Electronic Arts’ DICE studio made a big bet when it decided to invest heavily in the single-player vignettes, the War Stories anthology borrowed from Battlefield 1, for its upcoming Battlefield V first-person shooter game coming on the consoles and PC on November 20.
These missions show you the horrors of war, the sacrifices of comrades, and the things about the Second World War that you didn’t know. There are four single-player vignettes, and I’ve got a good look at three of them. I played through the full Nordlys story in a hands-on session at Electronic Arts’ headquarters in Redwood City, California. This story has my impressions of that preview session.
In a sharp contrast to Battlefield V, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 developers decided to do away with the single-player campaign after 15 years, opting to triple the Zombies experience and add the Blackout battle royale. That’s certainly paying off, but it comes at a big price. And the quality of DICE’s single-player vignettes shows what that price is. From the stirring music to the characters, Battlefield V adds an intimacy and immersion to the experience of single-player missions.
Eric Holmes, design director for War Stories at Electronic Arts’ DICE studio, said in an interview that the purpose of single player is to get players to be inspired and invested in the characters, weapons, and vehicles that otherwise wouldn’t mean so much to them in multiplayer.
Above: Battlefield V returns to tell the human stories of World War II.
“Playing a Star Wars game would be pretty weird if you hadn’t seen the movies, right? You might think the designs were cool, but if you saw the Death Star flying over a planet you wouldn’t know what that meant,” Holmes said in an interview. “But once you see the movie you know what it is and what it represents. It might inspire fear or awe. That’s the kind of universe-building we have to do in War Stories. We add texture and detail. We add a sense of being there.”
But DICE didn’t want to just remind you of your favorite World War II movies, or take you back to Omaha Beach and the Normandy invasion for the umpteenth time.
“You’ve seen movies and played games,” he said. “You have a lot of baggage. We took a page from Battlefield 1 and took players to places they had not been before. We had an anthology approach in Battlefield 1’s War Stories. Characters could live or die. People liked it, and we brought that to World War II.”
After you play the story with the Tiger tank, you won’t think of the Tiger as just the machine with a lot of hit points, he said.
Holmes added, ” What is going on in this world? Why do I care? Who’s fighting who and what does that feel like? Rather than just red team versus blue team, tank versus plane. It’s the Axis and the Allies. It’s not a plane, it’s a Spitfire. It’s not a tank, it’s a Tiger or a Sherman. I know what those things represent and mean. It gets addictive after a while, once you start learning about this stuff. You find yourself on giant Wikipedia binges, or suddenly you have a collection of books. You get sucked into that world. World War II is one of those subjects that just draws you in.”
Nordlys
Above: She’s going to kill you.
The first full story I played was Nordlys, which means Northern Lights in Norwegian. It started with a cutscene that shows a German officer talking to a captive Norwegian woman, who is evidently a scientist or resistance fighter who is valuable to the Nazi weapons program. The industrial facility where she is being held makes heavy water, which is a vital part of Hitler’s attempt to create an atomic bomb.
The young officer mentions a commando raid that really happened in the war. The commando operations — with the code names Grouse, Freshman, and Gunnerside — took place in early 1943 and they managed to stop the production at the factory in Vemork. The factory and its surroundings bear a lot of resemblance to the real locations, but this story is fictional.
The gamer plays a young woman, not a commando, who attempts to rescue the captive, her mother. You play as that young woman, and you start out with the thrilling experience of skiing down forest slopes to get to the perimeter of the factory. No matter where I went, I didn’t crash.
The guards were pesky and harder than expected to eliminate, since the weapons I had were fairly imprecise. I had to sneak around guards and take them out with my throwing knife, which had a very long range and seemed a lot more accurate than my guns.
Sadly, I didn’t start with a sniper rifle, so it was pretty hard to take out the guards in the high watch towers. I had to climb up the ladders to get them. The AI wasn’t so hot, since they didn’t expect me when I got to the top. Short-range weapons, distant targets. I considered that to be bad level design. Fortunately, the enemies weren’t brilliant or too plentiful. I eventually got a sniper rifle, just when I needed a machine gun more.
It took a number of attempts but I eventually made it inside the facility. It was thankfully deserted. But as soon as I freed the captive, who was my character’s mother, a bunch of enemies closed in. We had to shoot our way out and blow up the place. Once we were outside, we were trapped on a bridge.
At that point, the story gets interesting. You feel a sense of your mission and your duty, and what you owe your mother. As you make your mistake, you have to go out into the Norwegian wilderness during a freezing night. You can take out the sporadic guards, but your hardest task is to get warm. Otherwise, you will freeze to death. That wasn’t easy to survive, and it reminded me of similar survival games where the environment was just big a problem as soldiers shooting at you. It is the wilderness, viewed in panoramic detail, where the daughter is simply an ant in the wild, that pushes you to your limit.
Overall, I thought the story was well done. It tests the daughter’s resolve to carry on what her mother started during a moment of truth. This War Story had an emotional arc, fitting theme music, and a story that left me with an appreciation for the bravery of people who never got any recognition during or after the war for the sacrifices they made.
Tirailleur
Above: A frightening fortification to take over in Tirailleur in Battlefield V.
The battle to retake Europe started with Operation Overlord and D-Day in June 1944, but in the fall of that year, the allies launched Operation Dragoon to hit the Germans on France’s southern coast. Half a million troops invaded and had to fight tenaciously to overcome the German fortifications.
But the pictures of those soldiers showed only white French soldiers. They weren’t the only ones who served, said one surviving veteran who happened to be black. Tirailleur is named after a type of light infantry from France’s Napoleonic days. The black soldiers arrive, eager to fight the Germans. But they are relegated to filling sand bags. The narrator says, “You won’t find the story I’m going to tell you in the history books. That makes you disbelieve my words. But remember: Not everything that is written down is true, and not everything true is written.”
When the Allied soldiers had trouble taking a German-occupied château with an antiaircraft battery, an ambitious French captain sent in the black soldiers. Two of them, Deme and Idrissa, are the main characters of Tirailleur, pressed into the fight into a horrible battle in the woods. Their column of trucks (oddly, so small that each truck carries only around four soldiers) gets attacked by German dive bombers. They are thrust into battle, and you’re forced to take on the Germans with a primitive automatic weapon. As soon as I could, I grabbed a German submachine gun. But it also didn’t have a good range. So I was forced to get closer than I preferred to the enemy in the intense firefight for the fortification in the woods.
I found I had to take cover, but the battle was fairly easy to win on the normal level. I managed to get lost looking for the exit, but once I did, I ran down a hill to a mortifying scene. There was a giant row of concrete fortifications, machine gun nests, artillery guns, and barbed wire. Our unit charged straight into the trenches and fought fiercely, killing one German at a time. It took me several times to reach the German trenches, but once I did, it became easier to survive. I had to blow up a few artillery guns. Every now and then, I ran into a German with a flamethrower, and my task was to shoot the tanks on his back before he could burn me with his flames.
Above: Battlefield V’s Tiralleur focuses on black soldiers in the French army in WWII.
Once we advanced beyond the first trenches, we kept going further into the German fortifications. We reached a large redoubt with ammo caches and an elevated position. There, we waited for the German counterattack. I had a heck of a time surviving this battle. Elite German machine gun troops showed up. One of the non-player characters took over the mounted machine gun, to my great annoyance. So I had to switch between short-range machine gun fire and a one-shot rifle. The rifle had longer range, and it could take down a soldier with one shot. Annoyingly, the sniper rifle often required two hits to bring down an enemy. That made it worthless because the enemies came in too fast.
The small German trucks would come in and drop off four soldiers at a time, and then drive off. That seemed quite silly in terms of a way to attack an elevated fortification. But it was still a tough battle because I had to shoot most of the enemies with the single-shot rifle, or just wait for them to come within the extremely short machine-gun range. After a long battle, a German tank finally showed up. Fortunately, reinforcements arrived and took out the tank for me. Surviving that wave of attackers was such a pain, but I felt good when it was over.
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