[Note: We've seen a lot of people in our community interpret this article as a condemnation of anyone who downvoted the Battlefield V trailer on YouTube. That is not our intent. There are many reasons to not be excited about any given game trailer, including art style and general tone. With this piece, we intended to focus on a specific line of criticism we wanted to address, but rest assured this isn't the last you'll hear from us on Battlefield V, positive or negative.]

While we didn’t get to see real gameplay, EA and DICE’s reveal of Battlefield V did shine a light on a lot of details about the upcoming game. It’s coming out October 19, it’s going back to the series’ World War II roots, and it will not have a premium pass, meaning that all major post-release content will be free to everybody.

But along with these facts has come a backlash from a vocal minority around the fact that the trailer and box art focus on a female soldier with a prosthetic arm. The argument is that this detail means that we won’t be getting an “authentic” World War 2 experience from Battlefield V because there were no women in combat in World War 2. We’ll revisit the accuracy of that last assertion in a bit, but before we do, we have to challenge the premise that anyone has ever gotten an “authentic World War 2 experience” from any Battlefield game.

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When it comes to portraying war, the Battlefield series, and most video games as a whole, have never even attempted to be realistic, and constantly bend the rules of reality to create exciting and surprising gameplay. Or, as Battlefield V’s executive producer Aleksander Grøndal put it on Twitter, “we’ll always put fun over authentic.” And that’s the thing: unless you’re making a hardcore simulation along the lines of the ARMA series, you’d be crazy not to.

Here are just some examples of extremely unrealistic things you can do in the Battlefield series, most of which are a lot of fun.





Magically spawn on your squad leader Heal up to perfect health after a gunshot wound on the battlefield Reliably resuscitate people who’ve been shot in the head or blown up by artillery with an injection Shoot teammates without harming them (depending on server settings) Run an unlimited distance carrying heavy weapons Encounter a megalodon Drive a tank and fire its cannon by yourself Lose no mobility after being shot in the leg Bunny hop Fire physics-defying bullets that don’t drop over distance (with certain weapons) When you eject a magazine before it’s empty, the remaining bullets in the discarded magazine aren’t deducted from your ammo count Repair a severely damaged vehicle within seconds using a handheld "repair tool" Guns never jam or misfire Run around on top of a blimp Use a super-tiny Kolibri pistol Fall hundreds of feet, then pull a chute 10 feet off the ground and not break your legs Eject from a fighter jet, launch a shoulder-mounted missile at a pursuing jet, then land back in your own jet and continue flying Voice chat with teammates across the map in World War I Stand on top of a galloping horse with a flamethrower Use a defibrillator as a weapon

All of that stuff is completely absurd and throws the concept of realism out the window – and we haven’t even gotten into the nitty-gritty details like the accurate ammo capacity of a Lee Enfield No.4 Mk I or which army should be using what weapon during what time period.

But do you know what’s not unrealistic at all? Portraying women in combat in World War 2. It’s true that men were the vast majority on the battlefield, but you don’t have to look very hard at all to find examples of brave women distinguishing themselves on the front lines.

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Take Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper, who is credited with 309 kills – beating out fellow Soviet sniper Klavdiya Kalugina’s 257. Or Nancy Wake, a spy and hero of the French Resistance who became the Gestapo's Most Wanted by 1943. Or The Night Witches, a group of female Soviet bomber pilots who would go on upwards of eight bombing runs every single night. Or Anne-Sofie Østvedt commanded thousands of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Norway.

Were they as numerous as men on the battlefield? No. Did they exist, and did they play important and heroic roles that are worthy of memorializing in a game set in that time period? You bet they did. So when EA introduced Battlefield V by highlighting a female soldier in the trailer and the key art, it’s doing something realistic. But more than that, by allowing half the world’s population to play as an avatar that resembles them, EA and DICE are making Battlefield more fun for more people – and that’s what games should be about.