Check out the action-packed and loud Battlefield 1 trailer

Electronic Arts has unveiled the trailer for its new Battlefield 1 first-person shooter, set in the trenches of World War I.

It’s release is set for October 21. Battlefield has been slugging it out with Call of Duty for years to be the No. 1 franchise on the shooter market. Rival Activision Blizzard showed off Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare this week, taking the $15 billion series into the far future where humanity has settled the solar system and space has become militarized.

Get ready to interpret a lot of things in this video. Danny Berlin, the lead designer for Battlefield 1 at EA’s DICE studio, said he could only comment on what was in the video during an interview with GamesBeat. He said that the game’s based on historical material, and it won’t have a fictionalized “alternate history” with modern weapons. Whatever is in the trailer really did happen at some point in the varied history of the Great War, Berlin said.

EA will have a playable demo at the EA Play event on June 12 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June. You can get early access to the Battelfield 1 public beta test later this year by signing up for the Battlefield newsletter.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.