LAST EDITED ON Dec-01-16 AT 11:42 PM (EST)
 
Battlefield 1? Because as we all know, World War I is called that because there had never ever been a war before in the history of humanity.

This is why everybody hates you, EA.* This is the same impulse that led some douche at Microsoft to call the third Xbox "Xbox 1". I don't find it all that edifying to be trolled by someone who expects me to pay for it.

* Well, that and your vicious business practices and your ruthless, 19th-century-style exploitation of your workforce and your general air of entitled fuckheadedness. But mostly it's this. Sure.

--G.
for whatever reason I'm salty as shit tonight
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

It's still a slightly better name than the "New Nintendo 3DS XL". Which will become the most irritating thing ever once Nintendo does their usual thing and makes a slightly more updated version.

I mean, there's never been a game just called 'Battlefield' (the original was 'Battlefield 1942')

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Lime2K
The One True Evil Overlord
what are we gonna call it? the NEW New 3DS XL? New 3DSXL II Turbo Hyper Fighting Edition EX Plus Alpha Dash?

The decision to call it Battlefield 1 rests more with the creative team, which has a pretty convincing argument. WWI is considered the first "modern" war, with most of the weapons and tactics of that war still figuring largely into fighting that goes on today. It was the reason that people of the time wanted it to be "The War to End all Wars," as the idea that war was a nobleman's game fought between honorable warriors had died in the mud and gore of No Man's Land. So much of what happened in that war set the stage for the century that followed, from international relations to the very weapons we use today.

>The decision to call it Battlefield 1 rests more with the creative
>team, which has a pretty convincing argument. WWI is considered the
>first "modern" war, with most of the weapons and tactics of that war
>still figuring largely into fighting that goes on today.

Well... I guess, if you've never heard of the Boer War. Trench warfare, bloody stalemate, pointless charges into machinegun fire... it's all there, just on a smaller, less world-arresting scale. And as an added bonus, it was the war in which the concentration camp was invented and named (by the British, no less).

But yes, I see the point. I don't entirely agree with it as a rationale for giving a game a confusing, trolly name, but the argument has some merit. WWI was certainly a watershed, both in the conduct of warfare and in international relations generally (whether that's two different things depends on whether you agree with Clausewitz that war is diplomacy continued by other means).

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Also too: the game is... not relentlessly awful, but its basically a Battlefield game with a WWI skin. Did you like the past three or so Battlefield games? Great, this is more of the same! Do you not like Battlefield games? Then you won't like this one.

Except for the single player campaign, which is ridiculous. Apparently the Italians had a Space Marine on their side during WWI. You'd think they'd have done a lot better than they did, given that.

I have to admit I'm disappointed. I was hoping for... well, I was hoping for some more genuine WWI flavor.

It's been a dismal year or so for shooters, by which I also include the 2015 holidays. Destiny remains entertainingly fun, and Doom was pretty great, but aside from that it's been a bit more than twelve months of bleahhhhhhh. I'm especially angry at Halo 5; the people responsible for ruining a once-proud franchise should be ashamed of themselves. 343 Industries isn't fit to hold Bungie's jock.

-Merc
Keep Rat

>I have to admit I'm disappointed. I was hoping for... well, I was
>hoping for some more genuine WWI flavor.

... Would that work as a computer game, though? Genuine WWI Flavor, if you were an Entente infantry soldier on the Western Front (the theater most likely to be put into a game), would basically mean, "Right, lads. Everyone who survived that four-day artillery barrage and doesn't have trench foot, up and at 'em, it's time to get six feet into no man's land and be cut down by Jerry machine gun fire to which, even though it's 1917 and we've been at this for literally years, we still have figured out no better approach than to make thousands of you slog toward the gun positions on foot and assume, in spite of the mountain of evidence rotting all around us, that they can't get you all." Which, forgive me for saying, doesn't sound all that gripping as a gameplay experience. For the Germans it wouldn't be much better, though you'd at least have some dead Belgian horses to eat.

Meanwhile on the Eastern Front, basically the same thing, but with fewer trenches and more freezing to death in the mountains of Serbia.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>I have to admit I'm disappointed. I was hoping for... well, I was
>>hoping for some more genuine WWI flavor.
>
>... Would that work as a computer game, though? Genuine WWI
>Flavor, if you were an Entente infantry soldier on the Western Front
>(the theater most likely to be put into a game), would basically mean,
>"Right, lads. Everyone who survived that four-day artillery barrage
>and doesn't have trench foot, up and at 'em, it's time to get six feet
>into no man's land and be cut down by Jerry machine gun fire to which,
>even though it's 1917 and we've been at this for literally years, we
>still have figured out no better approach than to make thousands of
>you slog toward the gun positions on foot and assume, in spite of the
>mountain of evidence rotting all around us, that they can't get you
>all." Which, forgive me for saying, doesn't sound all that gripping
>as a gameplay experience.

I inartfully phrased that, didn't I?

I mean... let's be real. Even the vast mountain of WWII shooters don't do more than put a gloss on the "genuine" WWII flavor, which, like all wars, was long stretches of boredom punctuated by terror and slaughter.

But they do sort of put a gloss on it that's recognizable as at least vaguely accurate to the time period and the weapons involved, even completely balls-out ridiculous ones like various entries in the Wolfenstein franchise that have crazy Nazi magic and aren't meant to be that accurate to begin with.

I guess what I'm saying is I had hoped they would deliver a different experience than "run around with assault rifles and accoutrements." Because like I said, this is basically a WWI skin on a Battlefield game. I was hoping for something slower-paced, where your primary medium-and-long range weapon is a bolt-operated Lee-Enfield or Springfield rifle, with significant downtime between shots, and your backup weapon is a pistol or carbine. The rifles in Battlefield 1 look and feel wrong to me; they have ten-round (or bigger!) clips and fire full-auto with no need to work the bolt, for gods sake.

I think there could be a compelling gameplay experience built around a shooter with a higher time-to-kill and a higher opportunity cost for just spraying shots wildly rather than yet another entry in an already-crowded field. You know? I'm not saying re-create trench warfare exactly, but I think there was room to innovate and try and capture the zeitgeist of WWI in an entertaining way while also presenting a different sort of shooter.

It's pretty as hell, tho. I'll say that for it.

-Merc
Keep Rat

LAST EDITED ON Dec-03-16 AT 00:35 AM (EST)
 
>I guess what I'm saying is I had hoped they would deliver a different
>experience than "run around with assault rifles and accoutrements."

I only dimly remember it now, because it was months ago when the game was in the pre-release hype phase, but Ian at Forgotten Weapons did a video that was basically, "OK, I looked at some beta footage and here's what I think." In most instances, what he thought was usually along the lines of, "OK, that was a real weapon from the period, but I mean, there were like four of them in the world in 1916," or "Um, this is meant to be crew-served, so, um," or "OK you can actually shoot a Lee-Enfield rifle this fast if you're hyper-well-trained but basically all those guys were dead by 1916." So the developers did put some effort into the arsenal, but it was heavily slanted toward the early light automatic weapons which were, well, much rarer than the game mechanics make them.

Beyond that, it seems to me (having semi-watched a fair bit of gameplay myself, in the form of a few Hat Films streams that made their way to YouTube afterward, and in which I was really more interested in the banter than the game) that the multiplayer version has the same problem as every other multiplayer combat game, that being that it replicates what war would be like if it were fought by hordes of untrained total strangers with no command structure above them to speak of, but peculiarly effective logistics trains. Which might arguably be realistic if you're playing the Austro-Hungarians, but... well. For my money, you're never going to get "authentic flavor" out of something that's set up like that. It's like my main problem with Overwatch apart from "I suck at shooters," which is that the game has a story and the gameplay that comes with it makes not one bit of fucking sense in relation to it. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I wish medical technology hadn't backslid so spectacularly after the First World War. Those syringes that could instantly revive a gunshot fatality back to full fighting fitness would really come in handy nowadays.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I wish medical technology hadn't backslid so spectacularly after the
>First World War. Those syringes that could instantly revive a gunshot
>fatality back to full fighting fitness would really come in
>handy nowadays.

Still has nothing on the "Instant Healing" defibrillator packs from Battlefield 2.

>Still has nothing on the "Instant Healing" defibrillator packs from
>Battlefield 2.

Battlefield 2. The game that did not actually follow Battlefield 1, as we now see, nor was the second game in the series, having followed 1942 and Vietnam. And, considering the name of the FIRST game, really should've featured Romans and taken place the Holy Land. And hey, no camping snipers too! All good.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

>>Still has nothing on the "Instant Healing" defibrillator packs from
>>Battlefield 2.
>
>Battlefield 2. The game that did not actually follow Battlefield 1, as
>we now see, nor was the second game in the series, having followed
>1942 and Vietnam.

But it wasn't available for the Xbox One, which is the third Xbox, or the second one, the Xbox 360.

(What the actual, Microsoft.)

Early on, when they were still hyping the Xbone with the name styled as one word, I realized that "Xboxone" looks like one of those medications they advertise for cheap by anonymous bulk email. I can't decide if it's an antidepressant, a boner pill, or both.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I can't
>decide if it's an antidepressant, a boner pill, or both.
>
>--G.

Totally both, cause treating one tends to cure the other as well.

>Early on, when they were still hyping the Xbone with the name styled
>as one word, I realized that "Xboxone" looks like one of those
>medications they advertise for cheap by anonymous bulk email. I can't
>decide if it's an antidepressant, a boner pill, or both.
>

The fun part is that there's still a bunch of people out there using the sarcastic anti-marketing nickname of "X Bone".

I'm half expecting that in a few years, once they've gotten the Scorpio (aka XBone Plus) to be the low end of the equation, they'll quietly retire the name XBox One.

>I wish medical technology hadn't backslid so spectacularly after the
>First World War. Those syringes that could instantly revive a gunshot
>fatality back to full fighting fitness would really come in
>handy nowadays.

The technology was banned after it caused the various Nazi Zombie outbreaks of the early 1940s.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

>>I wish medical technology hadn't backslid so spectacularly after the
>>First World War. Those syringes that could instantly revive a gunshot
>>fatality back to full fighting fitness would really come in
>>handy nowadays.
>
>The technology was banned after it caused the various Nazi Zombie
>outbreaks of the early 1940s.

Yes. Thank God and the U.S. Army for Captain Blazkowicz. :)

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."