s own experience and surprise. I wanted to focus on how the game rewards you while the cutscenes add up to something concrete without feeling the need to add up to the resolution of the war with every character. We already know how that war ended, the story of the battle—get it—is much more interesting.