I'm very intrigued. I've been more or less glued to BF since 2 and I'm eager to see what becomes of this. Hopefully the launch with be smooth. >_>

I was looking at the pre-order bonuses and I noticed this. Battlepacks in BF4 are basically blind boxes of weapon attachments and skins. How could a vehicle go in there? Vehicles aren't something you equip. Does anyone have any guesses as to what this could mean?

@hayt: Oh jesus, I hope this doesn't mean that Battlefield has been Battlefront-ified and vehicles are powerups you find on the field, with the type you get dependent on your loadout.

@adequatelyprepared: I had thought that but how would the multi-person vehicles work then? Some youtubers also mentioned that there are dedicated driver and pilot classes, which wouldn't make sense with power ups either. I wish DICE would just share the info but if it's anything like Battlefronts marketing everyone will be in the dark until the beta or until someone leaks something.

Oh just a note re: those youtubers. Just know they are basically owned by EA at this point. They get early behind the scenes access and DICE asks for their opinions on gameplay and such and they get to put out videos with their hot exclusive info before anyone else can. It's called the "EA Game Changers Program". That link is regarding Battlefront but if you go to their twitters you can see they have the same position for Battlefield 1. So their information is accurate but just know they're not going to end up being terribly critical.

There's a twitch archive of the stream (skip the first 6 hours as that's just filler to the main event) https://www.twitch.tv/battlefield/v/64886482

There's a little bit of devs talking about the game and it says a lot about the state of gaming that they bring up 2 devs and a fucking youtuber to talk about the game.

I could go for a historical shooter right about now.

@hayt: hope they aren't stupid enough to do this, they must know that the battlefield crowd didn't like this in battlefront

@hayt: EA has quite an extensive network of youtubers around them through that Ronku thing or whatever. It's basicly their marketing strategy to give the youtubers (who I guess are more connected to their target audience and might look more independent?) the exclusive scoops to look less of an evil publisher looking down from their ivory tower. (although in reality it might be more rotten than the more conventional marketing and press events)

@gundogan: yeah I was a bit alarmed when it was revealed that the Game Changer youtubers had been giving feedback about the game but also posting speculation videos leading up to the reveal even though they knew what the game was.

As a huge battlefield fan the trailer didn't do anything for me. After Hardline and Battlefront this isn't what I wanted from the next proper battlefield game. I'm still willing to wait for gameplay before I make up my mind but my initial gut reaction is that I want no part of this. WW1 just doesn't seem like an interesting setting and neither does the new emphasis on melee weapons

This trailer makes me think of Codename Eagle.

I'm pretty sure there'll be more than enough guns and explosives in the game to make it more "interesting". The more than 15 million people that died in those 4 years weren't all killed by shovels and sharp sticks after all.

Bear in mind also that it was a global conflict so the opportunities for incredibly varied locales are high. I doubt it'll be solely concentrating on the trenches of the better known places like the Somme and Flanders. There's even a shot of a desert in the trailer with a cavalry charge, for goodness sake. (Which should provide an answer to the people I hear asking "Why did they shoe-horn an 'African American' man onto the cover?")

Also remember that there were fierce aerial and naval battles going on as well (some of the largest naval battles ever seen in fact) that even included submarines and aircraft carriers. Not to mention the tanks, massive railguns and artillery batteries, armoured cars, zeppelins, manned balloons used as spotting positions (that'll probably be this game's UAV analogue), catapult grenade launchers(!), flamethrowers etc. etc.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I think DICE can probably be trusted to, at the very least, create a game that involves a lot more than just running down a trench and hitting the enemy with a spiked club.

I, for one, am more than a little intrigued to find out what they come up with.

@wacomole: I'm interested to see what they do and I'll probably buy it and the season pass regardless but it's just a bunmer. I'm the only person on the planet not burned out on future shooters. After the last dlc for bf4 that had hover tanks, mech factories and ODST-like drop pods I was hoping for some of that.

@wacomole: The confirmed locations are Italian alps, Arabian desert and France but one of the people at the event said they saw what looked like a beachhead like D-Day. If I had to guess I'd say that would be Gallipoli.

@wacomole: Not sure about your point of the African American. He's part of the US' Hellfighters which joined in the last few months of the war.

Still seems kind of shoehorned to me. I get that they're trying to sell to American audiences, but still...

I'm incredibly excited for the ability to ride horses in a FPS game. I'd be even more excited if I could spawn as a horse because that'd make me laugh all day long, but I think that'd be asking too much.

If this stays true to the feel of the trailer, this is going to be something new and fun within the FPS genre. I can't think of any WW1 multiplayer shooters off the top of my head; certainly not a AAA-budget title. I've visited WW2, modern, and speculative future shooters enough that I'm more than ready to throw all my money at a different war.

Ugh, so many "Reaction" videos popped on the watch next queue. I don't want to live anymore.

That being said, looks neat. Want to see more.

I would love if they had a WW1 Steam Punk DLC pack, like the Vietnam DLC content for Bad Company 2.

Watching the trailer just now, something clicked for me.

I'm making my peace with the fact that Battlefield is doing a jingoistic, fun depiction of WW1, with a few shocks in the campaign to show that they still know war is hell. It's the COD4 formula to a T - and I'm okay with that.

And the reason is, it will still drive awareness of what the great war was in a way that the likes of Valiant Hearts and Verdun cannot. The youtube video already has 28 MILLION views.

If you think for a second - that trailer enticing you to buy the game actually matches up pretty well with the glorious, chivalric attitudes about war and soldiering that were prevalent before 1914. The Dub-step and Shovel-swinging stuff is certainly there to relate to modern fps fans, but it has its historical analogues. Back then they had their marching songs like 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary,' and bagpipers, drummers, and cavalry wielding lances and sabres were being sent on offensives, before the generals realized how useless melee and morale boosting had become.

That was before the trenches, the railways, the mud, and the machine-gun turned the conflict into the pointless waste of life that it was. On the podcast, Jeff talked about how WW2 was important as the first truly mechanized war, where the weapons worked better. But WW1 was the first industrialized war, and the first 'total' war, where any and all resources the nations had were fed into the conflict. The weapons of the time certainly worked well enough to make hell on earth.

Even if they don't go all Spec Ops: The line with this game's campaign - it's still a big budget, wide-release title that has needed to exist for a long time. To exist, it has to be fun mechanically as a video game, and being reasonable, that means they must pick and choose which FPS conventions get broken for the sake of historical accuracy, and vice versa. However the game turns out, it'll still translate into more downloads of Hardcore History. It'll still lead to better understanding.

That's how you cut a fucking trailer!

Loved it, watched it like 10+ times, it was that good.

@adequatelyprepared: @hayt: Whether or not they screw it up by adding Battlefront type cards you can at least count on the fact that if you want to play it even remotely seriously you'll have to buy Premium. It's been that way since Bf3.

@hassun: would you say? If you were to say DLC weapons tend to be slower to be balanced properly I'd agree but nothing about premium really makes you better at the game than people without. You get DLC a week early but considering these are games people play for 100s of hours that really makes no difference. The extra skins and xp boosters likewise don't matter at all.

@hayt: Most forms of progression in Bf3 and Bf4 are boosted by being premium. I don't expect this to change. E.g. I remember having matches in Bf3 where I was the MVP but others got the related rewards instead just because they had a premium boost. + the amount of items you get with your gold battlepacks and stuff can give you a very real competitive edge on the competition because they will probably have to grind long and hard to get the equivalent free attachments and whatnot.

@hassun: I'm confused now. You said you need premium to play anywhere close to competitively but your chief complaint has to do with not being awarded mvp when coming first? Surely being MVP is proof against this suggestion. Secondly considering that booster xp is awarded after all other match awards (including mvp ribbon) I'm very surprised it would award it to someone other than the top scorer but it could happen. As for battlepacks, again the attachments in those aren't a huge deal. No game has been won or lost on cantered ironsights. By the time you're playing competitively you can probably get 100 kills on a gun very quickly. The one thing that does make a huge difference is vehicle perks. Those are totally stacked in favour of people who already have them all and will make a game winning difference sometimes. That's something I hope the lower tech of WW1 might address but we shall see.

@hayt: Not really 'needed to be competitive' but more like 'you're a second-class citizen if you don't have it'. The unlocks can definitely be very useful and then there are things like priority in the server queues. I'm not sure if that's still a thing but it definitely was something that went around when I was still playing.

And yes the XP bonus was awarded at the end before the awards and ribbons. At least in bf3. I never played bf4 without premium due to having learnt my lesson with 3.

DICE and EA are definitely not your friend when it comes to that stuff.

I will third this if you want to understand why this war is considered different from other wars, probably more so here in Europe as most countries here really focus on it in our history lessons for obvious reasons. There's a particular futility and pointlessly repeating horror to it.

It's even still killing people in recent times thanks to the 'Iron Harvest'. There are parts of France considered far too dangerous to farm due to unexploded conventional and chemical ordnance, and some where plants just won't grow due to the amount of poisons and chemicals remaining in the ground.

As for the game, well I'm sure it'll be a Battlefield shooter with all the dumb fun those have. But it really won't and can't be about WWI in any meaningful way other than at a cartoonish surface level, so it might as well be pure fantasy or steam punk.

Good point but they could still easily focus on the war in Europe and find a good number of soldiers from all corners of the globe. England and France had huge Empires at the time, and as well as using colonial troops in other theatres, brought them to the Western front to fight as there was a constant struggle for man power due to the high casualty rates.

In addition to the 90,000 troupes indigènes already under arms when the war started, France recruited between 1914 and 1918 nearly 500,000 colonial troops, including 166,000 West Africans, 46,000 Madagascans, 50,000 Indochinese, 140,000 Algerians, 47,000 Tunisians and 24,300 Moroccans. Most of these French colonial troops served in Europe.

[...]

The British had regularly used colonial troops for imperial defence, but not in Europe or against other white races. Indian troops were not allowed to fight in the Boer War in South Africa (1899 – 1902). If a ‘coloured’ man were trained to raise arms against another European, what guarantee was there, so the racial thinking went, that he would not one day attack his own white master? However, after heavy casualties were suffered by the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914, two Indian divisions were diverted to France. Among the colonial non-white troops of the British empire, only Indians were allowed to fight in Europe. This was predominantly due to racial categorisation in British military policy.

Both quotes from this article on colonial troops.

Looks great. Love the name. Yes, Dan Carlin's podcast comes highly recommended. As longs as the servers are stable and it does not come out broken....battlefield 4. I will pick this up on PC.

@kosayn: If DICE has put even half the thought into their campaign as you have in your well-written post, I'll be very pleased. I'm looking forward to what they do with the WWI setting.

Part of me doesn't want WW1 to be sexed up and made to look cool. I'd say the same for WWII (and all wars I guess), but too much of the history taught and movies like Saving Private Ryan have given us a heroic vision of WWII. WWI shouldn't be made to look cool. There's not even a cool villain to hate. War is a racket. Everyone sucked and the poor saps in the trenches suffered. We already forget history and repeat it enough as it is.

This doesn't mean I'm against violent video games, but imo there are some important historical lessons in WWI and WWII and Vietnam and Korea and etc etc that are not awesome or radical.

I'm ok with Doom, because it's so silly. Halo is super not real. Real wars had some real bad shit happen that gets made to look neat and fun. We're not honoring the memory of those that suffered by making their suffering look like it was part of a cool battle with zeppelins. /shrug

@memonk: Hear hear! I also loved the Wrath of the Khans series.

@wwen: I think i feel the same way, probably why i never really got into COD and Battlefield until they got further from reality and actual conflicts. I like COD's new future games and i honestly never played through a battlefield campaign at all but the last few games seemed like made up conflicts even if based on reality. My grandfather (RIP) was an african american marine who survived the battle of Okinawa, i got uncles that survived Vietnam, and friends who survived Iraq and Afghanistan.

@wwen: I agree with what you're saying. WWI was fucking brutal. I think that's one of the reasons I liked the Brothers in Arms series. They never tried to fancy up war, but tried to give you a sense of what it is like to be part of a squad and losing your friends.

Not since the launch trailer for Red Dead Redemption, the official trailer for Skyrim, and the Dark Soul's Bartholomew trailer, have I been so excited by a piece of marketing. Not only does it confirm that they are working on a game set during one of my favourite epochs and that it's a game in a series I've been playing since it began, but it's simply a fantastically constructed and sounding trailer. Its 1 minute presentation is so dense that internet history channel, The Great War, has been able to make a 15 minute video analyzing it. If you're curious about the accuracy of the trailer or about The First World War at all, definitely check out that video and the others on their channel. Holy hell, I cannot wait for Battlefield 1.