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BF1=Anti-War-Game (?)


Migoxiss

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Now, this is something that had me going crazy for a while now and I wanted to adress it here on the forum. This question(s) are for people that did play the game and for not-players, I linked the game's prologue of the campaign.

 

Obviously the first World War is a topic, so big, many people and states have broken their heads over it. From Verdun, 1916 France-Germany, to Çanakkale, 1915-1916 Ottoman Empire, people died in a horrible war in horrible conditions with horrible methods. As a turkish person myself, I know, just from the history of my nation, how profoundly all of this was. And then Battlefield 1 was released and I was "happy" to see the Ottoman Empire take place in the game, with (excellent!) turkish voice acting. But after this specific gameplay, my hole opinion changed, not just from the game, but also on games like Battlefield, Call of Duty etc. 

 

This "teaser" is different, from what I normally see in FPS games. Most of the time you see soldiers running around, killing other soldiers with their super-cool weapons, with dubstep music in the background. Not really condemning war, is it? Then the games, where the developers seem to be so emotionally affected. But they're not. Hell, they just want to grab the customer's money and that's it. Now it's getting interesting. I put battlefield in that category drawer too. BF 1942, Bf3, BF4, BF Hardline all of them were boring, campaign-wise. But now I believe that BF1 is not boring, definitly not. I know, every developer wants money, that's why there are video games at all. Consider this though: "What are you achieving with this game?" should be the question every game designer, programer etc. should ask himself. And finally after all this talking, I can ask my question now: Is Battlefield 1 a Anti-War game?

 

When asking myself, I've got weird answer from my inner self.     This. Game.Is.Nothing.Special.

And that's right, isn't it? The only purpose was just to show the gameplay. That's it. But I have a different opinion on that.

 

Let's analyse the prologue, hm? It starts with sunshine, a woman singing a lovely song, a black man awaking. Everything's fine. Soon after he get's touched, the "dream-bubble" explodes and the black man finds himself in frontline combat. Nothing special, right? We've seen these kind of transitions bewtween reality and dreamland often. In movies and games. Next, everyone is fighting, smashing the head of the enemy, killing each other with pure shovels and bayonets. Screams can be heard, from agony and from killing another fellow. A scene worth a familiy evening, right? After a text appearing that frontline combat is shown and "you're not xpected to survive", an almost non-hearable pad starts playing, with frontline combat beginning. Soldiers start running an shooting. And that's where my mood suddenly start changing. I don't know how to describe it. It was a weird stomach-feeling. Like feeling guilty. Feeling guilty for being so excited about a game with such a extreme topic. If you would like, play the scene 8:46 and you will see a german soldier, dropping his weapon in the head of fight, just standing there. Probably shell-shocked. He was just there, not a boss, not a special character. A ordinary soldier. The player shot him down. After the player died because of being burnt, his name appeared. 1889-1918 Harvey Nottoway. Sadly this feature is only in the prologue. Do you see where I am going with this? Real War gets shown. No heroes. Just soldiers fighting. So isn't BF1 a game that declares war a bad thing? Kinda? Because it got me into thinking into NOT buying the game. It was the reason, I post this long-a** text. Even though that scene "touched" me, I dont think DICE did that because of intentions. 

 

How do you think about all this? What's your opinion? Do you think that "this is just a game bra"? Or dou you actually understand my position, even having comparable thoughts?

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I understand your position. From one point the gameplay was really good and impressive, a lot of various action in it. From other point, it's very sad, when you think about it. Millions of people dying because of the WW. Any war never is a good thing. It's even more sad, when I saw the last part about tank crew, because few days ago I've stumbled upon another part of campaign without seeing this part. 

 

I didn't understood the part about not buying the game, though. It looks well-made, it looks fun (Even if the story is sad), I'd pay for it. There, probably, was more than one artist working on this game, that didn't wanted just the money, but also a decent game with a deep and realistic story. Sure, game developer is a job, but that doesn't mean one can't love his job. Maybe, some director or someone in DICE is a greedy indifferent jerk, but not the whole company for sure. 

 

If one can draw such an analogy, it's kinda similar to the war - there can be some leaders that you can count as a terrible people, but I'm sure that on the both sides, amongst the simple soldiers there was some good men, that fight with each other because they have to, even that they don't want to (Like on 11:30 in OP's video).

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I want games to be fun. I'd much rather shitty politics and perceived moral judgements get left out. At the end of the day most people would just be alienated by it anyways (case in point you didn't buy the game). They should leave their politics out and let the player come to their own conclusion.

 

As an aside: War is not "bad" it's as valid a political tool as anything else. Reducing the likes of ISIS or WWII Era Nazis to dust is a moral win in my book.

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2 hours ago, Tomwa said:

I want games to be fun. I'd much rather shitty politics and perceived moral judgements get left out. At the end of the day most people would just be alienated by it anyways (case in point you didn't buy the game). They should leave their politics out and let the player come to their own conclusion.

 

As an aside: War is not "bad" it's as valid a political tool as anything else. Reducing the likes of ISIS or WWII Era Nazis to dust is a moral win in my book.


If we don't understand how and why people become those things, we will never ever be able to stop it.

As it stands, since games are like any other kind of art, the artist's opinions have their place. I like SOME of my games to be fun, and others I don't. Like horror games, I want to feel afraid, oppressed and helpless. The better the game accomplishes that, the more of a high I get when I come back to the real world. I want a game to tell me something I didn't want to hear, and to make its point eloquently so I have to really think about it instead of just brushing it off.


But then sometimes I just want to have fun. :P

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I saw though what they wanted to accomplish with the game and didn't really care about it.

 

They really wanted to push for that "War is hell" type of theme with the prologue and pigeon scene, but at the end of the day, you are playing a game where you can mow down half an army with a automatic rifle that didnt work like that in WW1 and giving you this action packed scenes and explosions that is totally going to make kids think that WW1 played out like that.

 

From my point of view, they just want to pull the heart strings of players with those scenes and they have suceded in doing so from all the comments i read about the game.

 

Its like how Spec Ops: The Line pulled so many players in with that white phosphorus scene, i just cant take Battlefield story line seriously when they present WW1 as if it was WW2.

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At some point they got tough targets to fulfill. It's a back and forth between censorship and entertainment. We already talked about realism in games. One one side, they not have to glorify the war setting itself, but they also have to entertain the players. So at all, if people enjoy the game, but thinking war is really bad, they success with their product. It takes us to excogitate the situation with our own belives and thats the point.

 

 

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Anti-war games, and media in general, aren't an incredibly novel thing to be honest.  Even Call of Duty, as shunned as it is, has always been anti-war from the start.  Halo, Fallout, Metal Gear, Killzone, Gears of War, Far Cry.... even the other Battlefield campaigns are fairly anti-war, hell Hardline was even bordering on anti-police.  It's really pretty difficult to find games made in the last decade that don't try making you feel just a little bit bad about shooting people.

 

And Hollywood's been doing it for far longer with movies like Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, MASH, You Get The Point.

 

God knows how many books before that, "The Iliad" was a thing before stories were even written down.

 

Truth is, people have never liked war, but they love hearing stories about it.

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Battlefield one is NOT AT ALL a "Anti-War-Game".

Totalbuiscuit made a great video explaining why. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkDysHo83lw

 

If you really want to have a good bad time, here is my small list of "Anti-War-Games"

1. Spec Ops: The Line. Why? Because you are not the hero.

2. This War of Mine. Why? Because you are no soldier.

3. Insurgency. Why? Because it is really intense CQB and shows how quick you would die in these close fights.

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I just wonder why they even fking bother with having a SP campaign in those games at this point. "Oh ze horrorz of ze war" (And now there you go player, you're invincible, go kill thousands in ur space marine armor using a gun with infinite ammo)

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On 10/20/2016 at 6:09 PM, Bourbon said:

If you really want to have a good bad time, here is my small list of "Anti-War-Games"

1. Spec Ops: The Line. Why? Because you are not the hero.

2. This War of Mine. Why? Because you are no soldier.

3. Insurgency. Why? Because it is really intense CQB and shows how quick you would die in these close fights.

3 doesn't really seem like a good reason to call it a 'anti-war' game, to me.

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I had a moral dilemma the other day when I was playing the very good fun Assassins Creed Black Flag and was forced to harpoon to death a large white whale. For the record I am so completely against the harpooning of any animal that I would actually snub anyone who agreed with or practised it. But I had to harpoon the whale to get a pretty outfit for my character and fashion is the key to free-running assassination. So I justified it on the grounds that it was only a game and not real, harpooned a virtual version of one of nature's wonders, got my whale suit and carried on with my task to viciously butcher/murder/jump-kill every Spanish and British soldier in the Caribbean Sea.

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  • 3 weeks later...

late but i dont think its anti war at all

anti war to me shows how horrible war is like for example red orchestra whereas in battlefield one everyone seems to be a sandbag puppet cause you never really see blood and people die in explosions and stay completely intact so i cant really take it seriously I dont think they planned to be anti war by the way a lotta commercials and such have modern / dubstep kinda music in it it seems more like pro war

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  • 1 month later...
On 10/17/2016 at 9:25 PM, Fuji said:

Truth is, people have never liked war, but they love hearing stories about it.

As Pindar (c. 522 – c. 443 BC) wrote, "War is sweet to those who have no experience of it, but the experienced man trembles exceedingly at heart on its approach."

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