History Buffs Discover Inaccuracies In Battlefield 1 Trailer (hothardware.com)

MojoKid shares an interesting article from Tom's Hardware. While the new Battlefield 1 trailer may be the most-liked trailer in the history of YouTube, it's also historically inaccurate, according to a popular YouTube channel about World War I. "Some of the scenes feature some unusual or experimental gear," reports Indy Neidell, the voice of the video series The Great War, "and some weapons are carried by soldiers from the other side."

Thousands of people joined the YouTube channel after the release of the game's new trailer, prompting this special video review of the historical accuracy of the Battlefield 1 trailer. "Some of the most spectacular moments in the trailer, such as the tanks bursting into trenches or giant, ominous zeppelins hovering, are actually historically accurate," reports Tom's Hardware, adding that the YouTube commentator "ultimately applauds Battlefield 1 for incorporating so many different elements of WWI. Many people often forget that much of WWI was fought through hand-to-hand combat or that battles took place throughout Eurasian landmass."

Comments

News at 11

[OzPeter]

Work of fiction is shown to be fictional.

Re:News at 11

[internerdj]

People complained about the architecture in Prince of Persia also. If you are going to complain about authenticity, maybe you should start with the knife that lets you time travel.

Re:News at 11

[Anubis IV]

In that same vein, I saw someone complaining yesterday about the fact that in the Dark Souls franchise, it's utterly unrealistic that rolling around (one of the core game mechanics for how you avoid taking damage) should be able to make you immune to any form of attack, since it makes the game less believable when someone swings a sword at you and you just roll right through it to dodge. It was quickly pointed out that he's playing a game in which he's an undead spawn of a demigod consuming the souls of the gods and demons he slays while fighting dragons, monsters, and the aforementioned gods and demons, so it would seem to be a bit odd that rolling is what's making the game less believable.

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

I've actually complained about this since Demons Souls, the invulnerability frames during rolling, it should be for movement and that's it, the game is applauded for the fantastic hit detection (that stops being relevant as soon as you press the roll button)

It's for the most part a player vs player complaint, you can stab seven feet of a spear through someone, while they're rolling towards you, even further skewering themselves onto the spear, but they take no damage from it because they were rolling and then counterattack you (usually killing you in one hit) during your attacks recovery phase.

Re: News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a standard 'best practices' story writing method in literature that has also carried over to gaming.

Most plots require that one thing that is unbelievable or breaks the laws of physics or what not. If the writer keeps everything else in their literary universe as accurate as possible, it makes it easier for the reader to suspend their disbelief further for that one "out there" plot device thing.

If your story just throws tons of established universe rules out the window at once, the reader has a harder time both relating to the world your characters are in as well as suspending disbelief for them, and usually such stories suck pretty badly.

That's why some people correctly ignore the one major disbelievable plot device while able to bitch about all the little things that Try to be accurate but aren't somehow.

It's still silly yes, but that's the explanation for ignoring the major time traveling knife all together while complaining about the really tiny discrepancies all at the same time.

Re: News at 11

[Anubis IV]

Quite right. A lot of it comes back to the human mind's fascination with what-ifs and their ability to tolerate the results that come out of the assumption that began the what-if.

If you start with "What if there was a knife that allowed for the manipulation of time?", then anything that would come as a natural result of that assumption (e.g. the holder would be able to rewind time if they made a mistake), regardless of how absurd it might be, gets a free pass, while anything unrelated (e.g. the architecture looks wrong) gets no such free pass.

The more complicated the scenario, the more difficulty we have in seeing the connections and how they logically connect back to that beginning point of divergence from reality. By the time you get to entirely fictional universes, we're basically only holding onto the laws of physics, any tie-ins to the real-world that appear to be evident (e.g. if I see a medieval suit of armor, I'll expect a lot of the other medieval trappings as well), and whatever else has been mentioned in the universe, so it becomes extremely important to do some world-building and maintain consistency in how it's presented if you want your world to feel believable.

The most important innacurracies

[Anonymous Coward]

WWI and wars in general are not FUN and you don't re-spawn every time you die.

It's a fucking game people.

Re:The most important innacurracies

[Maritz]

and you don't re-spawn every time you die.

Citation needed.

Historically accurate = Boring game

[jellomizer]

WWI was a lot of just sitting in the trenches and just kind of living in a world where you just can't lift your head above the trenchline. Just kinda slogging it and trying to survive, while living a miserable existence. For a game, rather boring.
Being also in a video games you are controlling characters not real people the strategy needed is different. In games NPC are disposable, there is no having to face the public and state that you sacrificed 50% of your unit, just to win the objective, where in real life it would just be to surrender or retreat. Because although you may win the battle, the losses would hinder the war more than what you would gain in the battle.

Re:Historically accurate = Boring game

[Opportunist]

A historically accurate game of WW1 would indeed be boring. And frustrating. You climb out of the trench, then run down a wasteland. Should you roll well on your saving throw you have no influence in whatsoever, you jump into the enemy trench and start hacking Krauts (or Tommies, same texture in a different color, basically). If you're lucky and nobody hacks your back apart, a few hours later the others will come running at you where you actually get a bit of gameplay where you may shoot at some of them before they jump into your trench and again it's mostly a matter of luck and less one of skill whether you survive or croak.

Oh. By the way. No respawning. You get randomly hit by a stray bullet, the best you can hope for is some sort of spectator mode for a few hours where you lie in that no man's land between the trenches and your character slowly dies instead of quickly.

Sounds like fun, eh?

Re:Historically accurate = Boring game

[rossdee]

"Blimps went out of use the moment airplanes became popular."

Blimps were STILL used in World War 2.
Of course by then they were inflated with Helium

Re:Historically accurate = Boring game

[malditaenvidia]

Don't forget about that mustard gas! There would be a complicated QTE involving tedious button presses whenever someone throws a gas canister into the trench.

Re:Historically accurate = Boring game

[tnk1]

On the Western Front, yes. Although there were some intervals where there was some movement even there.

Many, many attacks had one side or the other make it to the other side's first few trenches and there was heavy fighting there. And then you'd get counterattacked and possibly thrown back.

The major problem isn't the possibility of a good FPS fight in the trenches, its the fact that there was a very high casualty rate for getting there. Between machine guns, artillery, barbed wire and such, a lot of troops didn't make it across the No Man's Land. What would justify your character getting across? I'd presume, however, that you could use the narrative to simply suggest that they were one of the lucky ones who did simply because if they didn't, there'd be no game.

Now on the Eastern Front and in the Middle East (which they took some care to show), it wasn't all trench warfare. Remember this is when Lawrence of Arabia was active, so you're going to be mobile in any campaign that is located there.

Re:Historically accurate = Boring game

[Nidi62]

The major problem isn't the possibility of a good FPS fight in the trenches, its the fact that there was a very high casualty rate for getting there. Between machine guns, artillery, barbed wire and such, a lot of troops didn't make it across the No Man's Land. What would justify your character getting across? I'd presume, however, that you could use the narrative to simply suggest that they were one of the lucky ones who did simply because if they didn't, there'd be no game.

Obviously many people did survive multiple trips over the top. But there were also other types of attacks such as trench raids where they would sneak up quietly at night and attack a section of trench, whether to capture prisoners or just generally create mayhem and keep the other side on their toes. In those cases it was pretty easy to get to the other trench. The trick then was to not get blown up by a grenade or bludgeoned to death by a guy with a persuader. Oh, and make back across to your own trench afterwards of course.

It's a game

[Opportunist]

I can't help it, when I read this, immediately this is what sprung to my mind.

Re:hope it's accurrate in one regard

[Nidi62]

Well, they could always include (if there is a single player campaign) the Lafayette Escadrile or the multiple American citizens who joined the British Army under assumed Canadian citizenship.

Re:Shortest Game Ever.

[Coisiche]

Or you get slightly more gameplay when you're not killed but wounded and traumatized and shipped to a convalescent home where the doctors, not knowing of PTSD, persuade you that you're merely a bit shell-shocked and it is your duty to King and Country to return to the hellish front.

It's the second bit of action when a bullet blows your head off.

Alternate history disclaimer

[Anonymous Coward]

They straight-up admitted it's not going to be historically accurate because it wouldn't be any fun.

And while there's a time and a place for that (it's important to know how much the real World War 1 sucked) this is a video game.

World War I wasn't just trench attrition

[LichtSpektren]

Popular works like All Quiet on the Western Front have made every depiction of World War I inevitably something like what the Battle of the Somme was, or the Battle of Caporetto; bitter, miserable wasting away in trenches while swathes of men are destroyed in fruitless attacks on extremely fortified positions. In reality, a lot of the war was high-paced maneuver warfare like the Franco-Prussian War and World War II, especially after tanks were introduced.

Re:Did you know?

[PopeRatzo]

The fact that this post was downmodded is proof that the Italians did 9/11.

One inaccuracy

[Catmeat]

One thing he got wrong, the tank crewman at 7:14 isn't the driver, its somebody starting the engine. Engines of the period had crank-starts. I don't know why British WW1 tanks had the crank handles on the inside, but I'd guess it was because the engines constantly broke down and had to be restarted, and you'd get shot if you had to go outside to do that.

In this picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... - you can just about see the crank handle, on the left of the window.

This is what the actual driving position of one of the things looks like.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

Didn't Really Tear it Apart

[eumoria]

Indy didn't really 'tear apart' the game and at one point said "It's just a game so it's nice they're at least trying to bring to light the brutal nature of hand to hand combat" or something to that effect.

Everyone should watch The Great War series though it's awesome what they're doing. They're following the war week by week as we go through the 100th anniversary of it. It's really worth subscribing to.

Re:Didn't Really Tear it Apart

[Nidi62]

Everyone should watch The Great War series though it's awesome what they're doing. They're following the war week by week as we go through the 100th anniversary of it. It's really worth subscribing to.

I had never heard of it myself. But as someone who considers this to be light recreational reading material, it sounds like it's something right up my alley. I grew up watching the History channel before it turned into the "Hitler and aliens" channel, listening to Kenny Rogers talk about the Civil War before school and watching black and white footage of WWI and WWII with British narration after school, and seems like this will bring me back to those days.

Re:re-incarnation

[silentcoder]

But even they acknowledge that you lose all your gear and accumulated XP.

They can only go so far

[Nidi62]

If video games tried to be as historically accurate as possible then things would be a lot different and very few people would buy them. For instance in COD World at War, if that game had been historically accurate then in the levels where the Soviets are fighting through the streets of Berlin the models for the German soldiers would all have had to be young boys and old men. A World War I game would involve (if later in the war) hours of sitting in a muddy trench or marching around, enduring a artillery barrage every now and then, and going over the top into a shell blasted landscape covered in decomposing corpses.

Now that I think about it, a realistic war game would make one hell of a survival horror game. Imagine playing a German 6th Army soldier at Stalingrad. The game starts out bright and sunny, fighting and winning over open fields. But as you get closer to the city the weather gets colder, the days get darker, and the fighting harder. All of a sudden it is deep Russian winter, with long dark days and even darker,longer nights. Every day is a fight for survival, whether in battle with the Soviets or simply a fight to get enough rations to get you through the next day's fight and the next days retreat. All around men are dying in combat, giving up and laying down to die, or outright killing themselves. Christmas and New Years are somberly celebrated, many people realizing that these are the last 2 they will ever see. Thousands of men hoping and fighting to get a spot on one of the last few aircraft to fly out of Stalingrad. You fight to live on, scrounging around for a few scraps of bread or a couple rounds of ammunition. Finally, at the end of the game, you come to a choice: fight the Russians and die in combat, surrender along with the other survivors and die in captivity, or put a bullet in your own head.

Or, just make a game where you play a character who has the skills of a Chuck Norris/Rambo love child laying wastes to hordes of unnamed enemies while friendly characters with randomly generated names die all around you in spectacularly scripted explosions. Either one works.

The Onion on Most Realistic Modern Warfare Game

[Koreantoast]

The Onion's got you covered. Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

Designers say the new game explores the endless paperwork, routine patrolling a modern day soldier endures in photorealistic detail.

A Fantastic series of articles on The Great War...

[way2slo]

Over at Mental Floss, Erik Sass is compiling a tremendous body of work on the topic.
http://mentalfloss.com/section...
As of today, there are 235 articles. I believe there are about 1 to 2 per week for several years. He is covering the events that lead to the War and occurred 100 years ago. Snippets from journals, letters, and old photographs help convey what it was really like then. It has been a very large eye-opener for me. As a history buff, I thought I knew a good deal about the topic...but there is so much more.

Just to be clear, I am not connected with Mental Floss or Mr. Sass in any fashion. Only a large fan of this series.

Installment #1 posted on November 4th, 2011
http://mentalfloss.com/article...

Re:re-incarnation

[WallyL]

But you do get to keep at least one stats counter. Apparently it's really important for the next several spawns.