DICE’s Daniel Berlin talks Battlefield 1’s setting, pacing and team focus (but confuses us about classes)

At the Battlefield 1 reveal event in San Francisco earlier this month, Stevivor spoke with Lead Game Designer at DICE, Daniel Berlin. Being a reveal event, he was cagey on some basics — he actually said, “we aren’t talking about that, but I can say we will have multiplayer and we will have a single-player campaign,” at one point (I expect to be inundated with journalism awards for extracting that nugget).

However, he was very happy to talk about DICE heading further back in history than most expected, the affect that will have on the speed of gameplay and how it’s all about team play.

Why World War I?

Speculation was rife a few days before the announcement about Battlefield 5. DICE expected as such, and until the inevitable leaks mere hours before the reveal, nobody genuinely thought World War I was on the agenda. When it was made public, there were anticipated concerns about trench warfare not being conducive to Battlefield gameplay – and even EA had reservations. However, wanting to move away from modern combat, DICE took its time and found The Great War to be the perfect setting.

“When we choose where to go, we don’t pick a period and then make it fit Battlefield. We have the Battlefield pillars, and then look at different settings,” explained Berlin. “There was such a strong want within the DICE studio, there are a couple of guys at DICE who have been doing extensive research on World War I for many, many years and they had a vast array of information already available to us.

“So we sat down and looked at the gameplay fundamentals and asked, ‘how does that work with World War I?’ We started to break it down and look at it and found that it fits perfectly. It even branches out to new kinds of opportunities, like the hand-to-hand combat. That is something this era gives us the opportunity to do that we couldn’t necessarily do in the modern era.”

The more they researched, the more DICE became convinced World War I was the beginning for many elements of war today, and thus the Battlefield series.

“I would describe Battlefield 1 as the dawn of all-out warfare; the genesis of modern combat. A lot of the stuff you see in modern war today was conceived and built back in WWI,” explained Berlin in his elevator pitch. “It’s really cool to have the old world, the old way of doing combat, with a lot of hand-to-hand combat, mixing with these new types of machinery that came in at the time. It’s really cool to see how they create new gameplay opportunities. Like how you’ll be in the muddy trenches and you’ll be able to utilise hand-to-hand combat, and it’ll be a viable tactic.”

While Berlin placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of the new hand-to-hand combat system, through using weapons like the spike club, sabre, bayonet and shovel, he wasn’t able to actually explain how it works or how it integrates with firearms. Despite showing a soldier wielding a sabre on horseback in the trailer, he wasn’t able to confirm if players will actually be able to do this in Battlefield 1 – you can definitely ride a horse, but DICE wasn’t willing to confirm weapons can be used when doing do.

“The width of gameplay that we have, in terms of weapons available, people don’t really know there were machine guns, there were fully automatic rifles, that there were semi-automatic rifles back then,” he continued. “The vehicles, too. There was a vast array of heavy tanks, and light tanks and biplanes, and the battleships that we have, and the ability to be on a horse. Like ‘there’s a tank over here, and a horse over here,’ it’s the mix of the old and the new that makes Battlefield 1 be unique.”

Why take a horse to a tank fight?

“You can take a horse to a tank fight,” said Berlin to a chorus of applause from “influencers” earlier, during the presentation. It’s a great marketing line, but why would you do that? While they’re based on WWI technology, don’t expect the tanks in Battlefield 1 to necessarily behave like that.

World War I saw the introduction of tanks to the battlefield. However, they were notoriously unreliable. While it wants to be historically accurate to a degree, Battlefield 1 is first and foremost a multiplayer shooter, and will take some liberties with history books to ensure balanced gameplay.

“At the heart of it, gameplay is king to deliver the rock-paper-scissors dynamic,” said Berlin on unreliable WWI technology. “Every time we introduce a weapon, every time we introduce a vehicle, we make sure it can trump something and that it can lose against something else. No matter if it’s a bolt-action rifle or a machine gun, we make sure that there is a rock-paper-scissors winner/loser situation to create balanced gameplay.

“We want to create weapons that are authentic and feel very powerful. But at the base of it, we need to make sure it’s fun to play. If it’s not fun to play, it doesn’t make it into the game.”

You need a pilot?

As you might expect, DICE isn’t talking about how vehicles work in Battlefield 1. So despite the nifty tagline, we still don’t know how you’ll take a horse to a tank fight.

The bigger question remains the two new role classes introduced during the announcement. The classic four return – Assault, Medic, Support and Scout – but DICE quickly slipped in Pilot and Tank Driver as new additions.

The offline presentation was deliberately vague as to the statue of these vehicle classes. In previous games, it’s merely been a uniform, as players retain their chosen base class. It could be the same here, but DICE singled them out as new additions, while implying they aren’t the same as the four existing classes. Reading between the lines, I’d speculate they are sub-classes that offer more than the uniforms of old.

“Sorry, I can’t go into any specifics of how the classes work,” said Berlin when asked for more information. “What I can say is we do have a tank class. We do have a pilot class.”

That’s not very helpful – in fact, we’re more confused now and left to wildly speculation until E3, or later. DICE and EA are being extremely cautious with the flow of information, but it’s odd they would announce classes without actually explaining if that’s indeed what they are.

There’s no ‘I’ in team (but there is in ‘WWI’)

Team play, team play, TEAM PLAY! It’s “the recipe for victory” and you’ll need a good team, explained DICE at its most candid during the announcement. Battlefield has always been a team-orientated experience, but it’s every more critical in Battlefield 1.

“That is one of our key strengths,” said Berlin. “We’ve been reading up on what the community wants and working with the Game Changer guys (a group of pro Battlefield players already play testing). Team play is something we’ve really been pushing. How can we make it more fun to play with your team? How can we reward you more for doing things that benefit your team?

“I can’t give you any specifics today of what we’re doing, except for the permanent squad system, so you’ll be able to team up and keep playing. But we will unveil much more [on team play] in the coming weeks and months.”

Battlefield 1 is just as fast

If I’m honest, I assumed the return to World War I was to reduce to pacing of gameplay. Combat loops in online shooters are becoming increasingly faster as we shift from modern to futuristic warfare. Frankly, with wall-running, boost-jumping, jets and mechs it’s all becoming a bit much.

But I was totally wrong. Don’t expect a lack of technology to reduce the speed of Battlefield 1.

“We have a good pacing in Battlefield games and that’s what we want to maintain. We want the game to be set in World War I, but it’s really important to us it still feels like a Battlefield game so our fans get what they want. So no [there was never any thought of slowing down the pacing]. With the wide array of weaponry available, we can maintain the pacing [of modern Battlefield games] that our fans love.”

For more on Battlefield 1, check out our first look preview.

NOTE: Daniel’s Uber was literally waiting outside to take him to the airport during this interview. Due to time contrasts, we channelled the ANZAC spirit and thought it fitting to team up with our New Zealand pals at GamePlanet to talk about Battlefield set in World War 1 in a joint interview. Don’t be alarmed if you see any of the same quotes appear there. Stevivor attended the Battlefield 1 reveal event in San Francisco. Flights and accommodation were paid for by EA.