Introduction

Isn't this like the 80th Battlefield game? Why Battlefield 1?

Battlefield has a weird problem with numbers. This is technically the 6th mainline BF game (not counting Battlefield: Bad Company series, Modern Combat, BF1943, Hardline or the play for free games which would bring the total to like 14 if I counted all the Play For Free games right) and so yeah, it's kind of weird that they decided to call it Battlefield 1 when the last numbered game to come out was BF4. The logic is that because the game has a World War 1 theme and World War I was the "dawn of all-out-war" as the game's marketing material will tell you, that this is the earliest logical setting for Battlefield. And hey, it's not like their first game was called Battlefield 1, so it checks out!

World War I as a setting? are you dying in a trench constantly?

Oh, yeah, we all remember this famous WWI incident:


If you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.

I wouldn't call this a WWI setting, I would call it a WWI theme. All the guns, vehicles, locations and so on are all ripped from WWI and the surrounding time period, but you'll see dozens of people running around with weapons that had a production run of 6 and guys firing machine guns that took three people to operate as if they weigh ten pounds in this game. A certain creative license was taken here. In truth, it's all for the best. The game is really fun with some great map design (and some garbage design) some great changes to the multiplayer, amazing visuals and other positive and negative points I'll be sharing through the Let's Play.

LP Format

I'm going to take you through the single player, which is now more of anthology series than a single story thread. It's surprisingly well done from that perspective even if the gameplay and AI can be a bit lacking at times. I'm also going to be doing a bunch of multiplayer videos. The first few are going to ease people in to the classes, vehicles and mechanics of the game and then we're going to be doing full matches with limited commentary/guests.

Will you teach me about WWI?
I'm not aiming to make the LP historically informative and I need to stress that. WWI is a really hot topic now. If you need some historical context The Great War YouTube channel is dedicated to going through WWI week by week 100 years after the events happened. They also do a bunch of videos on individuals, WWI life, weapons and tactics from WWI. I highly recommend watching at least some of these if you need a WWI fix. They also made some contributions to historical research for this game. If you are looking for a day-by-day writeup take a look at Trin Tragula's blog, which is doing just that. If you are more inclined to podcasts go listen to the exhaustive Hardcore History series Blueprint for Armageddon that covers the war and the leadup to it in great detail. I hope you have like 20 hours to spend on that. I can also recommend A World Undone which looks at the people and tactics (or lack thereof) that made WWI the mess that it was, but remains sort of high level with very little of the "life in the trenches" sort of stuff you may be expecting.

I will sprinkle little historical facts or whatever through the videos and maybe in the thread, but I am not an expert on WWI and don't claim to be. That said, I'm going to be talking to people about WWI later on in the LP. WWI is one of those conflicts that shaped a lot of things that came after it, yet it gets very little attention in US schools; mostly because the US barely got involved in the war before it was over. I thought it would be interesting to talk to people from countries far more involved in the war to discuss what they learned in school and how their country looks at the events leading up to WWI, the war itself and its aftermath.

Episodes

Multiplayer