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 Ratius wrote:
Im a BF nut. Like since 1942. The more of these alpha videos I watch the more I think Im going to chuck money at it - continuously.

TL;DR. Unless it has some serious netcode/MP issues ala BF2142 or bf3 Im in!

Kudos to Dice - less so to EA for the release price.....

The price is the same as any other game, unless you decide to go for the "Early Enlister" edition--which adds a bit of DLC that will release later and is mostly cosmetic/early access to stuff that unlocks via the game.

Same as Battlefront and Battlefield 4.

Not from what I recall - bf4, had premium, deluxe, basic and added DLC content - SC, NA, DT etc.
I have no problem with decent added DLC - naval assault was brilliant imo but dragons teeth was not, CR was ok and 2nd assualt was blah bar gulf of oman & firestorm.
I.e. for the basic BF5 EA will charge "X" but what "X" contains is another debate....

Still I do love the bf series so.....

Gotcha; you're talking about the Premium Pass.

Sure it's expensive; but I don't think there was not a single thing in BF3 or BF4's Premium I didn't enjoy. Even the new game modes, while tiresome after a bit, were fun and nice to go back to every so often.

Also worth noting, I still sign in on occasion on the XB1 and get new Gold Battleboxes for Premium. That's a nice little perk that they didn't have to keep doing.

I've watched the videos and as much as I want to be excited I just can't be. Hardline felt like a one year filler between BF4 and the next big Battlefield launch, and for me this game isn't it.

 trexmeyer wrote:
The real question is: Can I be the Red Baron in a steampunk plane with rockets?

You can be the Red Baron with a pre-order customization DLC code. No rockets or steampunk plane though.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I've watched the videos and as much as I want to be excited I just can't be. Hardline felt like a one year filler between BF4 and the next big Battlefield launch, and for me this game isn't it..

What would you have preferred then? Another modern military shooter? WW2? Vietnam? Or is it something with the gameplay itself that you dislike?

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
What would you have preferred then? Another modern military shooter? WW2? Vietnam? Or is it something with the gameplay itself that you dislike?

For me there is an immersion breaking juxtaposition that a war famous for it's trench to trench battles, no man's land, tunnel raids has been turned into (from the footage that we have seen) fighting in villages with weapons that were rare at the time now incredibly common place, with weapon attachments and sights that either did not exist or existed only in the most minuscule quantities being available wholesale. We are seeing firearms like the machine guns that were overwhelmingly in static positions and often crew serviced now man portable. It feels like we are trying to take a largely static conflict and paste it into an FPS.

I understand that there were some engagements that took place in villages and the like, but over the course of the war that became the exception. I also understand that this is still in it's closed alpha testing stages and that the game may evolve over time.

Given the nature of the conflict in WWI I felt that it was best reflected in an RTS/TBS strategy game where you build your trenches and defenses up over time, develop new weapons and vehicles by expending resources as you capture strategically significant locations, uncover new strategies/special abilities/buffs against enemies with combat in no man's land (reflecting veteran status of units, learning more about enemy tactics and capabilities, etc.), and have different classes of soldiers so you can launch a trench raid on the northern flank to distract your opponent while your sappers dig a tunnel and plant explosives under his base to allow a small team to carry out a decapitation strike. Then you have the possibility of teams of opposing sappers digging into each other.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ratius wrote:
Not from what I recall - bf4, had premium, deluxe, basic and added DLC content - SC, NA, DT etc.
I have no problem with decent added DLC - naval assault was brilliant imo but dragons teeth was not, CR was ok and 2nd assualt was blah bar gulf of oman & firestorm.
I.e. for the basic BF5 EA will charge "X" but what "X" contains is another debate....

Still I do love the bf series so.....

I think that is part of a trend with developers now that $40-50 gets you the basic game, but $100 get you the game, all DLC, and some perks. Ubisoft have done something similar with Rainbow 6 Siege and The Division.

Yeah some of the machine guns were so heavy in the war they were like 30 pounds if I recall and required 2-3 people to carry and set them up.

I hope there is at least one or two trench maps. Truth be told all we have seen is the one map. So hopefully there is more variety.

 Gamgee wrote:
Yeah some of the machine guns were so heavy in the war they were like 30 pounds if I recall and required 2-3 people to carry and set them up.

I hope there is at least one or two trench maps. Truth be told all we have seen is the one map. So hopefully there is more variety.

While the Lewis Gun was a more manageable 13 kilo (unloaded) that is still a lot to carry around. The MG08 weighed 65 kilos without water for the barrel cooling system and was serviced by a four man crew. The Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr anti-tank rifle was 18.5 kilo and intended to be operated by a two man crew.

By comparison the M249 is 10 kilo loaded.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

While the Lewis Gun was a more manageable 13 kilo (unloaded) that is still a lot to carry around. The MG08 weighed 65 kilos without water for the barrel cooling system and was serviced by a four man crew. The Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr anti-tank rifle was 18.5 kilo and intended to be operated by a two man crew.

But could be used by a single infantryman if necessary.

The whole reason the T-Gewehr had a "two man crew" was because one guy carried the ammo while the other carried the rifle. Both were trained to fire the weapon.
The same thing goes for the MG08; it had a four man crew on paper but could be utilized with degrees of effectiveness with less.

But that's not how they were intended to be used nor how they were used in practice the vast majority of the time.

Which is the issue a lot of folk have with BF1; it's not the fact a thing is present that's the issue, it's that the thing is present at such a disproportionate quantity compared to WW1 in reality and alongside so many other things with similarly disproportionate involvement, that it doesn't look or play like a WW1 game at all but rather a WW2 game.

So the question then becomes; if you can't make a WW1 game and still have it play "like a Battlefield game", why not just make a WW2 game?

I loved 1942, I'd have been super-happy with BF1944, but if they pitch "Battlefield in WW1" then that's what I want to play, not a reskinned WW2 game. They didn't need to turn the game into a realistic sim game like Verdun to do a BF-WW1 game any more than they had to turn the game into ARMA to do BF3 & 4. I mean come on, they didn't even do something as low-effort as make basic unscoped bolt actions an all-kit weapon; 3 out of 4 classes have no choice but to use auto or semiauto weapons.

Well I won't argue with that, I too don't like how prevalent automatic weapons seem to be. But from what I hear, the smgs are very short ranged, and inaccurate at long range, which should hopefully make sure that rifles are not made obsolete.

 Kanluwen wrote:
The whole reason the T-Gewehr had a "two man crew" was because one guy carried the ammo while the other carried the rifle. Both were trained to fire the weapon.

So when I spawn do I get the rifle without the ammo, or do I get the ammo without the rifle?

 Kanluwen wrote:
The same thing goes for the MG08; it had a four man crew on paper but could be utilized with degrees of effectiveness with less.

I guess in the case of a one man crew wholly ineffective is a degree of effectiveness

 Yodhrin wrote:
But that's not how they were intended to be used nor how they were used in practice the vast majority of the time.

Which is the issue a lot of folk have with BF1; it's not the fact a thing is present that's the issue, it's that the thing is present at such a disproportionate quantity compared to WW1 in reality and alongside so many other things with similarly disproportionate involvement, that it doesn't look or play like a WW1 game at all but rather a WW2 game.

So the question then becomes; if you can't make a WW1 game and still have it play "like a Battlefield game", why not just make a WW2 game?

I loved 1942, I'd have been super-happy with BF1944, but if they pitch "Battlefield in WW1" then that's what I want to play, not a reskinned WW2 game. They didn't need to turn the game into a realistic sim game like Verdun to do a BF-WW1 game any more than they had to turn the game into ARMA to do BF3 & 4. I mean come on, they didn't even do something as low-effort as make basic unscoped bolt actions an all-kit weapon; 3 out of 4 classes have no choice but to use auto or semiauto weapons.

I have to say that this is where I am too

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Well I won't argue with that, I too don't like how prevalent automatic weapons seem to be. But from what I hear, the smgs are very short ranged, and inaccurate at long range, which should hopefully make sure that rifles are not made obsolete.

From the info we have, it doesn't matter - Assault gets SMGs and Shotguns. Medic gets Semiauto rifles. Support gets MGs. Only Recon gets bolt-action rifles, and by all accounts they're only any good when used scoped as sniper rifles.

If DICE were serious about making a WW1 game, the all-kit weapon should have been a selection of close-to-medium range unscoped bolt action rifles, and all other weapons should have been balanced around that baseline as either sidegrades or situational upgrades. Instead, they started with the BF4 kits and thought "how can we shoehorn a WW1-ish skin onto these?", and as a result players don't seem to be even being given the option to play the game in a thematically-appropriate way.

I was already teetering on the brink of not buying this after the Battlefront debacle, the public beta will have to be seriously impressive to sway me now we have actual info about the game.

I'm just going to leave this here for being absolutely hilarious and saddening in equal measure. Hype culture is awesome!

Contribution to the thread here: I feel like BF1 isn't doing any particularly special to merit me buying it. It's essentially levelling at us gameplay and mechanics that are extremely similar to games coming after BF3 from what I can tell, with a WW1 skin over the whole thing. Granted that skin looks fantastic, but when you peel it back you just get the same dinner lady who's been serving you sloppy roast dinner on Wednesdays for years.

Plus I'm in no position to trust DICE's abilities in making a content rich experience after Battlefront; most people gave that a free pass because it was Star Wars, which is insane considering how few weapons, maps and worthwhile game modes there were in the core game, with anything worthwhile being split into DLC that will divide the community and lower the lifespan of the game

Apologies if it has been mentioned already, but Verdun is your go to if you want a realistic and immersive WW1 FPS




Does it look as good as BF1 on the surface? Hell no. But I'd buy and play that kind of experience far and away over what BF1 has offered us so far.

G.A

See that's the thing though, I didn't need BF1 to be realistic even to the level of Verdun, any more than I needed BF4 to be realistic to the degree of ARMA. For my money, it just had to make the minimum possible effort and at least allow me to play the game in a thematically appropriate way.

Nobody sane was expecting a "proper" WW1 game, but I think initially most people were at least expecting the baseline weapon of the game to be the same as the baseline weapon for the actual war.

 Yodhrin wrote:
See that's the thing though, I didn't need BF1 to be realistic even to the level of Verdun, any more than I needed BF4 to be realistic to the degree of ARMA. For my money, it just had to make the minimum possible effort and at least allow me to play the game in a thematically appropriate way.

Nobody sane was expecting a "proper" WW1 game, but I think initially most people were at least expecting the baseline weapon of the game to be the same as the baseline weapon for the actual war.

I don't think I was expecting that either; apologies for my wordsmithing, but I was leaning more to saying that a game like Verdun will offer gameplay that better suits a WW1 theme. From what I see so far from BF1, it looks like a simple reskin of a Battlefield game, the only difference is the weapon roster and variety is a lot different. Granted that could result in a much different experience, but right now it looks samey to me.

This isn't to say that BF1 will be a bad game, in the same way that the CoD franchise in recent memory haven't made bad games (apart from Ghosts). They're tired and thus potentially very boring for previous comers to the franchise, but not bad. I'm sure plenty of people who are new or fairly new to the franchise, or who even don't feel tired of the gameplay, will have plenty of fun with it. But for me, I don't think it will merit my money or time. That, and I found a really funny YouTuber by the name of Squire who plays a lot of Verdun, and it has me hooked

I do have to add as well that that collectors edition is one of the worst things I've seen in game marketing if it is truly real.

G.A

Just give me 2143 already. I want my giant ED209s back.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:

 The Grumpy Eldar wrote:
It's an alternate version of WW1. Not the real WW1

I don't think this was confirmed?

Either way, Battlefield 1 = Battlefield won, eh?

Anyone with even a 30 second briefing on WWI could tell you this is clearly an Alternate history game.

...

My guess would be that this game takes place in 1919 onwards. Either the Americans stayed out of the war (and knowing EA, that's pretty unlikely) or the German's counteroffensive in 1918 worked, when Russian pulled out and allowed hundreds of thousands of Germans to reinforce the Western front.

This could be awesome, alternate history WWI has a lot of interesting potential and if done correctly could be a lot of fun.

100% based on an enormous leap in logic and conjecture with absolutely nothing to support any of these claims.

Them showing a tank moving at excessive speed and German troops walking around in heavy armor and machine goes does not make it "alternate reality WW1", it just makes it an exaggerated WW1. AND, in fact, DICE has said that it is *NOT* an alternate history:

Battlefield 1 is based on authentic World War I history and doesn't feature any alternate history elements, according to DICE lead game designer Daniel Berlin. "Battlefield 1 is definitely rooted in history. There's no alternate mix of anything else. All the stuff you see is equipment that was available. All the vehicles you see were available at this time. This is our depiction through a modern lens, looking at World War One, the Great War," Berlin said in an interview with GamesBeat.

Read more: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/52048/battlefield-1-rooted-history-based-alternate-ww1-timeline/index.html

Artistic liberty DNE alternate reality.

Open Beta is live now.

There's a lot more bolt actions and they're pretty heavily spread out in classes.

Additionally, the "German troops walking around in heavy armor" are an Elite class called the Sentry. The MGs you're seeing walked around are the "light weight" variants and they overheat really quick if you fire sustained.

Funny enough, I put the beta on mainly to confirm my suspicions that the game would do nothing for me, I actually ended up enjoy what I played immensely. The game is visually just beautiful, seems well-balanced (or at least, tanks and aircraft aren't dominating like I thought they might) and as much as some of the weapon choices/types seem a bit out of place (I still think bolt actions should be the standard for most classes, with semi-autos rare and machine guns rarer), the gameplay itself is very enjoyable (even if I am crap at it!)

The 'dogfighting' such as it is is awesome, those planes are slow and clumsy but they feel just right. Definitely plan to grab aircraft whenever I can.

So the same floaty gameplay that is apparently mandatory for every battlefield game with absolutely no attempt to make the game even slightly in keeping with the period. There are some nice little touches like needing to unzoom the sniper rifle to work the bolt but they seem lost in the same old beige gunplay.

As a game its basically Starwars: Battlefront but without the heroes and vehicle pick ups. Woo?

Also the state of the beta is terrible, its virtually impossible to connect to a game, I have been trying periodically all evening and I have managed a grand total of 1 game..

Put a few hours into the beta and the game seems alright, graphics and sound are amazing but IMO they couldn't have chosen a worse fething map for the beta. There's a single small town roughly in the centre of the map but outside of that almost every other control point is just stupidly open with very little actual cover for infantry. So you're constantly spawning with either snipers immediately shooting at you or a tank coming through for those easy kills.

I've played 5 hours or so total in the past 3 days and im already bored of the map, there's nothing really special about it and it plays out the same almost every single round. Being a medic now sucks too, to revive somebody they have to actually choose the option to be revived otherwise you can't interact with them at all. Most people just hold space bar to respawn instead of giving you a chance, in all my game play I've revived a grand total of two people and it wasn't from lack of trying...

I'm really hoping that EA will release the original alpha map St. Quentin's Scar during the second half of the beta, I'm still on the fence about spending $100 on this game and from all the YouTube videos I've seen it looks so much more fun than Senai Desert.

Yeah, I do want to see another map (is that one you mention the Western Front one with the windmill and zeppelin ect?), this one was perhaps released first simply as there's less preconceptions about the war in Asia whereas a lot of people would see a France/Belgium map and assume it's just trenches and machine guns and empty blown up fields...

Still having a blast with it, I'm fine with it being very similar to Battlefront as I really enjoy that as well, and the slower pace makes it much more accessible that the modern-day shooters where basically, if someone sees you and gets their gun on you, there's nothing you can really do about it. In this, you've usually got a chance to dive for cover, even if that's just a shell hole or boulder, unless you're hit by a full-auto at point blank range or a headshot.

Silent Puffin? wrote:So the same floaty gameplay that is apparently mandatory for every battlefield game with absolutely no attempt to make the game even slightly in keeping with the period. There are some nice little touches like needing to unzoom the sniper rifle to work the bolt but they seem lost in the same old beige gunplay.

You do know that this "nice little touch" has been standard in Battlefield games since BF2 right?

It's why I despised the addition of the "Straight Pull Bolt" in BF3+4. It made it so that you could fire a bolt action sniper rifle without unzooming.

As a game its basically Starwars: Battlefront but without the heroes and vehicle pick ups. Woo?

There are "heroes" in the sense of the Elite classes. There's several chances for players to get them(I know of at least one at objective Edward, the "Pick up Tankgewehr" turns you into the Tank Hunter Elite class).

Also the state of the beta is terrible, its virtually impossible to connect to a game, I have been trying periodically all evening and I have managed a grand total of 1 game..

That's not really something they can control. Apparently they got DDoS'd yesterday.

I got a few games in yesterday afternoon then EA Online was down for most of the rest of the day.

Mr Gutsy wrote:Put a few hours into the beta and the game seems alright, graphics and sound are amazing but IMO they couldn't have chosen a worse fething map for the beta. There's a single small town roughly in the centre of the map but outside of that almost every other control point is just stupidly open with very little actual cover for infantry. So you're constantly spawning with either snipers immediately shooting at you or a tank coming through for those easy kills.

That sounds a bit like an issue with the player base if I'm gonna be honest. It's ALWAYS the case that you get people who gravitate toward snipers because they assume they're super leet.

I've played 5 hours or so total in the past 3 days and im already bored of the map, there's nothing really special about it and it plays out the same almost every single round. Being a medic now sucks too, to revive somebody they have to actually choose the option to be revived otherwise you can't interact with them at all. Most people just hold space bar to respawn instead of giving you a chance, in all my game play I've revived a grand total of two people and it wasn't from lack of trying...

I will agree with this, but with a caveat.

I tap out because even calling for a medic? The four or five hours of gameplay I've got in the open beta right now...I've never gotten a revive. Even when there was a Medic literally on top of me.

Revives don't really matter though any more, it's not saving the team a ticket, and unless you literally fall over in cover right next to a medic there's no real point in putting their rifle away long enough to revive you.

At least, that's what I'm told, because apparently the game simply won't run on my PC. At first it just crashed immediately when a game began loading, so I grabbed the "game ready" driver update from Nvidia and ho-lordy, what a colossal fething faff that was - seriously, this is the "simple, easy, just works" graphics drivers Green Team fans were harping on about while I've been running ATI cards all these years? It failed to install four times and when it finally worked I had to recalibrate my bloody monitor from scratch. That 1080 sure was money well spent

All of which was pointless effort regardless, since it bought me a grand total of ten seconds of actual game before it crashed again, except now when it does it locks up my whole system and requires me to restart.

Crikey even the Battlefront beta, shonky as it was, was playable and that was on my older setup with a creaking, about-to-fail 7970 under the hood.

Yeah yeah, "it's a beta hurp durp", but lets be real here EA FPS betas are intended as marketing stunts not genuine tests of anything other than their server infrastructure, if they've not fixed bugs so severe they cause complete system lock ups on modern hardware odds are the launch is going to be a gakshow - this reeks of BF4, I pity anyone who's fallen for it and preordered.

 Kanluwen wrote:

You do know that this "nice little touch" has been standard in Battlefield games since BF2 right?

Evidently not. Battlefront is not a series that I am familiar with and the few times I have played it I wasn't a sniper. The sole reason that I played this game is because it was a free beta and I was curious as to just how badly the history has been mangled (the answer is:very).

This is not ticking any boxes for me.
No tickets on conquest just encourages a spawn, charge or camp, die and then carry on stance with no real encouragment to actually stay alive or keep your team alive.
Weapons, enough said already I think...
Aircraft - Need more time in them but so far not that impressed.
Rush I have yet to try - reserving judgement for now there.
Does it feel like WW1? No, not in a million years.
And why on earth are cavalry harder to take out than a tank? Anyone charging head first on horseback at someone deserves to die, not survive despite taking five hits and then just running the target down.

Beta has worked more or less flawlessly for me, really enjoyed playing so far, not to say Im entirely happy with it (needs more bolt action & semi-automatic rifles, less SMG's, and lets just pretend that its impossible to fire an lmg from the hip, shall we?), but I'm probably going to preorder the game now that I've put a few hours into it.

I didn't quite care for the game at first, but recently after watching a few videos of the gameplay and the solo campaign trailer I'm quite hyped. I don't really mind the more "dynamic" setting with SMGs everywhere and stuff, because to me it helps packing some action. I'm no Battlefield player but I think it's the watermark of the series to have massive maps packed with action, static trench warfare wouldn't be in the spirit of the series and I think the Battlefield veterans wouldn't take this change easily. Personnaly I think I'll try a bit of every class (I don't really know how the class mechanics works) to have a taste of what's available and what I'll face, then settle for a good ol' bayoneted bolt-action rifle to fight mid/long range with suicidal charges on well-aware enemies.

And to be fair the multiplayer is bonus to me, the solo campaign looks good so far. From what I've read you'll play different characters - five, if I recall correctly - and you can fight with any playstyle you want, be it sneaky, full assault, sniper or whatever. Now, I don't have confirmed info about that, it's all from comments on videos and articles, so I may be mistaken.

I'm even sparing my Warhammer money to buy this game instead. By the time I'll buy it there's surely a whole bunch of patches and tweaks to correct bugs, glitches and unbalance between gameplay elements. So I'll have some time to see the game from an outside point of view and I don't think I'll have regrets buying it. I've read numerous times that the game is well optimised too, so I've got that going for me because my PC is quite good but can't keep up at high with new games, like Total Warhammer, which I run in Medium and not fluidly.

So in short I'm quite hyped and think overall it will be a great game. I put aside the inaccuracies because just the WW1 style is awesome. Just would you look at those sweet uniforms and rifles. Totally worth it. There's Verdun for the folk who'd rather have a trench simulator. I never tried it though.

And if some of you guys want to mount a Battlefield 1 gaming group I'd be glad to join !

After chatting to some close friends who got the beta Im going to give this a miss unfortunately.
My first one since BFBC1 :(
They are fans of the series just like me but said they couldnt quite put their finger on why it isnt as good as previous games, although "the general feel" seemed to crop up again and again.
Maybe when it drops in price somewhat etc.