October 21, 2016
Battlefield 1 is a 2016 first-person shooter game developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts. It is the fifteenth installment in the Battlefield series. It was released for PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, and Xbox One in October 2016. Battlefield 1 marked a departure for the series by setting the game in World War I. Its single-player mode, titled War Stories, explores the experiences of various soldiers across different theaters of the war, including the Western Front, the Italian Front, Gallipoli, and Arabia. Additionally, the game offers multiplayer gameplay marked by large-scale ground battles and intense aerial dogfights. Battlefield 1 received positive reviews from critics, who saw it as an improvement over the series' previous installments, Battlefield 4 and Battlefield Hardline. Most of the praise was directed towards its WWI setting, single-player campaigns, and multiplayer modes. The game was a commercial success, with estimated sales of over 15 million copies, and was followed by Battlefield V in 2018. Gameplay Similar to its predecessors, Battlefield 1 is a first-person shooter game that emphasizes teamwork. It is set in the period of World War I, and is inspired by historical events. Players can make use of World War I weapons, including bolt-action rifles, submachine guns, automatic and semi-automatic rifles, artillery, flamethrowers, and poison gas to combat opponents. Melee combat was reworked, with DICE introducing new melee weapons such as sabres, trench clubs, and shovels into the game. These melee weapons were divided into three groups: heavy, medium and light. Players can also take control of various armored vehicles, including light tanks, landships, heavy tanks, armored cars, cars, torpedo boats, bi- and tri-plane aircraft, armored trains, reconnaissance vehicles, dreadnoughts, M-class zeppelins, as well as ride horses to use in battle. Destructible environments and weapon customization, features present in the previous games, returned in Battlefield 1 and are more dynamic. The game's world designer, Daniel Berlin, said the campaign mode has larger and more open environments than those in previous installments in the franchise, with more options and choices in terms of paths to completing levels and how to approach combat. Players can control several characters in the campaign. If the player dies in the prologue, they will then take control of another soldier and role instead of reloading from a checkpoint. These roles can range from tank gunner to rifleman. Unlike its predecessors, the game features a collection of war stories, similar to an anthology. The game's multiplayer mode supports up to 64 players. The new squad system allows a group of players to enter and leave game servers together. According to Berlin, playing without joining a squad would make gameplay significantly more difficult. Multiplayer maps are based on several fronts of WWI around the world, including the Middle East, the Western Front, Gallipoli, and the Alps. Further expansions introduced the Eastern Front and Russian Civil War, as well as naval battles in the North Sea. The game launched with nine maps and six modes, which include Conquest, Domination, Operations, Rush, Team Deathmatch, and War Pigeons, a mode in which players must secure war pigeons and use them to call for an artillery strike.