What happened DICE?

Out of all the DLCs for Battlefield 1, this was the only one I was genuinely hyped for. The description says this:

“Go over the top in the most infamous battles of WW1. Conquer bitterly contested ground with brutal tools and unique weapons.”

People (including myself) were writing articles and making videos speculating what maps, weapons, and content the DLC would bring. “My God”, I thought, “This will be the best DLC in the whole game!”

Many YouTubers that I follow, including Flakfire and Westie thought of tons of amazing map locations and interesting weapons that should be featured in the DLC.

Then the official news came out. The maps that would be featured in the DLC would be the Somme, Passchendaele, Caporetto (so far so good), and two aerial maps recycled from the single player campaign.

And so, after the news leaked, I decided to make a list of the glaring problems this DLC has and how DICE can rectify it.

1. The Map Locations

Okay, so we get the Somme, Passchendaele and Caporetto, all are famous battles and all were on my list so that’s a good start. However what’s the deal with these aerial assault maps? Firstly, they should have been included with Turning Tides given it’s a vehicle based DLC. Secondly, why the rehashed maps from Campaign? Would it kill them to make some original maps for the DLC. I mean, it’s not going to take long to make, all you are designing is the sky! That can’t be too hard.

Thirdly, why aren’t these maps free to all players? That would be a great gift to the community who have played the game since launch. You’re already recycling the maps from Campaign and a lot of people want aerial only maps.

Then if you only want to include 5 maps with Apocalypse, make some unique locations like Messines and Belleau Wood. I mentioned this in my map speculation article but here’s the TL;DR version:

Messines

Have a windy maze of tunnels underground (with capture points) and have some flags on the top map so players can fight underground and on the surface. Or perhaps they could have it completely underground and lock the primary weapons so you can only use your sidearm and melee weapon (similar to how they only let you use Landships on the Russian Revolution maps). This way, we could have unique infantry only map like we’ve never seen in a Battlefield game before. It could become the new Operation Metro.

Belleau Wood

This can have tall trees and trenches throughout. There can be the old German trenches near their spawn HQ and the start of the woods where the Americans spawn. There can be trenches and field guns throughout the forest as well as some shell holes to take cover in. The Americans can get a re-skin to resemble the US Marines that fought in Belleau Wood. Some could have the Brodie helmet and some could have the Smokey Bear hats or the caps that the US scout currently has in the base game.

I think if DICE adds those maps and gives the air maps away to the whole playerbase for free, then that will be a nice gesture and we’d get some fun and unique maps for Apocalypse.

“But what about the February release? They won’t have time to make the maps!”

This brings me to my next point.

2. Rushing The DLC

This is another gaping problem this DLC is presenting: the timing. The second half of Turning Tides hasn’t even been released yet and they’ve already got the Apocalypse maps on the CTE! DICE made a huge mistake by being too ambitious with the Russian DLC. Look at this release:

They Shall Not Pass: March 2017

In The Name Of The Tsar: September 2017

Turning Tides Part 1: December 2017

Turning Tides Part 2: January 2018

Apocalypse: February 2018

There is a whole six months between the French DLC and Russian DLC release. Granted, In The Name Of The Tsar had a load of content but was it worth it? Was it worth throwing the whole calendar off to add some more maps in? I would have rather they spent less time on the Russian DLC and took out a couple of the maps (like Albion and Lupkow Pass since they don’t fit into an Operation) and spent more time in 2018 working on Apocalypse to make it as great as possible.

If you’re going to do the last DLC with all the famous battles of World War 1, you should take the time to do it right.

It also doesn’t help that their interest has been shifted to Battlefield 2018 and this DLC makes it even more obvious that they are just hurrying through WW1 so they can get to World War

2. Lack Of Fan-Favourite Gamemodes

DICE has a new fixation with Conquest Assault now and they’ve added it to Apocalypse on the Somme and Caporetto. The problem is that they have ONLY added Conquest Assault for those maps. There is no Classic Conquest for those maps. I assume it is for historical accuracy but I have heard that there are gameplay problems because of the Conquest Assault mode on these maps.

The simple solution would be to include Classic Conquest for these maps as well.

However, what I really wanted to talk about was the lack of Frontlines and Operations. Frontlines is a favourite of many players (including myself). It was originally released with the French DLC but has now been applied to some maps in the base game.

Surprisingly, it hasn’t been added to the Russian maps yet but I hope DICE does that in the near future.

Frontlines should be added to the Apocalypse DLC. It would be beyond perfect to play Caporetto on Frontlines because in real life, there were 12 battles of the Isonzo. The Italians and Austro Hungarians fought over this river for 2 years before the Austro Hungarians finally won.

It would be great to play Back to Basics (a mode where everyone uses standard issue rifles) on Caporetto on Frontlines. I don’t think you can get more WW1 than that!

If DICE added Frontlines to the Apocalypse maps it would give the players the real WW1 experience (at least in my eyes).

As for Operations, I can understand why they aren’t adding them. None of the maps are connected which misses the point of Operations. However, if DICE were to stretch the maps (like what they did to St. Quentin’s Scar in the Kaiserschlacht operation) then that could be cool. Make Passchendaele twice as long and have the attackers capture 10 objectives (5 sectors). I think that would be something cool to try out and we can also get those awesome cutscenes that play before the round.

3. No New Armies

I wrote in my Apocalypse map speculation article that I would be upset if the Canadians weren’t added to the Apocalypse DLC.

Ah yes, the Canadians, the ones that took Vimy Ridge and fought in numerous deadly battles.

The Canadians, that survived 4 days enduring gas attacks with no form of protection at Ypres.

The Canadians, that aren’t in the freaking game.

Seriously! I checked the official Battlefield website and I didn’t find the “new army” blurb on the Apocalypse page.

They didn’t even re-skin the British on the CTE! I mean that’s the least they could do. You could argue that the Canadian uniform looks identical to the British one (which is true). But so is the American one and they made the Americans look different to the British.

I know that DICE is running out of time since they (stupidly) promised to release the DLC in February but they should at leats re-skin the British to look like Canadian soldiers (maybe change their faces, add some different uniform variations, patches, etc.) As for the voicelines, they could use the American ones. I know that Americans and Canadians don’t sound exactly the same but look at what they did to the medic in Turning Tides that is meant to be an ANZAC. They just gave him a British accent.

I would have liked it if DICE changed the voice actor for the Canadians but I’d be happy if they just changed the character models and gave them the American voice. It’s better than excluding them from the game entirely.

4. Lame Weapons

I don’t know, the weapons just seem boring this time around. Nothing really strikes me as “brutal” as they said in the DLC description. There’s a couple of weird looking weapons but none of them are nearly as weird as the ones that have already been featured in the game. But it’s not like the developers had to think of weapons to be featured! Flakfire had already suggested many interesting weapons that could be included but only two are in the game at the moment (the Ross rifle and the m1917 Enfield).

The rest of the guns look pretty ordinary by Battlefield 1 standards and don’t look like they play well (note: this is from watching videos, I am in Asia so I cannot play on the CTE).

The new SMG looks like a shorter Chauchat with fewer bullets. The Chauchat has 20 bullets whereas the SMG has 9. The recoil looks terrible and it looks like you can only face one enemy at a time. This gun comes in an optical variant as well.

The new LMG is pretty much the gun the Sentry elite class uses. It’s called the 08/18. It has 100 rounds and overheats quickly. However, it looks like it takes very few bullets to kill and it has virtually no recoil. It’s a Parabellum 2.0 with less recoil. There is also a suppressive variant.

The new medic rifle looks more unique than the other 2 guns. It looks like a cross between the Autoloading Extended and the Selbstadler m1916, but it fires like the Autoloading 8.35.

All in all, I think the weapons are very bland and they do not match the “brutal” and “unique” description of the DLC.

At this point, I don’t know what DICE is going to do, but I can only hope they listen to the community on this one and let Battlefield 1 go out with a bang.