"It's a difficult balance. You don't want to focus on and create entertainment out of the horror," says Grøndal, and cites the game's prologue, which casts the player as one of the Harlem Hellfighters defending France from the Germans near the war's end, as instrumental in setting the tone for Battlefield 1. The sequence explicitly tells you you are not expected to survive—and when you do, your perspective shifts to another character, as the name of the man who just died is displayed on screen, just above the years their life began and ended.

"The balancing act there is to not pass judgment, and instead focus on the people in it portrayed through the perspective of what they saw, and not kind of pointing fingers to a map and saying 'let's go,'" says Grøndal. "We wanted to tell the stories about the people who were there. They were there for many different reasons, but they were all kind of overwhelmed by the circumstances they were in, and how they reacted to them."

"One of the interesting things about World War I is that there is no clear bad guy or good guy. There are good people and bad people in it, and they did good and bad things," says Grøndal. "These are all stories about change—not only how these people changed, but how the world changed around them at the same time."

"We wanted to tell the stories about the people who were there. They were there for many different reasons, but they were all kind of overwhelmed."

Of course, all of this is in the service of making a really good Battlefield game—hence the liberties taken in the game's portrayal of the war. The balance between accuracy and fun is a bit less of a precarious one, but it's one worth parsing given the gravitas the game's story seeks to portray. " We had to take some creative liberties where we felt those were needed, but also not invent anything new, because we didn't really have to do that either. We took some creative liberties in terms of time—some things exist in the game that didn't exactly exist in that point in time, but still within that four-year span. Just to make it better game, essentially ... Battlefield games are in our DNA, so we kind of know where the fun lies and what we should be doing. In previous Battlefield games we've also been taking creative liberties in terms of having equipment that hasn't been [used] before, like fighter planes and helicopters. We've had to be a little more peculiar with it, a little more detailed in the decision making. But the good thing is because of all the great research we had—we had so much to pick from—we essentially just picked the thing we found most interesting."

At its core, Battlefield 1 is a big-budget first-person shooter—a form of video game that rarely bothers with any sort of nuance, electing instead to divert most of its energy to what remains, to date, the most tangibly visceral of digital experiences to go mainstream. They are real-time tactical puzzles and team sports that may never entirely shed the sometimes-troubling subtext of their violence. That Battlefield 1 attempts something approaching reverence for its subject matter beyond simple gear fetishism is both rare and commendable—and, for the most part, really effective.

"I'm surprised how little I knew about it," says Grøndal of World War I's faint cultural imprint, which seems at odds with its far-reaching and lasting effects. "The Europe that you and I know today was largely created by this time. And the British Empire, and all these other empires—this is the time all these empires collapsed, or started to collapse, and created the world we live in today. ... Visiting countries that were a part of these empires, seeing the different cultures and how far they reached, I find it interesting and also important in light of today's world. How modern conflicts are rooted in these beginnings, and you can trace them back to those times."