The battlefields of Battlefield V won’t be totally familiar with gamers, and that’s the way that the designers at publisher Electronic Arts’ DICE studio want it.
They wanted to bring Battlefield back to World War II, but not to the familiar scenes that we’ve played in earlier games or watched in war movies, said DICE senior producer Lars Gustavsson in a press briefing. This anticipated Battlefield game coming in October this year for the PC and consoles.
DICE is bringing back the War Stories mode, or the single-player campaign, that it also used with Battlefield 1 in 2016. Each war story is about a solider’s experience during the conflict, and it serves as a piece of a larger campaign. EA didn’t fully describe the single-player mode, but it appears that it will consist of the vignettes of a handful of different, unrelated soldiers again. I enjoyed those vignettes in Battlefield 1, but I wished that they were longer and deeper. I don’t know if we’ll get that in Battlefield V.
“We challenged ourselves to reframe the preconceptions we carried in the studio of what the Second World War really was,” Gustavsson said. “We’ve played all of the games. We’ve seen the movies. But we wanted to do something different. Finding those stories that challenged us, that made us excited, that is what this is all about. We are going to take you on a journey around the world.”
Battlefield V’s War Stories will include a story set in Norway, north of the Arctic Circle, in 1943. It focuses on a woman who’s a resistance soldier fighting the German occupation. DICE showed the briefest of trailers showing a pilot under water and a woman who says, “I love you.” The warrior is fighting to save her family, not the world, Gustavsson said.
Other environs include the French countryside “as you face the full force of mechanized armies,” “the total devastation of the city of Rotterdam” (the first major city that German bombing leveled in the war) in the Netherlands, and the “heat of the North African desert, said DICE senior producer Andreas Morrell.
The Norwegian story is a family story, said Ryan McArthur, producer at DICE.
We saw some combat on a map in a French town with lots of hills and fields, not unlike some of the scenery in France in Battlefield 1. It’s going to be a journey around the world again, focused on the adrenaline moments and horrors of war.
“In all of these locations, you will be able to take part in the biggest battles ever fought in history across air, land, and sea,” Morrell said.