STACK #169 Nov 2018

GAMES FEATURE

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Design director at DICE, Eric Holmes, leads STACK through an introduction to BattlefieldV 's single-player mode,War Stories. Words Paul Jones

I can clearly remember the disappointment when Brothers in Arms: Furious 4 was announced at E3 in 2011. In just a one- minute-and-23-second trailer, Gearbox Software had taken its magnificent WWII FPS franchise, thrown it into a blender with Bulletstorm and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and created a cliché-ridden turd that rightly deserved to go down the pan. Roll forward seven years to the anticipated announcement of Battlefield V, and I found myself in a similar position. Prosthetic limbs, body art and biker patches? Is this Furious 4 all over again? After the incredible success of 2016’s Battlefield 1 , why are they doing this? A vehement backlash on social media followed, prompting a resolute response from DICE along the lines of 'like it or lump it'. But time, and undoubtedly commercial pressure, softened DICE’s stance, and the studio announced in September that the game would launch with less customisation options. Last month EA invited me to a hands-on single-player session in Sydney, and, from a single-player perspective at least, there wasn’t a fictional gun or a mechanical arm in sight. One of the outstanding features in Battlefield 1 was the compelling single- player War Stories, a series of five stories

set across different campaigns of the Great War. It was a unique, personal and even emotional way of telling a narrative. Fortunately, these make a return in Battlefield V with action spread across Norway, North Africa, the South of France, and the final days of the war in the German Rhineland. “Right out of the gate we knew we wanted to hang on to War Stories because it was so successful in BF1 ,” says Eric Holmes, design director at DICE – a thoughtful man who carefully considers each answer before replying. “I think the biggest gem for me coming out of BF1 was when we saw people crying when they play-tested War Stories; you’d watch streams of people playing and they were genuinely moved, and that’s powerful. That was something we didn’t want to give up and something we wanted to improve on. “[War Stories] is about the personal human experience of World War II. This isn’t about killing Hitler. It’s about individuals and their own struggles in this epic conflict.” Players will explore theatres of combat possibly less familiar to those who don’t have an invested interest in the history surrounding World War II, and I ask Holmes what the process for choosing these

locations entailed. “It wasn’t really just a case of drawing up a wishlist,” he explains. “It was a bit more high level than that. Norway gives you the Northern Lights and frozen landscapes; have we seen that somewhere else before, recently? Nope, so that’s a tick. Whereas if we went to a French village with horse- drawn carts, a bakery and cobblestones, I can’t tell you where, but I feel like I’ve seen a lot of that in games. So we determined that we’re not really breaking new ground there, so that gets a question mark next to it.

Born in 1914, Anne Margrethe Bang was a Norwegian resistance fighter during the Second World War. When the Germans invaded in April 1940, a group of 250 fighters held out at Hegra Fortress, under constant attack for 25 days. Anne was the only female within the resistance fighters and worked 20 hours a day as a nurse, patching up soldiers. When the fortress fell, Anne continued the fight, joining the Norwegian resistance movement and working as a courier and a contact point for the rest of the German occupation. She died in 2008. Freedom Fighter

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