Battlefield 1 Lead Designer Talks Origins Of Title, Hopes For The Game
Battlefield has long tried to overtake Call of Duty in the “war game” department. Despite being the original one, Call of Duty has surpassed it on many levels, despite some impressive games. But also, Battlefield games are now infamous for their releases, and the bugs that come with them. In an interview with GamesBeat, Lead Designer for Battlefield 1 Daniel Berlin talked about how the game came to be, and how they hope to improve from where Battlefield 4 failed.
“When we set out to create a new Battlefield game, we look at gameplay first. We need to support the main Battlefield pillars in terms of gameplay. There were a lot of people at DICE who’d wanted to go to this era for a long time. It’s a passion project for us this time around. DICE chose the setting. This is what we want to do.
Diving into the research around the era, it’s so rich. There are so many gameplay opportunities, so many different vehicles, so many weapons to make use of. It’s a common misconception that they were still just using single-shot rifles, and that’s not true. Everything you saw in the trailer, those were real weapons used by soldiers in this time period. Shotguns, pistols, automatic rifles, everything. It’s such a rich world, too, with so many locations. It’s not just Europe. It’s all over the place – the Dolomites, the Italian Alps, the deserts.”
As for the launch, DICE is taking a “live and learn” approach:
“We know it was a difficult launch. We’ve been working on this for a long time. We released Battlefront, which did really well. We’re pushing an open beta to ensure stability. We’ve taken a lot of learnings from that experience, and we feel like we succeeded with Battlefront. We’ll take everything we learned there and apply it to Battlefield One as well.”