Electronic Arts and DICE invited us to Sydney on Tuesday to try out the new Battlefield V war stories, and interview DICE design director Eric Holmes (known for Battlefield 1, Arkham Origins and more) to find out more about what players can expect when the game launches next month. Set in the dramatic Cell Block Theatre of the National Art School, EA Australia had about two dozen top-end PC’s set up, and a huge projector screen where we got to watch unreleased trailers and in-game cut-scenes that were yet to be put in to the current build of the game.
EA provided us with an AOC 144hz screen and sweet RGB towers with a nVidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. This meant we could run Battlefield V on maximum settings and test out the open-world environments in each of the war stories. We were given access to the full prologue and Nordlys mission, however Under No Flag and Tirailleur were only 1/3rd complete, and the game booted us out early on. The final war story The Last Tiger is coming post-launch in December and will focus on Tiger I Tank #237 in an unwinnable battle against the allied forces. While what we played was incomplete, it was clear that the war stories are a big step up from Battlefield 1. We learned that each war story is in a different language with subtitles to maintain authenticity. There’s no weird accented English in Battlefield V, it’s all how it would have been in World War 2.
While we were asked not to get in to detail about the prologue, we can say that it will give you a good idea of what to expect from the rest of the war stories. We quickly jumped in to Nordlys where you get to play as a resistance fighter in Norway caught up in something much bigger. It quickly becomes your job to take down some German installations to stop them from getting rare resources only found in the far reaches of an icy land. Skiing plays a decent role in this war story, and you can climb up hills to get a survey of your surrounds with your binoculars and then ski down. We did a bit of exploration a bit later in Nordlys when the map opened up a fair bit, and it was fun to be able to put the skis on and off. The story of Nordlys is a touching emotional rollercoaster and showed that women were just as brave if not more so than the men of World War 2.
Under No Flag was a more typical Battlefield story with hardened British elite soldiers. You are in the SBS (Special Boat Service) renegades and get dropped off at a vantage point where you quickly find yourself behind enemy lines. There’s stealth involved in all the war stories, but this one seemed to require a little bit more as it involved sneaking around very large German installations and using their weapons against them. You will find there are lots of reasons to replay the war stories as there are so many different options and ways that you can approach each of the objectives that there’s definitely a lot of fun to be had and a lot of exploring of the maps that needs to be done.
Check out our gameplay capture of the Under No Flag from the Battlefield V war stories:
https://youtu.be/3uG7m8nZGZY
Tirailleur puts you in the position of an under-equipped coloured French colonial soldier who learns just how welcome he is among the fellow French army men. From what we played of this war story it looks like it’s going to be full of explosive battlefields and constant death as you work your way across Southern France in what is somewhat of a forgotten battlefront. We learn that parts of this history from World War 2 were scrubbed or hidden despite the brave colonial soldiers fighting against unprecedented odds. DICE summed this story up as a combination of the movies Snatch and Mad Max Fury Road.
Watch some of our time spent in Tirailleur from the Battlefield V war stories below:
https://youtu.be/0JKgVNeOr-E
The final war story of Battlefield V is called The Last Tiger and some may call it a little controversial, but DICE explains in their interview with Rocket Chainsaw that it’s anything but. We did get to see a little bit of The Last Tiger and it’s looking like a whole lot of tank warfare as you desperately try to stay alive in Tiger I #237. We all know how World War 2 ends, and we all know what happened to the German forces so the ending to this war story won’t come as a surprise, but the journey promises to be epic.
At this stage we can’t confirm if there will be any other post-launch Battlefield V war stories, but we can say that DICE were eager to have them in Battlefield 1 but ran out of time as they began working on Battlefield V, so perhaps we might see some more, or we might just get a full-blown WW2 sequel to Battlefield V.
Battlefield V launches on November 20, 2018 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows PC platforms. To find out more, head to the official Battlefield website here.
