I'm not a guy that necessarily likes or dislikes realism. I can enjoy it in bits and pieces, and sure, you can call it cherrypicking, at the end of the day I want my games to be fun. I don't care what you call that, its the point of video games. However how you arrive at that can amass in many different ways. I don't play by this idea that entertainment and fun exclusively equals wide grinning smiles. You need immersion, and enjoyment of the product, and that's a loose and broad, but very fitting approach to how to get to "fun". So with that, how do we approach a polarizing subject like historical accuracy, and authenticity? Technically the authentic route in a game with violence is to stop working the moment the player first dies. However, as games like Dark Souls and... pretty much every other game in existence stands to suggest, that's not the key to victory, and that's not what people mean when they talk about obtaining authentic behavior or realism. So... can we stop making these awful strawmen arguments?
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| though admittedly this was funny |
What people ask for when they want "realism" varies often by a series standard, or their exact context, but its never the exact reality of the situation or else they would just dive right into it. To simulate or be even just immersed is a slight different story, but still one of noble ambitions to limit a piece of art towards obtaining the spirit and heart of the setting. Most of us don't want to see katanas in a more modern military style shooter, nor do we want the same katana in the hands of a realistic norse game, and likewise it would just look off if someone were to say... cast Abraham Lincoln as a chinese man in a wheel chair, or choose a native american soldier as the red coat in an upcoming American Revolutionary war game. Saying something isn't right, or something is amiss isn't the same as suggesting "my game now needs to stop working after I die once" type of realism, it just means you fucked up the basic level of believability for the setting, and damaged the basic point of even choosing that setting or ideal area to begin with, unless of course you were intentionally going alt-history or steampunk fantasy. ...and I have no problem with that, by all means, go crazy fantasy with this shit, just do it in your own space and with that loudly at the declaration. However if the first thing you note is "we're a Vietnam game", and then you give me katana wielding frenchmen, I'm raising some questions. Not because of some idiotic strawmen of "Oh you don't like french people or katanas" No, fuck off, I don't like it because the idiots designing the game forgot what their game was even supposed to represent.
However you think I'm probably being silly, unless of course you know what this is building up to. You think I'm just saying silly things, and there would never be such a crazy thing as a chinese wheelchair man posing as abe lincoln, or some katana frenchman in Vietnam, but yet the entire time you're laughing at these mock-ups, Battlefield V's trailer exists with a frequent energetic woman soldier flipping around in the WW2 era, jumping and shooting backwards out of an exploding house, doing fast paced combat better than most in a constantly energetic and twitchy fast-paced battleground, with a prosthetic two-piece claw arm, and just when she steps out of the spotlight for a second she comes back in on a close-up scene to save the FPS-perspective player. If you somehow stopped your brain functions and decided the only thing I noted out of that entire recap was "ew, women!" then get off the internet, do some jogging, get some fresh air into that thick skull, and come online only when you can think and comprehend thoughts again like a matured human being. That's not what I said, I am in fact pointing out how batshit crazy this "latest WW2 Battlefield" game has decided to pitch itself as with the very first trailer and spotlighted appearance. This is what they want to show off as their return to WW2 after nearly a decade. A series that has been the pinnacle of mainstream semi-tactical competitive multiplayer, with large militaristic possibilities all in a team coordinated large war field lite simulation. ...and now they choose their big WW2 game will be best represented with a disabled tenacious claw woman rushing in with assault rifles, jumping out of falling buildings, and into jeeps where she just perfectly shoots out semi-auto rifle rounds from a moving vehicle with her claw arm, and expects fans to somehow NOT call bullshit. That's without noting the gameplay implications also poked at by the same angry fans. The fast paced action and chaos, with chatty characters, was more of a strange warped fusion between COD and Overwatch than it was a sessions of Battlefield.
Look, people aren't mad here because of some arbitrary "realism" meter. The fact is Dice or EA decided the best way to pitch this game, was through the lens of the most crazy and unblievable fashion imaginable, crushing your immersion and sensibilities from the start with super badass claw english woman at the forefront. No amount of "but women and those prosthetic types were technically in the war, and-" will strike down how crazy and unbelievable the whole scene was. ...and once again, neither does it help when somebody's smug dumbass decides that asking for a slightly better and more immersive representation is the same as wanting your game to be a straight parallel to real life. Look, we get it, games can be unrealistic and are meant for fun. Media in general is permitted to do these things. We were all fine with Wolfenstein, we were all happy with the world aspect of The Order 1887, and we can have quite a lot of fun with crazy games like Timesplitters, or Killzone. Those clearly aren't real, and even their realistic inspirations are a stretch, but the difference is they made it clear from the start, and their ambitions to entertain you were as different as Candy Crush is to Portal. We didn't get Disney's Mulan as a real life tale of what really happened, we got it as a more modern american spin on an old folk tale. However when a more serious game series, established with mostly semi-accurate portrayals of wide open battles and interesting settings and events, says its doing WW2, its perfectly acceptable to find it jarring when their reveal is a tinge away from being both Steampunk action, and another less serious game franchise like COD. Many fans of that franchise were not expecting, nor wanting, that kind of game shown off there. It was bad marketing and a misjudgement of their own consumer base at the very least, and disgusting political pandering and drama-stirring PR calculation at its very possible worse, but in either scenario... its not an easy reveal for fans to take in, otherwise there wouldn't be a big fuss. Somebody fucked up.
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| Nobody expected a realistic Robin Hood from Disney, but Battlefield is another case... |
...and look, I'm not here to rain on Dice's parade. If their message against this controversy were true, I could respect it a little. Fun and authenticity can be difficult to balance in a way. Its tough sometimes to figure out whether you want the gun jamming of Far Cry 2, or to just make the setting itself exclusively feel right while the gameplay is gamey as hell. However... most devs never reached a point of throwing Elephants in Far Cry 5's America, or giving COD WW2 a space station launched nuke. That's where Dice fucked up, in the same spot and reason the actual new Robin Hood movie trailer is being scrutinized to pieces rather than the Disney one. There's a difference between having fun, and pretending to take up a serious mold while still being sillier than even the one clearly having fun. Its not that they're some innocent child sitting over there trying to figure out what's fun, and what matches the theme, but rather the fact Dice have all but pushed the ignite switch on this controversy by including the most ridiculous thing at the forefront of their reveal. In addition to katanas, crazy fast-paced action, and twitchy weapon combat, you had a handicap claw-armed woman in an era where she was a minority. Yet here she was diving in wrecklessly, dying, jumping out of an exploding building just magically alive again, and returning to conveniently save someone else at the front of the camera. Somebody out there tried debuking this situation as "oh, you could run on exploding blimps in BF1, but we only complain when there's women", and here I stand shrugging at that, not even sure if that's possible in BF1, because the fact is Dice weren't stupid enough to make that the highlight and main point of their WW1 game. This is the first thing we see out of their WW2 effort though, and its practically just as crazy, and they're standing behind this as a virtue signaling proud moment to "represent their players" with possibilities like this. ...fuck off with that bullshit Dice, what you really have here is something crazy enough to be an accidental Bad Company 3 advertisement, except you lost any talent to make a good game worth that title. So we're left with this bullshit, and the possible first sign that your series is collapsing and doesn't know what to do with itself as EA pushes you to make the next annual thing every year.
At the end of the day Dice you have two better options to pick from with this situation: 1) Market your games better and more appropriate. Tone matters, whether you seem to actually put effort into it or not, and consumers will see and discuss it. 2) Make this a spin-off, and go all out on steampunk craziness. By all means, I am serious, and would even rather play that game than whatever garbage you had planned here. Within this perimeter you can truly do whatever, including a playable wheelchaired Chinese Lincoln. No wait, you can make it a she, and give her a claw as well. No, make that a minigun arm! It'd be far more welcomed and enjoyable than pretending such nonsense would make it into a common WW2 battle ground filled with wacky antics. You can do whatever you want without concern of authenticity, or even basic laws of nature, as long as you follow your own set world's rules. That's what makes games like Doom so much more fun than your games anyway Dice. Give it a try sometime.
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| Got some exclusive Battlefield 6 concept art right here |
