I'm not entirely sure if that's the best way to phrase what I'm getting at here, and the answer might just be "well duh, dummy." But I noticed something while playing through the Battlefield 1 campaign for the first time over the past couple days. I'm playing it right after beating the Titanfall 2 campaign, and while the latter was thoroughly awesome in its own right, I'm trying to figure out what it is that got me so immediately hooked on the Battlefield 1 campaign (aside from sucking at the flying missions. Seriously how is it possible to fly into enemy/friendly planes 3 lives in a row? The sky is huge...)

From a purely gameplay perspective, Battlefield 1 doesn't really do anything that hasn't been done before. Granted, I still have to finish the last two war stories (which is definitely a cool, fresh way to format a single player experience), but I doubt there will be anything mechanically groundbreaking in them. We've all played games with tanks and planes before, as well as the "choose your own method of approaching this enemy camp" style of level design. And as far as missions go, the "protect this tank", "escort these bombers", and "go find these four spread out items" aren't revelations either. But there were several points in the first couple stories where I was just so mentally locked in to my character and what I was doing on screen. It should be noted that all of these moments occurred outside of vehicles, and mostly when my character was alone.

I've played first person shooters since my dad (probably mistakenly) showed me Serious Sam at a young age. The concept of going from area to area, pointing gun, firing gun, isn't new to me. And I definitely agree with some aspects of the notion that many FPS games, especially campaigns, all start to blend together in terms of level design and fundamental gameplay mechanics. And I wouldn't fully exempt Battlefield 1 from that argument either. Like I said it doesn't really do anything groundbreaking. But something clicked in my brain while playing this game only about an hour or so in.

After watching the first couple well-acted, beautifully rendered cutscenes, I was sent alone to find replacement spark plugs for my broken down tank, Black Bess. These spark plugs are scattered throughout several enemy camps in the area, and there are well-placed windmills that serve as perfect scouting locations for the camps. I found myself slowly creeping around the windmill, carefully climbing the steps to the top, where I spotted the handful of enemies down below. After sniping a few of them with the silenced sniper conspicuously placed in the windmill, I cautiously headed down to grab the spark plugs. I mistakenly thought I was alone, and I heard the voice of a solider in the house nearby. I quickly hid and assessed the situation. He was inside the building to my right, talking to a soldier outside, but I didn't know exactly where he was. They were both obscured from my vantage point in the windmill, but luckily they were far enough away that they didn't hear me snipe the other soldiers. I decided to enter the house and try to knock him out (or shove a hatchet in his face, same thing). I quietly crouch-walked through a room to the left, right as he walked through the door to my right. It was dark so I couldn't fully make out my surroundings, but as I turned around and walked back the way I came, I came face to face with the rather surprised German soldier. Before he could react, I broke his face...right in front of the window that the outside soldier was staring at. I instinctively switched to my silenced sniper and fired before he could get off a shot, the bullet shattering the glass window pane on its way to his forehead. And then it was all over...

I immediately had the urge to record the clip on Xbox. I watched it again this morning and honestly it doesn't look that cool. But it represents something vastly different from the way I would normally play a typical FPS. I'm one of those players who will often reload a checkpoint if I alert an enemy or miss a sniper shot, which always deadens the feeling of vulnerability for my character (if I can just restart, who cares if I die). Or, on the flip side, I would skip the sniper spot, and sprint through the map lazily killing enemies without any particular concern for my safety or whether I'm being sneaky, knowing that I can just respawn if I die. Those mindsets are completely absent when I play Battlefield 1, despite it being a pretty standard mission based shooter. The reason for this subconscious shift, is the graphical and audio fidelity.

This seed is first planted by the cutscenes which look stunning and are acted really well. But then there's the in-game visuals and sound. The reason I climbed that windmill is simply because my brain saw that not as an in-game gimmicky spot to snipe these lifeless AI enemies in a vaguely farm-like map, but rather as an actual windmill in actual France, where my actual character would use his actual legs to climb the actually creaky steps to the actually lethal sniper where he would use his actual eyes to watch the actual footsteps of the actual feet of these actually human enemies. That's what it felt like, without me thoroughly realizing it at the time. This kind of immersion is exactly what sucked me into The Last of Us so much, but it's even more effective because of its first-person nature. If this game came out in the last generation, I probably would have just sprinted up the windmill without thinking and quickly shot the enemies to run and grab some item for some reason I've already forgotten about, following orders from whatshisname. But with the graphics, sound, and voice acting being what they were, I had a purpose. My character was alive. I was Edwards, I was the driver! McManus just ditched me and I need to find these four spark plugs to breathe life back into Black Bess and save my buddy Townsend. It all felt so real. I'm not trying to get up my own ass and sound all metaphysical here, I knew the whole time I was playing a video game, but the feeling was so effective and lingering. And that effect continued into the next two stories. I felt like I cared about my characters, their stories, and their mortality in a way I usually don't for FPS games. The fact that the graphics and sound were enough to completely change my mental approach and play style for what is mechanically a very familiar game, is all the proof in the world: the video game medium is one of the most powerful creative expressions, capable of invoking the full spectrum of human emotion, on par with film, music, art, and literature, yet still proudly standing in a league of its own.

If you got through this whole post, thank you very much for taking the time to read it!

Cheers,

Alex