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]

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

[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

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:re-incarnation

[silentcoder]

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

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.