Since their beginnings in the early 00s, Battlefield games have been known for wild, unpredictable battles involving up to 64 players, on foot, in tanks or on planes. But the last two games, themed after the world wars, have introduced a new kind of single-player storytelling to complement their frenetic multiplayer warfare. Presented as an anthology of separate stories about individual people and places involved in the conflicts, War Stories debuted with 2016’s Battlefield 1, and focused on allied soldiers fighting the Germans in France, Turkey, the UK and Italy, and Ottomans in the Kingdom of Hejaz alongside Lawrence of Arabia.
Battlefield V, out this week, uses the second world war as its backdrop, and tells four new war stories. This time the game’s Swedish creators at Dice went in search of lesser-told stories from that conflict, rather than the frontline soldiers that dominate cinematic portrayals. They chose a Norwegian resistance fighter, the Senegalese fighters of the Tirailleurs, a Brit in the Special Boat Service, and a veteran German tank commander in the final days of the war.
“It was a global war, it touched everyone in the entire world. So why not tell those stories you hadn’t necessarily heard of?” says Daniel Berlin, Battlefield’s design director. “Let’s have a war story all about the Tirailleurs, the French colonial soldiers who were fighting for a nation that didn’t accept them, to liberate a country they’d never been to. That’s an interesting part of world war two.”
There’s a reason, of course, that we tend to hear the same kind of story over and over in movies and games about the wars: those people were documented best. To find different stories, says Berlin, the designers delved into soldiers’ personal correspondence and other documentation, and they visited lesser-known locations to find places that were visually fresh.
Battlefield V is not a historically accurate representation of events from the second world war. It stays well away from the most horrific aspects of the conflict, such as the Holocaust, zeroing in instead on heroic fantasies of war that are fun to play. As a female Norwegian resistance fighter, I blew up a German factory with my mother, shot Nazi soldiers with a pistol while skiing down a mountain and foiled a plot to export heavy water intended for German atomic bomb experiments. But they are rooted in real places: the Norwegian resistance did exist, and successfully sabotaged German operations in the area. Battlefield V’s design director Eric Holmes describes the stories as “living in the cracks between established facts”.
Given the demographics of video games, and of the Battlefield series in particular, Battlefield V might be a first introduction to aspects of the world wars for teenagers and young men. “Battlefield 1 brought a new perspective on the first world war and sparked interest [among players] to find out more about what actually happened,” says producer Lars Gustavsson. “Many of us, including me, lived under the impression that it was primarily taking place in Europe in a trench stalemate. Our hope is to do the same with Battlefield V as we bring new perspectives on what took place beyond D-day, and how this war changed the world and our lives.”
Battlefield V does march on to potentially controversial territory with its final story, The Last Tiger, which comes out in December and casts the player as a tank commander defending Germany’s borders. “It’s a challenging subject,” says Holmes. “We knew it was something we had to handle delicately. But we didn’t choose the subjects of theses stories because they were easy. We chose them because each felt like an untold story … each can bring something new to a war that has been explored in many mediums.
“The Tiger tank itself is an icon of the war. It was years ahead of its time. It could destroy enemy tanks at a kilometre away – meanwhile, if allied tanks hit it point blank there was no guarantee you would be able to damage it. The juxtaposition of an unstoppable vehicle in a fight it cannot win felt like a rich dramatic backdrop to explore what it would be like to join a German crew. It was vitally important that we didn’t gloss over the tough issues, that we held the crew to account for their actions. For the things they said and did just to get through one more day. It was important to use the opportunity to get closer to their world without celebrating them. The German submarine movie Das Boot was a touchstone for many of us – a crew under pressure, not always unified, not all buying in to the official narrative of the war.”
Battlefield V doesn’t challenge the official narrative of war entertainment typically presents – of heroism and against-the-odds victories – but it does present heroic narratives different than those in a typical war video game, spotlighting female, non-white and non-allied combatants, and attempting to show a human side to a war that was so vast and incomprehensibly awful that it can be difficult to relate to. War Stories is a counterpoint to the mayhem of Battlefield V’s large-scale multiplayer battles.
“It’s important that you give people a sense of feeling and emotion, rather than just facts and damage stats,” says Gustavsson. “Why was this war fought? What did it mean to people who engaged in it? What was that like? It’s a form of world-building that’s vitally important if you want people to really invest.”
