Is it possible to make the horror of the First World War fun? Video game developers haven’t attempted it – until now.
On October 21, developer DICE and publisher EA will attempt to do just that, with the release of Battlefield 1, a large video game using The Great War as the backdrop.
It would be a bit pretentious of them to claim that they will somehow make the First World War fun, said Aleksander Grøndal, DICE’s senior producer. It’s a very interesting period. They’re not trying to make a documentary about that historical time; they’re trying to make entertainment. It’s meant to be fun primarily, so they’re going to use creative license where they can.
In 2013 DICE released Battlefield 4 and realized they needed to do something new. The series began in the Second World War but soon transitioned to modern times and away from oddballs like Battlefield 2142 and Battlefield: Vietnam.
It was clear to the team that they had to do something different, he explained. The team wanted a challenge, something that would clean their palate and force them to reconsider what they were doing.
As it turns out, DICE had the ideal concept. They’d been labouring on a First World War game for nine years.
The concept had been presented a couple of times, he said. It came together quite beautifully. The more we examined the source material and started investigating, it has all the ingredients required by a battlefield game. It had the incidents, the location, and the weapons, and it was untouched.
He said the greater the research by the team the more thrilled they became. How would players employ tanks such as the Mark V? Could they remake the close and fatal dogfights by bi-planes? What occurs when a gargantuan armoured train fires artillery shells into the victorious team on a Battlefield conquest chart?
Even though Grøndal’s attachment was getting a tangible sense of the First World War, his favoured resource was mostly visual. He would say the large encouragement for him was the series of podcasts by Dan Carlin, Motherboard reported.
The latest game will utilize the most infamous features: chemical and trench warfare. There’ll be parts of that with a distinct flavour of Battlefield, he explained. He also guaranteed additional maps would make use of mustard gas and trenches; maybe not in conquest gameplay form, but in other game forms, there’ll be greater use of those.
https://youtu.be/fUmsH5rRPMQ