Well everyone E3 is officially underway and what I’ve
seen so far, (through the internet like everyone else sadly), is pretty
promising. Granted you have take everything that’s presented at E3 with a
grain of salt, given all the sketchy promotional practices that the industry is
infamous for, but for the first time in what feels like a long time I’m
deciding to be optimistic and let some of the hype settle into me. To
that end, over the next week or so I’ll be posting a number of new posts that
will highlight some of the games that I myself am interested in, be it part of
a franchise or a new IP from a talented developer and give my general thoughts
on it and the franchise as a whole if applicable. To that end, let’s talk
about what is probably the most highly anticipated game of the year, Battlefield 1.
I think it’s safe to say at this point that the initial
trailer for Battlefield 1 got
everyone hyped for the game in a way that the FPS genera hasn’t in what seems
like a very long time, with said trailer garnering more like than any other
YouTube video in history. And to be perfectly honest, when I first saw
it, I was right along with them. The World War I setting is a fresh, new
idea in a genre that had stagnated and seemed content to rehash the same dull
and dreary modern war setting over and over again and seemed to promise to reinvigorate
the genre in a way that we haven’t seen since Call of Duty 4. But then my skepticism began to set in,
primarily because the trailer in question didn’t show any actual gameplay
footage and was all pre-rendered CG material. Then the other day they
released an actual gameplay footage trailer and……
…...it looks okay.
Not great. Not bad. Just okay.
You see, the problem with the FPS genre is that once
you’ve played one you’ve pretty much played them all. Sure, the jump from
WWII to the modern warfare setting in Call
of Duty 4 was different and new when the game was first released but by the
time Call of Duty: Ghosts rolled
around the whole thing had worn itself thin and people were really getting sick
of it; hence the insanely positive reaction to the trailer to a game that
literally takes combat back a hundred years. Unfortunately for me, I’m
old enough to remember a time where games like this were commonplace. Let
me make one thing clear before I continue; World War I games were never a
mainstream thing. Before Call of Duty
4 came out in 2007 and turned the entire genre into the modern shooter, it
was primarily dominated by World War II games, starting with Medal of Honor back in 1999 before
burning out with Call of Duty 3 back
in 2006. But in that seven-year period you couldn’t go into any gamer
scene and blink without a WWII game coming into play at least once and, for
better or worse, Battlefield 1 looks
very much like one of those WWII shooters. You have machine guns being
shot by single infantrymen while standing, shotguns blasting their way through
buildings, war torn towns and locations that could have only existed in
pre-1950s Europe, and a dull, washed out, grey color pallet that seems to revel
in just how dreary and depressing it is. While these are all things that
may seem fresh and new to a modern audience that primarily grew up playing
present set first person shooters, these are all things that I saw in abundance
over ten years ago and feels to me more like a nostalgic callback to those
times as opposed to something fresh and new.
However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the game
still looks pretty good. You have trench fighting, hand-to-hand combat,
assaults on towns, tank battles, and shooting blimps out of the sky in old
fighter planes. The game simply looks fun. It’s just that, when all
is said and done, I still can’t help but feel like it’s some relic from the
early 2000s that somehow snuck its way onto the modern FPS scene. But, in
spite of my cynicism, that’s actually more than enough for me. With all
of these modern shooters flooding the market for the past nine years, I am more
than willing to welcome a change that harkens back to a time when this genre
was still fairly new to me and the responsibilities of adult life were still a
good five years away and I think I’ll be picking this one up.
Congratulations D.I.C.E. You officially have me interested in the
FPS genera once again.
So until next time, please follow the site, like the Facebook page and follow me on twitter and let’s see what E3 has in store for
us.
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