Battlefield V – TOM CLEMENT | WRITER

Battlefield V’s Campaign: A Follow-Up

January 6, 2019March 20, 2019Posted in ArticlesTagged Battlefield 1, Battlefield V, Campaign, Cutscenes, Design, DICE, EA, Female Soldier, Feminism, Games, Nordlys, Online, Portfolio, SJW, Story, The Last Tiger, Tirailleur, Under No Flag, Video Games, Writing, WWII1 Comment

In my last article I wrote about the opening of Battlefield V. I hadn’t completed the campaign at the time of publishing, just wanting a first snapshot of my feelings. I was a little unimpressed, feeling that BFV had lost the spark that BF1 had due to the latter’s setting and time period.

So with a hint more apprehension I booted up the narrative proper.

And damn, I was hooked. I had missed out on an excellent addition to the opening. So I needed to follow up.

I adore Battlefield V’s campaign and it fixes the small problems I had with Battlefield 1’s (also stellar) campaign. My fears of the War Stories not comparing to BF1 were completely unfounded. The dialogue, performance, and design are of the highest quality (DICE always makes things looks pretty), with each story having a different tone yet all to feeding into one another.

BFV continues where BF1 started (quite literally with the still that opens the game). It features the lesser-known stories filled with misfits and malcontents, the people usually not remembered in sanitised history books. I was particularly looking forward to story featuring the young female resistance fighter in Norway, echoing the story of the female Bedouin fighter from BF1.

bfv nordlys — With throwing knives and hit-and-run tactics (courtesy of a handy set of skis), The Norway section of the game carves its own niche in WW2-set games. (Source: junkee.com)

It was nice that after the bombastic opening that the game settled back into a groove, allowing the player to approach how they wanted. It can be easy to guide the player through a linear story progression and keep up that cinematic edge (I love Remember Me), but having the player tackle each task how they want fits for a series like Battlefield (obviously gearing up for the multiplayer). Compared to the limited open-ended sections in BF1, nearly every story in BFV has a degree of player choice, allowing players to tackle objectives in any order.

While the gameplay is open, the story is a little more guided. The main issue I had with BF1 was the lack of narrative cohesion. Each story was self-contained and focused on a different aspect of the war. While getting to play the levels in any order is great for individual personalisation it means that you can’t effectively have a difficulty curve or sense of progression.

BFV now has that through line yet the story is still free form. You can play the story in any order, but if you play the game chronologically (as they are listed in the menu) starting with “Under No Flag” and ending with “The Last Tiger”, the game builds with each new step adding on from the last one.

“Under No Flag” starts as a stealth mission with an AI buddy and enemy squads far apart. “Nordlys” continues the stealth aspect but with you alone and with enemies in closer proximity to each other. “Tirailleur” puts you as a member of a squad of soldiers pushing through German lines, before “The Last Tiger” casts you against overwhelming odds and fighting alone. Each level builds on the last by putting you in familiar territory yet changing a small aspect each time. This slowly but surely ratchets up the difficulty curve without any immersion-breaking spikes.

Due to “The Last Tiger” not being available at launch a lot of players (including myself) would have played that chapter last. It is a fitting end and not just for having the word “last” in the title (other games such as Timesplitters Future Perfect, Halo 3, and Tomb Raider all follow this model with level names referencing their place within the story).

I had railed against the cinematic introduction to BFV, but “The Last Tiger” pulled the game into morally dark territory (and not just because we’re playing as the Nazis), ending the game on a perfect note. With the surrounding landscape wreathed in flames and the framed Nazi banner on the final bridge burning up, it paints a perfect metaphor for the tank crew and player character Müller’s unravelling allegiance to the Swastika. The darker edge fits better as an ending in general, having the player reminded at the end of the game of the destruction of war.

2002758 — “The Last Tiger” is the high point of not just *BFV* but most campaigns in the franchise. (Source: eurogamer.net)

I also really liked how “The Last Tiger” broke tropes. When the radio in the tank is busted, Müller goes out in search of one. At first I believed we were going to go on an extended on-foot section to find several radios to repair, but it turns out there is a radio right next to the tank. Having a large map to explore would have killed the tension that the final section was building up and it was nice that pacing was chosen over an extended gameplay segment.

After hearing the broadcast on said radio, enemy tanks and soldiers roll in during gameplay. From the POV of the Tiger tank, the following sequence is setup like a stage; there is a slight border (mimicking curtains) and a raised section where the Allies appear. It is a beautiful tableau (in a game full of awe-inspiring vistas) and the fact that it is during gameplay makes it that more memorable.

In the end it almost felt like the opening was a bait-and-switch, aiming for a broader audience by being a bit more “intense” instead of mournful like the opening to BF1. Whether it was deliberate or accidental, I still love this campaign and look on it more fondly than I did when I started.

Photo Banner Source: digitalcentralmedia.co.uk

Why Battlefield V’s Opening Lacks Pace

December 20, 2018December 10, 2020Posted in ArticlesTagged Battlefield, Battlefield 1, Battlefield V, Design, DICE, Diversity, EA, Female Character, Female Soldier, Games, Libya, Norway, Online, Portfolio, Senegal, tomclement1, Video Games, Writing, WWI, WWII1 Comment

It was with a mix of trepidation and eagerness that I picked up Battlefield V. I had enjoyed the excellent War Stories in the previous game, Battlefield 1, and wished to see what creators DICE had followed up with. Yet I remained cautious. The previous War Stories had been a high point of my gaming experience of recent times and I didn’t want to raise my hopes too high in case they were dashed.

The sequence started beautifully, reusing the iconic shot from BF1 of the two opposing troops levelling their weapons at each other as the sun breaks through to the battlefield. That was one of the defining moments of BF1; it is abrupt from the carnage that we have been a part of and distinct in its imagery.

I had previously written about how even though I liked the War Stories of BF1 and the opening, it could have toyed with player expectations a little more with its use of death. BFV’s opening reuses this defeatist attitude and makes it work. We aren’t told that are characters are destined to die yet most of them do. But unlike BF1 we do not see their names upon death, an aspect that is sorely missing. While I am happy that DICE isn’t directly lifting from BF1 for the semi-sequel, the inclusion of character names added a sense of humanity that can usually get lost in the larger stories of a world war.

battlefield-ed — A shot from the opening of *BF1.* It is an excellent and artistically significant image that helped set DICE’s new tone for the series. Source: fraghero.com.

BFV also switches characters through its opening, circling around the locations that appear in the later War Stories. On the surface this is good. The major problem with the shorter stories in BF1 was the lack of narrative cohesion. With each story lasting around an hour, the overall arc falls flat with predictable peaks and troughs, leaving the game without a strong climax and resolution. The opening of BFV helps aid the previous lack of narrative structure by having the opening focus on the locations, but not always on the playable characters.

The paratroopers dropping into Norway, the German tank crew driving forward in the desert, the Senegalese troops providing covering sniper fire, and the German planes flying overhead, they give us a taster of what is to come and also help set up the story. For example, the paratroopers in Norway get slaughtered in the first few minutes of gameplay, with the playable character in the Norway section being the resistance member they were meant to rendezvous with.

The opening is also a beautiful example of editing within gaming. Each scene leads into one another and connected with excellent scene transitions. The tank in the Norway section rolls out into Libya, the plane flying overhead in the Kasserine Pass moves into dogfights over Germany, before said plane crashes into the Netherlands right in front of our new character. It is a nice flow of scenes and heightens that feeling of a world consumed by war.

However, while the changing characters help create that crux for the larger narrative, it means it loses something of its previous identity. BF1’s opening was set entirely on a singular battlefield. The fight was contained to one narrative with sweeping long shots taking us across the lines to the next solider after one had died. It told a solid story on its own and helped set that “anything goes” precedent of that game.

Swapping between five different fronts and fighting styles in the BFV opening feels disjointed and uneven and it is partly because of the change of scenery. The stakes change on a dime and the enemy we were previously charging is now half a valley away. It loses that excellent pace and momentum that the opening of BF1 had. This isn’t helped by the gameplay. In BF1 you could fight for as long as you wanted, but eventually you were going to be brought down by the enemy soldiers. In BFV the onus is on you to continue the story. This was especially evident in the Senegalese sniping and the German dogfight sections.

As I was getting to grips with the controls, my sniper aim lacked finesse, with shots widely missing the enemy targets. Only when all the targets are down will the prologue continue. In the German dogfight section I managed to shoot down several Allied bombers, but was unable to see the tiny red marker that indicated the ONE plane I was meant to shoot to continue the sequence.

With gameplay swapping every few minutes, *BFV* assaults us with a flurry of imagery. It is just sad that none of it feels connected. Source: VGR.com.

The whole pacing is off. Each section starts the same; the player slowly moves forward before being presented with a few enemies and then ends with explosions. At least BF1 kept the explosions as a constant, throwing the players into disarray and keeping them on edge. It feels like there is a distinct lull in BFV’s opening and feels antithesis to the tone that it seems to be aiming for.

This comes to a head at the final playable section. After shooting some soldiers on a turret, you turn said turret around and direct the fire back. Your squad is bombed and you are paralysed, trying to hold off the oncoming enemies with only your pistol. It feels so odd to go from the excellent Remarquism of BF1 to this Hollywood-ised, last-man-standing depiction of battle.

I understand why it was done. This is the final scene, the gameplay needs to end at the same time as the narration for the pacing, but it doesn’t have that brutal edge that worked wonders in BF1. This final scene could have worked if we had control of our movement, if we were allowed to charge, retreat, anything other that having to sit still, playing out a sequence ripped straight out of Call Of Duty 4.

It is also a context problem. BF1 worked because it wasn’t about the grand ideas, rather focusing on the little person caught in the whirlwind of history. It was a pointless war with both sides fighting for pretty much the same reason and therefore could focus on the personal stories.

While there are flourishes of these individual stories in BFV’s campaign, the grand ideas can’t help but push through. Every fight (bar the Tiger tank story) is about pushing back the forces of darkness from enveloping the world. Every fight is about how to weaken and dismantle the Nazi war machine. It can’t help but BE that.

That’s not to say that grander stories are bad. Grand ideas work well in several games; Civilization, various CoDs, the first Assassin’s Creed, but the smaller stories are what gave BF1 a bit of bite and it is sad that BFV is without it. It means the characters in BFV don’t get a chance to shine since we don’t focus on them.

Characters like Zara Ghufran and Frederick Bishop in BF1 get small moments in between all the fighting, giving us hints of their personality and time outside the war. This makes them richer, making them more than the “stoic badass” or “stealthy assassin” archetypes. And I haven’t got that from a single lead in BFV yet.

Either way, I’m still enjoying BFV. I’m blazing through the campaign and will hopefully look fondly on my time spent with it. And while the opening fixes a lot of the issues I had with BF1’s, it can’t help but produce a few of its own.

Edit: Now that I have finished the campaign my feelings on BFV have changed. I started to really like the story and have written a follow up. You can read it here.

Banner Photo Source: wccftech.com

Why Battlefield 1’s “You are not expected to survive” Does not Work

June 19, 2018January 9, 2023Posted in ArticlesTagged Arabia, Bad Company, Battlefield, Battlefield 1, Battlefield V, Design, DICE, EA, First World War, Gallipoli, Games, Nothing Is Written, Online, Opening, Story, Theory, tomclement1, Video Games, Violence, War, War Stories, World War One, Writing, You Are Not Expected To Survive1 Comment

I recently upgraded my console to the newest gen (PS4) after a good near decade of time with my Xbox 360. I bought a few games for the new console; Assassin’s Creed Unity (so I could pretend I was in an Alexandre Dumas novel), Mafia 3 (so I could drive around New Orleans), and finally Battlefield 1.

I’d never played a Battlefield game before apart from a few matches on a friend’s console of Bad Company 2. I always thought of Battlefield as a multiplayer-focused title so my interest was immediately turned off (local co-op is more my thing). Add to the fact that it was a continuation of a gritty, modern war aspect; nothing about the series got me hooked enough to play.

But with the announcement of Battlefield 1 being set in the First World War my interest was piqued. So I picked up the game and its probably the best thing I’ve played so far on my new system.

I was in love with time period (although annoyingly the game was focused on the latter part of the war to add as many machine guns as possible) and happy that the developers looked beyond the trenches of Western Europe. I was especially excited to see Gallipoli and Arabia make an appearance with a female Bedouin playable character in the latter section.

From a narrative perspective the change from sprawling epics to individual vignettes of War Stories is a stroke of genius, allowing the developers to move from battle to battle without having to tie it into each other. While the smaller stories mean you lose larger narrative structure making the ending feel flat, the end coda is a nice wrap up.

I just wish they had added more in connection with the DLCs, with battles on the Russian Front, or even better some from the Central Powers point of view (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottomans, and Bulgaria). This isn’t the Second World War with a clear bad guy on one side (so we are not playing as Nazis). If we want to talk about crappy stuff on the Allies side in WWI, Gallipoli and Arabia have you covered. Even the game acknowledges this with the final coda in the Arabian section (13:17).

But today I wanted to write about the opening of the game and how even though I like the start of Battlefield 1, the game bungles its hand and for me loses some impact. I am of course talking about, “You Are Not Expected To Survive.”

Battlefield 1 and Death as Inevitability

Many people hold up Battlefield 1’s opening as one of the most engaging bits of interactive media of the generation. As the game starts you are dropped into the boots of a member of the Harlem Hellfighters.

After a few lines telling us how many people fought and how world changing the “War To End All Wars” another line flashes up;

“What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive.”

It’s an effective opening and conveys the game’s darker theme than other shooters as well as portraying the brutality and futility of some battles. BF1 carries this tone throughout the rest of the game with No Man’s Land during “Fall From Grace” being littered with soldiers (and rats), or the final push on “Cape Helles” showing the amount of deaths it took to take the hill.

However, I feel that telling the player that death is inevitable makes the prologue lose its shocking quality. Most players were probably the same as me, trying to fight for as long as they could, but eventually falling to a hail of bullets before quickly moving onto the next character.

The expectation of death (for me anyway) made me feel a little defeatist. What was the point of playing if I was just going to die anyway?

So, What Would be Better?

I did some research into WWI deaths for this article, but nobody can really give a definitive answer to deaths in WWI due to the huge amounts of missing and unnamed soldiers.

History On The Net ranks it collectively as 2/3 soliders died. The official statistics are 6 million for the Entente Powers, and 4 million for the Central Powers.

But let’s take 2/3 as our number just for conveniences sake.

“What follows is frontline combat. Two out of every three soldiers in WWI died.”

Now, what that does is give a glimmer of hope to a player. As players we are conditioned to not dying in-game. That third, that 1/3, we think it will be us. So when we die and your character’s name flashes on screen it would hit much harder. This is a concept known as defamiliarization (breaking away from traditional forms to allow us to view things differently, such as being killed again and again in what should be a fun shooting game), and interestingly here is an academic dissection of the scene by Stuart Marshall Baker which discusses the idea in relation to the prologue. If we even wanted to go further the game could pit us in a battle where entire squads were wiped out such as The Somme or Passchendaele.

“What follows is frontline combat. Entire squads were wiped out in a single day.”

That still delivers a grim mood, but isn’t an absolute. You could still make it through and be one of the lucky ones.

I believe that giving us that inch of hope only to snatch it away would make for an effective and memorable opening. Obviously some of the gameplay would need to be changed. It would lose some effectiveness if players were allowed to pause and restart immediately after dying thinking that they could win the fight. Something similar happened with the “corrupted” section of Batman: Arkham Asylum when you meet Scarecrow (00:05-00:14). Anecdotal evidence aside, I know friends who went to go get their discs fixed because they thought it was a bug.

At the moment this seems like a bit of a pipedream, more theory without a real-world example. So let me show you a similar game (from the EA stable) that conveys a similar theme and makes it work.

Lets talk Medal Of Honor (2010).

Comparison: Medal Of Honor and the Looming Horror of Death

I really liked the two Medal of Honor reboots, Warfighter and all. Part of it was the “Based On True Events” aspect; I found that to be an interesting and unique selling point.

Medal Of Honor in 2010 was set all during the first few days of the Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, with the player switching between a behind-enemy-lines secret operative and a Ranger who was part of the larger invasion force.

In our first mission as the latter character, “Belly of The Beast”, our transport helicopter drops us into a firefight and we must make our way to another drop zone and set up a perimeter for a medical transport. We move through the hills and encounter enemies and old relics of the Russian invasion.

Another reason why I love this game is also highlighted in this mission; you are not always the pointman. Your character carries a massive machine gun, better for suppressive fire than leading the charge. It was a little change from the one-man-army approach of Call Of Duty and I really liked it. But I digress…

We get to end of the level where the drop zone is to be located; a large, flat plain. You are ambushed from the hills and you cower with your comrades in the only cover there is, a small hut in the middle of the plain. Your radio messenger tries to call in support as you try and keep enemies at bay.

This is the end of the level. If you haven’t been stocking up on ammo (by requesting ammo from your teammates, which destroys some of the tension) then you will be running dangerously low just like the rest of your team. As you pick up stray rifles from dead enemies and are forced to use your pistol you realise that there are too many enemies and that reinforcements won’t get there in time.

Your commander tells the radioman to call off reinforcements and you start to contemplate the end, fighting until every last bullet is gone.

Around ten seconds later rockets fly across the sky as a pair of Apache helicopters come to help you out by scaring away the enemies. You end up surviving by the skin of your teeth and go on to fight another day.

This scene works because instead of subverting our ideas of death at the start like Battlefield 1, it waits until the end to make that shock and reflection closer together.

We were not thinking that we were going to die (inside the story rather than dying as a “game over”) and having that few moments to allow that idea to sink in was a chilling and horrifying feeling, something that Battlefield 1’s opening line extinguished by making us aware of the inevitability of the situation.

Conclusion

Protagonist deaths have started to become a wider theme in gaming nowadays although many of them won’t have it during gameplay. One of the memorable ones is Call Of Duty, with Modern Warfare 2’s Roach being killed at the end of a level. But Roach’s death is during a cutscene with control taken away from the player, lessening the impact. The same happens with playable character Pvt. Allen during the infamous “No Russian” level, where he dies at the end during a cutscene.

Red Dead Redemption had a similar scene with player character John Marston being shot down during a last stand during the finale. However, there isn’t much lead into the scene, with the death/shooting being moved to a cutscene rather than during gameplay.

The closest scene that I can think of is Halo: Reach’s ending. Again, you know that death is unavoidable, all the ships have taken off without you and you are left to fight an endless wave of Covenant troops. But just before you die you take off your helmet and it fades to cutscene again just like all the other games I’ve mentioned.

Battlefield 1 is an improvement over these scenes by having death come at you during gameplay. But by telling us that it is coming I feel that it loses some of that punch it could have had.

I still love Battlefield 1 and I still think its probably my favourite game on my new system, but that opening, while still impactful may have reached greater heights by toying with us a little more.

Banner Photo Source: http://www.dice.se