Video Game / Battlefield 1

Experience the dawn of all-out war.

Battlefield 1 is based upon events that unfolded over one hundred years ago.

More than 60 million soldiers fought in 'The War to End All Wars'.

It ended nothing, yet it changed the world forever.

What follows is frontline combat.

You are not expected to survive.

— Opening text of "Storm of Steel"

Battlefield 1 is a First-Person Shooter in DICE's Battlefield series. Unlike what the title number implies, it is not the first game in the series (that would be Battlefield 1942). It is instead the fifteenth overall installment and the next game in the main series after Battlefield 4.

The game set in World War I (hence the jarring change in the title number). The game was released on Windows, Playstation 4 and Xbox One on October 21, 2016, with an "Early Enlister Edition" dropping three days beforehand on October 18.

Four DLCs were announced: They Shall Not Pass, In the Name of the Tsar, Turning Tides, and Apocalypse. Like previous games, each DLC features new weapons, new maps and operations, and new game modes. Premium season pass holders receive access to them two weeks early, and can have earlier access to their contents in the Premium-only Community Test Environment.

The first DLC, They Shall Not Pass, was released on March 14, 2017. The DLC focuses on the French Army and their battles in World War I, including the infamous Battle of Verdun itself.

The second DLC, In the Name of the Tsar, was released on September 19th, 2017. It focuses on the Eastern Front of World War I, as well as the Russian Civil War that caused the exit of the Russian Empire from World War I, including both the Russian Empire and the Red Army factions.

The third DLC, Turning Tides, focuses on naval engagements during World War I, and was released in two parts in late 2017 and early 2018.

The fourth and final DLC, Apocalypse was released on February 20th, 2018. It focuses on some of the most notorious and bloody battles waged during the Great War; The Battle of The Somme, the Battle of Passchendaele, Battle of Caporetto, a German air raid conducted over the city of London and aerial dogfights waged over The Alps.Watch the Reveal Trailer here, the Gameplay Trailer here, the Gamescom Gameplay Trailer here, Single Player Trailer here and Launch Trailer here.

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Tropes that apply to Battlefield 1:

General Tropes

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Grenades (not counting the Anti-Tank Grenade, which is a gadget) are thrown instantly, without pin-pulling animations, unlike Battlefield 4. Unrealistic? Stretching it just slightly beyond breaking. Acceptable? Seeing that it is such a tiny change and it speeds up the grenade throws, acceptable.
  • Teammate gas will not damage teammates, but will deny healing and apply heavy suppression effects on them. This is a compromise between the lack of friendly fire in most of the multiplayer and the reality that one is expected to wear a gas mask in lethal chemical gas. In addition, the effects of the gas are heavily downgraded as to not slow down the game too much. Instead of causing blinding and other other long-lasting symptoms, it just drains your health.
  • Anti-Tank grenades, both their heavy and light versions, don't do as much damage as their frag grenade counterparts do against infantry, even though the Anti-Tank Grenade is visibly larger and powerful enough to destroy vehicles. For the sake of balancing, they needed to do less damage against infantry as there'd be little reason to use frag grenades over a grenade that can do the same amount of damage while also granting its user anti-vehicle potential.
  • Tanks drive way faster than they did in real life. If they were in historically-accurate speeds, playing through the entirety of Through Mud and Blood would take hours if not days.
• Action Girl:
  • Zara of the "Nothing is Written" war story is one, and as the codex notes, it was not entirely unheard of for women to serve on the front lines. Some, such as Milunka Savić and Flora Sandes even served openly as women, and didn't have to resort to disguising themselves as men. World War I even saw Amazon Brigades like the Russian Women's Battalions take the field. The in-game codex in fact mentions these female soldiers by name.
  • Battlefield 1 was also the first game in Battlefield series that has female character model in Multiplayer mode in the form of the Scout class of Russian and White Army factions. They are supposed to represent the real-life Russian Women's Battalions mentioned above.
• Advertised Extra: The Harlem Hellfighters, the all-black infantry regiment who were featured heavily in marketing leading up to release and are represented on the game's cover, are only playable in the game's brief prologue, after which they are never seen again in the campaign (although they are mentioned in Enemy Chatter, and the narrator for the beginning of each War Story is from the Harlem Hellfighters, not to mention some of the American multiplayer models).
• A.K.A.-47:
  • The Beretta M1915 pistol and M1918 submachine gun are referred to as, respectively, the "Modello 1915" and "Automatico M1918".
  • A more glaring example: the Browning Auto 5 is referred to as the "12g Automatic". Especially odd as a trailer for the game referred it as the "Automatic 5". In a similar vein, the Remington Model 8 is referred to as the "Autoloading 8".
  • More examples include the "Mle. 1903" (FN 1903), the "Taschenpistole M1914" (Mauser M1914 pocket pistol), the "Repetierpistole M1912" (Steyr M1912), and the "Gewehr M.95" (Steyr Mannlicher M1895).
  • A more minor example: the Wechselapparat flamethrower is referred to by its shortened "Wex" nickname.
  • The 1.59-inch Breech-Loading Vickers Q.F. Gun, Mk II is called the AT Rocket Gun in-game. It's a deliberate choice, given that the real artillery piece is used against bunkers, and since the gun needs to have more uses than just shooting at the environment, it was renamed to imply that it was primarily an anti-vehicle weapon.
  • A somewhat historically justified example is the Thompson SMG that was added in the May 2018 update, which is refferred to by its original nickname - Annihilator.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Horses automatically jump over minor obstacles like barbed wire, low walls and even vehicles.
  • Sprinting into doors will have the player automatically charge the door open so you don't have to stop and open it yourself.
  • Medics and Supports using Bandages and Ammo Pouches, smaller and single target versions of their crate counterparts, will appreciate that throwing their goods will home in at teammates in need of health and ammo, rather than simply flopping on the floor. Handy for giving your support while remaining in cover.
  • Grenades are thrown instantly without delay or pin-pulling animation.
  • Getting into a vehicle has a detailed animation, but getting out is instant. One would guess that watching your soldier slowly climbing out of a doomed tank would be a very frustrating sight...
• Anachronism Stew: Conspicuously averted in general, despite the presence and abundance of relatively high-tech weapons. Every piece of weaponry and technology used in the game either predates or was developed during the war, even if it wasn't actually used to some extent, but most were either too obscure or too impractical to see widespread service.
  • Even if the weapons were 'real', it was still a common criticism of the game that the Developers chose to use these experimental & obscure weapons to ensure the game played like a typical modern shooter, filled with automatic weapons that only gained more wider use in World War 2, and not the slow bolt action rifles that were actually used by troops during the war.
  • Straight examples of anachronism stew:
    • The stick grenades used by the Central Powers Nations (and by extension, the Anti-Tank grenade) are based on the interwar M24 stick grenade, as opposed to the more period-appropriate M17 model ^note A noticeable clue is that the M17 has a belt clip on on its warhead◊, which the in-game stick grenades lack◊.
    • In a similar vein, the M1911 isn't an original model 1911; it's a mishmash of both the original 1911 and the M1911A1 (developed in 1924), with the most glaring detail being the curved mainspring housing, which is straight on an original M1911.
    • The interface icon for the B.A.R. actually depicts the WWII-era M1918A2 variant, as opposed to the original M1918. The Telescopic variant of the B.A.R. likewise has the bipod of the M1918A2. In fact, even the iron sights◊ are taken from a WWII-era B.A.R. For comparison, this◊ is what the iron sights really looked like.
    • The MP18 never actually had a bayonet. The later MP28 could mount one, although even this looked considerably different from what's shown on the weapon in-game.
    • Limpet mines were actually developed ca. 1939. While some forms of sticky naval mines similar to limpet mines may have existed near the end of World War 1, the limpet mine itself was never developed and named until after World War 2 started.
    • The first Char 2C super-heavy tanks weren't built until several years after the war ended.
    • The Allied gas mask◊ is modeled after a Mk IV General Service Respirator, which was first issued in 1926.
    • As mentioned below, the model of the Villar-Perosa is actually based on a prop mock-up of the weapon used in the 1987 film The Sicilian. A more accurate depiction of the weapon would look like this◊.
    • Pre-ordering Battlefield V unlocks a number of World War II-era weapons, such as the M1919 Thompson Machine Gun and the M1938 Mosin-Nagant carbine.
  • Map & War Story specific anachronisms due to the universal equipment:
    • "The Runner" is set during the Dardanelles campaign (1915), but that won't stop Bishop from acquiring an MP 18 submachine gun (developed in 1918, hence the name), nor does it stop most of the British troops from wearing Brodie helmets (developed in 1915, but not issued en mass until 1916). Bishop actually runs into a guy with a flamethrower twice!
    • "Friends in High Places" is set in the spring of 1917, but again, some German troops are equipped with MP18s. Not to mention that all of the German fighters are Fokker Dr.I's, which didn't see widespread service until the spring of 1918.
    • While most multiplayer maps are carefully selected from battles happening around the end of the war at 1918, there are a few exceptions. Fao Fortress is set during the Fao Landing in 1914, Suez is set during the Raid on Suez Canal in 1915, and two of the They Shall Not Pass DLC maps are set during the Battle of Verdun, in 1916.
    • The In the Name of the Tsar DLC likewise has two maps set during the Brusilov Offensive (1916), as well as one set during Operation Albion (1917).
    • The Gallipoli levels in Turning Tides happened in 1915, and the two Battles of Heligoland Bight (either of them could be the one the game is depicting) are set in 1914 and 1917. The Zeebrugge Raid is set in 1918 though.
    • The three infantry Apocalypse maps are all set before 1918. Battle of the Somme happened in 1916, while Battle of Passchendaele and the Battle of Caporetto happened in 1917.
• Automaton Horses: This game loves this trope! Not only can the horses survive ridiculous amounts of damage that you'd swear they're Terminators, but they're also capable of leaping onto buildings!
• Arbitrary Gun Power: While this trope is par for the course for the Battlefield franchise, this even happens to one specific weapon, the General Liu self-loading rifle, depending on what fire mode it's in. In semi-auto, it shares its damage model with the Mauser Selbtslader 1916, as both are chambered for the 8mm Mauser round. Shutting the gas system off and putting the rifle into bolt-action mode however, and it switches to the Gewehr 98's damage model (again, same chambering), including the bolt-action weapon's "sweet spot" mechanic.
• Artistic License – Geography: While the tradition of locations in the Battlefield franchise being much closer to each other than they actually should be continues as usual, it's taken up to eleven with the They Shall Not Pass map Soissons. The actual battle for Soissons was spread apart for miles long across the land, with towns of interest scattered about along the country side. Here, they're a mere couple meters from each other in the form of small towns as objectives for teams to capture. It's justified in the sense that it would be incredibly difficult and rather glaring to create a map that large in comparison to the rest of the maps.
• Artistic License – History: The single-player storylines revolves around an embellished version of WWI. Everything historical still roughly happened when they were supposed to happen, but in the interest of drama and fun, the battles were condensed, the war machines more nimble (and not to mention, numerous), and the advanced weaponry more widely-used (whereas in Real Life they were relegated to limited-run or prototype phases).
• Badass Cape:
  • A few of the characters (including the Harlem Hellfighter on the game's cover art) wear a rubberized groundsheet cape. The cape was widely issued to soldiers in WWI, and was the only piece of waterproofed clothing they had. Soldiers would use it as a raincoat, a sleep mat, and as an impromptu tent to protect themselves and their gear from the damp weather.
  • The Allied factions have lots of cape-wearing classes (mostly Scout and Support), but the Royal Italian Army takes the cake by having everyone wearing giant flowing capes.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: The German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers are this in the game.
• Badass Longcoat: A staple of the armies of the Central Powers. Except for the Ottoman Empire, where only their Scouts wear one.
• Bayonet Ya: Since it's World War I, bayonets are present, and it is possible to do bayonet charges with them.
• BFG:
  • The Tankgewehr M1918 Anti-Tank Rifle in the anti-tank kit is an oversized bolt-action rifle able to penetrate tank armor. It's so big and the recoil is so massive that it forces the wielder to prone in order to use it.
  • The 1.59 Inch Breech-Loading Vickers Q.F. Gun Mk.II is a portable artillery piece carried by Assault class (as simply the AT Rocket Gun). Like the Tankgewehr, it forces the wielder to prone in order to use it. That said, for a class focused on close ranged combat, the AT Rocket Gun is actually a useful ranged weapon for shooting infantrymen from afar like a modern day grenade launcher.
  • The Sentry kit also provides a hand-held MG08/15 to provide ample firepower.
  • The massive artillery gun on the back of the armored train in "Nothing is Written".
  • In the They Shall Not Pass DLC, the Siege Howitzer is a rather large artillery gun to be placed around similar to Field Guns, and meant specifically to rain down hell on anyone in range.
• Black Vikings: While the black (and for the British, Sikh) models in American, French and British Forces do indeed make sense given their history (along with a lack of variation for multiplayer models), routinely finding black German troops (German Scout and Cavalry Kits) fighting on the Western and Eastern Fronts is less so, given the fact that Germany hardly used colonial forces in Europe.
• Bloodless Carnage: The standard Battlefield series practice sees minor cases of being broken in this entry. While most of the combat does not result in any gore, the far more brutal melee takedowns do result in a few splashes of blood.
• Crew of One:
  • The Renault FT-17 light tank is crewed by one player despite needing two (gunner and driver) in real life.
  • The A7V is an even more ridiculous example, with one guy being able to both drive and use the front cannon, even though in real life, it required four men just for those two roles. The entire vehicle required a minimum of 18 people to operate.
  • Somewhat averted for the Mark V landship. While only one player is needed to drive and use its machine guns, two more players are needed to use the cannons on the sides.
  • Downplayed in the War Story "Through Mud and Blood". Black Bess, a Mark V landship, is reportedly suppose to have a crew of eight, but the war story starts with only five in the tank.
  • How about just two players manning both main batteries on an Iron-Duke class dreadnought? Or one player managing to drive an armored train while manning a mortar in the car in front of the locomotive at the same time?
• Combat Parkour: Aside from automatically leaping over chest-high obstructions like in the previous games, BF1 introduces the ability to scale over walls. Fitting, given that Parkour's forerunners were the military obstacle course programs that appeared in the years before the war.
• Cool Airship: The German LZ series of Zeppelins make their official debut here in the Battlefield series as one of the Behemoth-class vehicles in multiplayer. One also shows up in "Storm of Steel", where it is briefly seen supporting German infantry before exploding in a catastrophic fireball towards the end of the level. In the War Story "Friends in High Places", two more show up in an air raid over London and it's up to you to stop them.
• Cool Boat: The Dreadnought that appears as another Behemoth-class vehicle in multiplayer. It can also be seen in "The Runner" War Story.
• Cool Train: The armed to the teeth Armored Train serves as yet another Behemoth-class vehicle in multiplayer, and appears in the campaign during the "Nothing is Written" War Story.
• Critical Existence Failure: As with the previous games, it is played straight for infantry who still have the ability to run, jump, leapfrog and scale walls even at 1% health, aside from blood covering the edges of their screen. Vehicles however can be critically damaged and suffer mobility penalties, and may even catch fire and burn away its last bit of health when damaged enough. In addition to this, individual components of the vehicles may now be targeted and disabled individually affecting its performance. For examples, tank treads can be de-tracked or have their turrets damaged and unusable unless repaired by the crew. Planes can now have their wings partially clipped which will hinder flight controls and handling.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Many structures such as buildings and bunkers are recycled between different maps. For example, "Giant's Shadow" reuses some buildings from "St. Quentin Scar", while "Prise de Tahure" shares a lot of the same assets as "Amiens".
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Considering the setting, the campaign has become this compared to the previous games. The game in general is arguably the most brutal Battlefield game yet, with the most glaring examples being the violent takedown animations and soldiers now screaming in agony from getting shot dead/being lit on fire.
  • They Shall Not Pass is noticeably a tinge darker than the base game. 2 maps are directly based on battles that happened in and around Verdun, easily one of the most bloodiest and drawn-out fights in the entire war, and have appropriate Scenery Gorn to match. The new music is also darker in tone as well.
  • Apocalypse, the final announced DLC expansion, is set to tip things even further in this direction, if the early information about taking place in the most infamous battles of the war and this concept art◊ is any indication.
• Deadly Gas: A staple of the Great War, chlorine or mustard gas is now available weapons for usage by infantry from gas grenades, or deployed via canister shells from vehicles and artillery. Luckily, gas masks are issued to every class to counter this.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Just so that the only semi-auto Scout primary in the game won't become an armor shredder when used with the K-bullets, using the K-bullets with the M1903 Experimental (a Springfield M1903 with a Pedersen device, turning it into a semi-automatic rifle) will show an animation where the soldier replaces the device with the original bolt (loaded with a K-bullet in it), turning it back to its original bolt-action form.
  • DICE really shows a lot of care into the reload animations in this game:
    • Firearms fed with stripper clips reload differently depending on the remaining ammunition. If the amount of ammunition you're missing equals the size of the clip (five for rifles, ten for the C96), the soldier will simply load a clip. If the amount missing is two clips, like with rifles, you'll load one after the other. However, if you're missing, say, 7 rounds from a 10 round rifle, the soldier will load one clip, and then individually load the last two rounds by hand. This means that reloading your rifle when you're missing 5 or 10 rounds results in more efficient reloads. If you don't have enough backup ammo for a full clip, then the reload will be made with individual rounds.
    • The Steyr M1912 mid-magazine reload ejects the exact amount of bullets that are left, an interesting detail for something that happens for a split-second.
    • Similar to the Steyr 1912 mentioned above, some of the weapons in the In the Name of the Tsar DLC have different reload animations depending on how many ammo is left. The Mosin-Nagant and its sawn-off counterpart in particular have five different animations, one for reloading from empty, and one for every possible number of bullets left.
  • If you use the "Go! Go! Go!" command as the squad leader, the player will actually blow the trench whistle instead of shouting.
  • The church bells on Brusilov Keep and Volga River will ding if shot.
  • There are actually different sounds for ejected shells dropping on different surfaces. No joke.
  • On the map Fao Fortress, if you blow up parts of the shore and create deep craters, they will actually fill up with water.
  • Soldiers will breathe heavily and panic when grenades land near them. Other soldiers near you will also say things that react to very specific things like bailing out of a plane midair or from a vehicle that's on the verge of exploding.
    • Lo and behold, they actually recorded female voice lines for every language just in case someone has the "my team speaks my language" option on. This, even though only one class for one faction in the entire game is a woman.
  • On winter maps, you can see soldiers' breathing condense midair due to the coldness, including your own soldier's breathing in first-person.
  • A Jam tin grenade is used when destroying a telegraph station in the Rush and Frontlines gamemodes. In an incredibly subtle detail, the label of the tin actually varies between factions◊, rather than just reusing one texture for all circumstances.
  • The windmills on some maps will spin faster if it's raining.
  • Not only will walking on piles of spent artillery shells make a unique sound, you can actually hear raindrops landing on them if you listen closely.
  • The In The Name Of The Tsar DLC actually has male and female takes for the pre-battle speech, depending on whether the player chosen to have their soldier speak is playing as a female or male soldier.
  • The L-Class destoryer introduced in the Turning Tides DLC has the flag of the faction the team that spawned it on the stern (e.g. a British destroyer has a Union Jack on the rear). The real foresight is that if an enemy faction takes manages to capture it, the flag turns into a Jolly Roger.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Battlefield Hardline added the Lewis Gun and Springfield M1903 weapons into that game as DLC several months before Battlefield 1 was announced.
• Easter Egg: As per DICE tradition, many are to be found ranging from small little details to the ridiculously elaborate.
  • In the first mission of the Friends In High Places War Story, several pyres can be found on the mountaintops, which can be lit up by firing rockets at them. They are very reminiscent to the Beacons of Gondor. Given that J. R. R. Tolkien himself actually served in The Great War, the relation is probably not coincidental.
  • The They Shall Not Pass DLC contains an arsenal of new easter eggs.
    • Verdun Heights has a series of objects that must be shot at, which results in a small house tied to balloons floating across the map.
    • Soissons has a literal basket of Easter Eggs sitting atop of a building even labeled as "Easter Eggs".
    • Rupture contains several scattered mini-houses hidden within the poppy fields.
    • Fort De Vaux has a sealed door to an isolation chamber which standing next to it for a while will produce a loud slam against the door and an shriek afterwards.
    • On the complex end of the scale, going to Fort Vaux and activating three valves throughout the fort, getting three people to turn them all again at the same time, waiting for a crater outside to fill with water from the pipes, throwing a grenade down a long pipe in the floor and killing 3 soldiers by melee kills inside the puddle to fill it with blood will summon a Megalodon shark to instantly kill a player every time they walk over the puddle.
  • An ongoing mystery puzzle involving finding hidden radio headsets scattered across the multiplayer maps and deciphering the codes with Morse and specific timings as well as game updates. There are many signs that this is related to the Phantom Program ARG from Battlefield 4.
• Everything Breaks: The level of destructibility in this game returns to a level similar to the Bad Company games, with more open maps being present that feature many destructible buildings, though there are still maps that are designed with more closed off and tighter combat in mind, featuring minimal destructibility. Notably, there is a shift of focus from the engineered spectacle "Levolution" destruction to more small-scale organic destruction.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The aforementioned flamethrowers are available for use in-game.
• Forces with Firepower: Since this is World War I, a generous variety of armies with a mix of their unique races.
  • Brits with Battleships: One of the main factions, with a variety of soldiers hailing from all corners of the British Empire.
    • Aussies with Artillery: With their Kiwis with Carbines allies, as part of the ANZAC forces serving under the British Crown. They appear to be a customizable skin for the British Empire faction wearing their recognizable slouch hats.
    • Kipling's Finest: Indian soldiers serve as Medics for the British faction in multiplayer, wearing the traditional Sikh turban military garb.
  • Gauls with Grenades: The first DLC, They Shall Not Pass, is completely dedicated to the French Army and their battles.
  • New Roman Legions: The Italian Armed Forces are seen fighting in the Alps, as allies of the Entente.
  • Prussians in Pickelhauben: The old German Empire and their Army make up the bulk of the Central Powers. The iconic pickelhauben itself appears on the heads of German (and Austro-Hungarian) cavalrymen.
  • Russians with Rifles: Similar to the above French example, the Tsarist Russian Army appears in their own DLC, ''In the Name of the Tsar.
    • Reds with Rockets: Unexpectedly showing up in the same DLC as their Tsarist counterparts, the newly formed Red Army takes part in the Russian Civil War where they duke it out with the White Army, a loose collective army that is in direct opposition to communists and their ideology.
  • The Sound of Martial Music: The Austro-Hungarian Empire and its troops appear opposing both the Italian and Russian armies.
  • Turks with Troops: The Ottoman Empire and their troops are seen in the Middle-Eastern front, as an ally of the Central Powers.
  • Yanks with Tanks: The United States appears as one of the factions, dressing similarly to the Brits. The famous Harlem Hellfighters unit is the star of the singleplayer prologue Storm of Steel, which was an all African-American infantry unit which distinguished itself on the Western Front. The cover art of the game features one such member.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Due to the prevalent usage of chemical weapons for this game, all classes are now equipped with gas masks that they can put on quickly with a tap of a button, but renders the soldier unable to aim down the sights of their firearm.
• Heavily Armored Mook: The flamethrower troops in the campaign are these. They are resistant to most shots in the front and their weak point is the fuel tank on their back. In multiplayer, these are anyone who picks up an Elite weapons kit on the battlefield. Cavalry soldiers also wear a metal breastplate that gives them Elite-level armor protection against attacks from the front.
• Hindenburg Incendiary Principle: All the airships in the game go down in giant, spectacular fireballs. Fitting, considering that early airships are filled with hydrogen gas.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • Various prominent characters in World War I are mentioned or introduced. T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) is a side character in the War Story "Nothing Is Written". Manfred von Richthofen (a.k.a the Red Baron) is mentioned in Enemy Chatter and his signature red camo triplane scheme as well as a Luger P08 appears as a pre-order bonus.
  • Stalin is regularly referenced during the Red Tide operation. He was the real commander of the Red Army during the Battle of Tsaritsyn after all, and the city of Tsaritsyn would later be renamed to Stalingrad. That Stalingrad.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Anybody on the receiving end of a bayonet charge.
• Kaiserreich: Naturally.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • You can do horrendous damage to close range enemies with the flamethrower kit and other flammable explosives.
  • In the War Story "Through Mud and Blood", Townsend ignites Black Bess' leaky fuel line and incinerates the surrounding German soldiers, including himself.
• The Juggernaut:
  • Heavily armored troops hand-carrying MG08 machine guns and even Villar Perosa Aircraft Guns appear as both a Multiplayer Elite Class and an enemy in Singleplayer.
  • Luca, the soldier you play as in the "Avanti Savoia!" War Story, equips himself as this to attack Austro-Hungarian forces. He wields both of the aforementioned Elite Class weapons, but he wields the latter in the second part of his War Story, where he isn't wearing his armor.
• No-Sell: A new mechanic is that shell projectiles, like shots from the the AT Rocket Gun, when used against tanks that are angling their armor, will have a high chance to ricochet, lead to the shot ricocheting off the armor for negligible damage.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In multiplayer, this announcer line will send you and teammates into this if unprepared.
  "An Enemy Armored Train/Airship/Dreadnought is en route"
  • In "The Runner", Bishop reaching the rear command only to find it deserted and with a retreat order, which called for an artillery strike on the village that the ANZAC forces are still in.
• Politically Correct History: For Russian Army in the DLC In the Name of the Tsar, female soldiers (in reference to Russia's Woman's Battalion of Death) appeared as the Russian Scout Kit. Again, this one is somewhat justifiable given the history behind Russia's female soldiers, but they were treated as propaganda value and disbanded before the end of the war.
• Red-plica Baron:
  • Richthofen is prominent character in the game since it's based on the WWI, even having his own DLC, the Red Baron Pack included in the Heroes Bundle.
  • All German fighter planes in the campaign Friends in High Places are painted like Richthofen's.
• Regenerating Health: Infantry as per normal are granted this, with Medics speeding up the process by a bit. Averted for vehicles, however: they can only be repaired by a player equipped with a Repair Tool. All repairs to a vehicle must be manually carried out, whether by banging on the vehicle with a Repair Tool from the outside, or activating the self-repair function, which takes some time, prevents the vehicle from firing or steering, and is cancelled by any damage incurred during the process.
• Rule of Cool:
  • The reason rare semi-automatic rifles and sub-machine guns that did exist in the Great War are ridiculously common weapons in the game.
  • Airships or zeppelins fly well low enough in-game just to present themselves in all their glory.
  • Every German fighter plane you fight in "Friends in High Places" is a red Fokker triplane.
  • The existence of offensive-based armored infantry, as seen above in The Juggernaut example. This one is also Truth in Television as the Italian Arditi did have armor.
  • Giant's Shadow has you fighting inside the ruins of a crashed airship. The battle it's based on, the Battle of the Selle, had no records of there being a crashed airship. However, some records indicated that some airships had crashed near the region, and that might be the inspiration.
  • Cavalry with horses had largely disappeared after the first year of fighting. This, however, is no reason not to include it in the game alongside late-war weapons and battles, since it is cool and fun to play.
• Rule of Fun:
  • The general speed at which the game plays is far faster than what the setting would make you expect. The gameplay, unlike say, Verdun, de-emphasizes the slow trench warfare elements, and instead focuses on the open and mobile battlefields that the Battlefield series is known for. Acceptable Breaks from Reality speeds up the combat gameplay, all so that the game would still feel like a Battlefield game at heart but with significant changes to accommodate the setting. To be fair, the entire Battlefield franchise had always sped up the pace at which warfare goes for fun, much like the rest of the FPS industry.
  • This also applies to the tanks in-game. Just like in previous Battlefield titles, some of the more redundant crew positions (loader, etc.) are not filled by the player. This leads to the British Mk.V tank only needing three players when its actual crew count is 8, and the A7V being able to have six players when its actual crew count is 18.
  • The Limpet Charge sticks to everything, even though the real thing uses a magnet and can only stick to metallic things. What makes it really fun is that with the destruction system and the Limpet's high explosives, you basically have a mobile demolition charge that can bring down any structure it sticks on with ease.
  • Parachutes issued to pretty much everyone, in a time when it was still in a highly experimental phase; and worse, was even considered cowardly by some, resulting in hundreds of British pilots plummeting to their death when their plane was shot down.
  • The actual interior of Fort De Vaux is filled with cramped tiny hallways, and during the fighting the electricity inside had been cut off, leaving the whole fort dark. Obviously, both of these are not good for gameplay, so the in-game Fort Vaux is more akin to a large 1930s Maginot Line-style fort containing large and open hallways and being well-lit with electric lights.
  • In real life, what little we know about the Hellriegel SMG states it fed from either a 20-round stick magazine or a 120-round "snail" magazine with a chute that required the user either be stationary, or for a second person to hold the magazine as he moved. For the sake of usability, here the gun is given a totally fictional 60-round drum magazine.
• Scenery Porn:
  • The first level in Friends In High Places has you flying a plane over the snowy French mountainside.
  • Despite still being in a warzone, the map Rupture features large patches of bright red poppies largely untouched by combat, creating a surprisingly beautiful scene in a dark and violent game about war.
• Scenery Gorn: Even more so than its previous titles. Due to the increased destruction capability, Battlefield 1 maps have the ability to start off pristine and beautiful (trenches and some scorched land notwithstanding), to a crater-wrecked, mud-filled, burnt-out hellscape after one round. The map Verdun Heights deserves special mention, being set in the infamous Battle of Verdun itself, features and entire hill set ablaze by artillery shells, and you will fight within the hellish landscape at the heart of it.
• Selective Historical Armoury:
  • While there are many WWI standard-issue weapons in the game, the British service Webley Revolver is noticeably absent from the base game. With the British characters in "Through Mud And Blood" all using the much rarer Webley–Fosbery Automatic Revolver, presumably to stand in for the Webley Mk VI Revolver. It's only later that the Mk VI Revolver appears in the Apocalypse DLC.
  • Bolt action rifles are limited to the Scout class in the normal game, but the "Standard Issue Rifles" custom game mode averts this for primary weapons; Each class can only use the standard rifle issues to the player's faction (i.e, the Germans get the Gewher 98, the British get the SMLE, etc). The only exception are the Italians, whose standard issue Carcano rifle is introduced post-release in the Turning Tides DLC, and they use the Winchester 1895 as their Standard Issue Rifle in-game. The Ottomans used to be another exception to the aversion, using the Martini-Henry (which was used by the Ottomans, but is not what one would call "standard-issue"), but the game later switched it to the far more plausible Gewehr 98.
  • A smaller example than most, but the M1903 Infantry is only available in singleplayer. In multiplayer, you can only use it by playing as Americans on the Standard Issue Rifles mode. Arguably subverted in a way when a patch added it in the form of an alternate firemode for the Experimental variant.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Shotguns are available for the Assault class and they are as every bit deadly in close-quarters just as they were in real life. It is telling, though, that in the base game, all three shotgun makes are American made.
• Shout-Out:
  • 'Storm of Steel' takes heavy inspiration and scenes from Passchendaele, such as an Entente soldier getting a bayonet through his palm and how the battle ends quietly with the rain stopping and the sun rising.
    • Storm Of Steel is also the title of a famous work of literature about the first World War by Ernst Jünger.
  • Many of the Legendary weapon skins are named after important people and battles of the era, even the low profile conflicts before the Great War.
  • One of the multiplayer maps, set on a large château complex, is named "Ballroom Blitz".
  • Łupków Pass has an objective named "Rostov's Hold".
  • The war story "Nothing Is Written" naturally references the famous epic Lawrence of Arabia. Both the name of the story and the chapter "Young Men's Work"'s name are based on quotes from the movie.
    • Similarly, the shot of Lawrence standing on top of the train's wreckage is lifted directly from the film.
  • The 3D model of the Villar-Perosa machine gun used with Sentry kits is based on the prop mock-up of the weapon used in the 1987 film adaptation of The Sicilian.
  • If the defenders win an Operation on the first map, the resulting voice-over commends their "Valiant Hearts".
  • The version of Dream a Little Dream of Me that plays at the beginning of the campaign is the exact same version that plays in Boardwalk Empire.
  • The Sawed-off Shotgun has a special reload that pays homage to Doom II's Super Shotgun, right down to the deliberately jerky animation.
  • The description for the Peacekeeper states that "according to some, this is the greatest handgun ever made".
• Shown Their Work:
  • Even though many weapons present in the game did indeed have their presence exaggerated for purposes of gameplay, some of these weapons are so rare and obscure that it really shows how much DICE went into their research to find them. The Hellriegel 1915 is a shining example since the weapon never went into production, there are only a few photos of it, and there is practically no commonly available information about how it is operated.
  • The "Apples", "Butter", "Duff" military alphabet that the announcer uses is the period-correct military alphabet used by United Kingdom's Royal Navy during World War 1.
  • On a minor note, if you pause it right and look VERY closely enough at the Singleplayer Trailer (when you're in the first-person view of the Italian Ardito wearing armor), you can notice that there are soldiers that are also wearing blue and red uniforms. Even though some French units fought on the Italian Front, the uniform is that of an Austro-Hungarian soldier, since the French blue and Austro-Hungarian blue are different shades.
  • There seems to be a very heavy emphasis on making sure that the weird WW1-era weapon reloads are portrayed correctly:
    • Some of the clip-loaded rifles will eject a round when opening the action with rounds remaining. The non-empty reload animations for these rifles account for the ejection by having a quick animation showing the soldier covering the ejection port before placing the other rounds in.
    • The Steyr Mannlicher M1895 uses an en-bloc clip, meaning that it cannot be "topped off" with spare rounds. In addition, once the M1895 chambers the last round in its magazine, the en-bloc clip falls out of the bottom of the rifle. However, reloading the M1895 while there is only one bullet left will still result in the animation of the clip being ejected. The player also doesn't eject the clip if he uses K-bullets.
    • The Bodeo 1889 is reloaded with a loading gate with an unusual technique where the soldier pulls the trigger after loading a round to spin the cylinder to the next position. The Bodeo can do this without fear of accidentally firing because the hammer is disconnected from the trigger while the loading gate is open.
    • The Lebel Model 1886 rifle has a very counterintuitive reload animation where every reload is finished up by pulling and pushing the bolt twice. This is because the gun features a cartridge lifter that holds an extra round. In non-empty reloads, the player character also loads another round before the second push. This may seem strange at a glance (you may think that you loaded an extra round after reloading all the rounds you fired), but if you look closely, the player character did not cover the magazine when opening the action (it's because if you do so in real life, you will mess up the bridge, which must be pushed down to load more rounds), causing an extra round to be ejected, which is where this extra round came from.
    • The reload for the Perino Model 1908 machine gun added in In the Name of the Tsar correctly depicts its rather unusual reload of filling up a hopper-like box magazine with strips of 20-round clips.
    • The tactical reload of the Farquhar-Hill rifle has player character disengaging the magazine switch before removing the magazine, while the empty reload animation simply shows the empty magazine being removed. This is because the rifle lacks feed lips and uses the magazine switch to lock ammo feeding. Were one to simply remove a non-empty magazine without using the swithc, the remaining rounds would instead come flying out in a spectacular shower of failure. The empty reload animation also shows the bolt being released via pulling the trigger, which is also consistent with the real weapon.
    • The Nagant Revolver normally reloads via a loading gate; however, reloading it from empty has the player remove the center bar, detach the cylinder entirely, and replace it with a full one. While this might seem made-up, it is in fact a real thing people did with loading-gate revolvers, especially cowboys. Don't Try This at Home, however.
  • A quirk of the Model 1897 Shotgun is that it will be slamfired if you hold the fire button as the real weapon was designed to do this, allowing it to fill the role of a semi-automatic shotgun in gameplay terms.
  • Details about Conquest Flags:
    • The U.S. flag correctly has only 48 stars on it.
    • The Germans use the Imperial War Flag◊, as opposed to the National Flag◊.
    • The Austro-Hungarians use the Flag of the Habsburg Monarchy◊.^* This flag◊ was actually a merchant ensign
    • Arguably subverted in In the Name of the Tsar, which gives the Russians this flag◊. While it is commonly associated with Imperial Russia, it was actually only meant for private use. Not only that, but it's even used on "Albion", "Volga River", and "Tsaritsyn" - All maps based on battles that happened after the Tsar abdicated and a provisional government was instated.^*...and in the case of the latter two, after the Tsar and the rest of the Russian royal family were murdered.
  • While Allied nations get a frag grenade based on the infamous Mills bomb, Central Powers nations get a functionally identical stick grenade instead. In the Name of the Tsar likewise gave the Russians their own M1912 "Lantern" grenade.
  • Cavalry-pattern rifles come without a bayonet attachment (which comes default on infantry-pattern rifles). This enables them to be drawn from a holster on horseback.
  • While defending in Kaiserschlacht and attacking in the Oil of Empires operations as the British Empire, being forced to retreat/charging into the next sector will sometimes have a Piper playing the bagpipes to the sounds of the retreat bell/trench whistles and screaming soldiers.
  • As noted by Flakfire, even though the Soissons map uses heavy Space Compression to stuff multiple landmarks into one area, many of them are recreated faithfully.
  • In a similar vein, the game's depiction of the exterior of Fort Vaux is dead on with the real thing.
  • A video by hickok45andson on the SMLE noted that DICE did not take into account of the movement of the cocking piece, a tiny bit of detail that most of the public are likely not aware of. Coincidentally, DICE patched it in soon after, as well as doing the same for the Scout's other rifles..
  • The tread pattern on the British motorbike tires◊ says non-skid, corresponding to an actual World War 1 era tire◊ manufactured by the company Firestone.
  • Compare these labels on the jam tin bombs shown in game◊ with these real ones◊.
  • The elite classes all wear some weird equipment, but it is all based on actual equipment used in the war. The Flame Trooper's gas mask? Real◊. The Sentry's face-covering helmet? Real◊. The goggles-and-respirator combo worn by the Tank Hunter? Real◊.
  • Really minor compared to most, but at the end of Fog of War, Townsend says that "that's enough fun and games for a Tuesday." October 8, 1918^*The first day of the Battle of Cambrai actually did fall on a Tuesday.
  • The May 2018 update added the original model of the Thompson SMG, which was developed during WWI. However, as the description for the gun states, the war ended mere days before the first shipment left the dock. The gun is even referred to by its original "Annihilator" nickname, as it didn't get the "Thompson" nickname until it was put on the civilian market.
• Sword and Gun: The new "vehicle", the horse cavalry, get to use both a cavalry saber and a rifle on the horse. The saber kills enemies in one hit, but is only at melee range, while the rifle is inaccurate but high damaging.
• Tank Goodness:
  • As with the setting, you can pilot the first-built tanks in the history of modern-era warfare; the French Renault FT light tank, the German A7V heavy tank, and ever iconic British Mark V landship.
  • A new Behemoth in the They Shall Not Pass DLC is the Char 2C, a super heavy tank. The same DLC also adds the St. Chamond, designated as an 'Assault Tank' in-game.
• Viewers Are Morons: According to some DICE developers, EA at first didn't want to give the game a chance because they thought that few people would know about World War 1. It was highly likely this is why DICE added a codex containing historical information into the game.

Campaign Tropes

• Action Girl: Zara, a female Bedouin warrior and the Player Character of the "Nothing Is Written" War Story.
• Action Prologue: The moment the game starts up, you're not taken into the main menu. Instead, you are taken straight into "Storm Of Steels", making it very startling to players when they enter and see this quote:
  You are not expected to survive.
• And the Adventure Continues: How "Nothing is Written" ends, with Zara implied to be heading off to accompany T.E. Lawrence on his adventures.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • The Prologue, "Storm of Steel" has your current character dying (even showing their name and date from birth to death) before switching you to another character who, after a bit, will die as well. Lampshaded by the game, by saying that since you're on the front lines, you are NOT expected to survive.
  • In the Through Mud and Blood campaign, you already lose two of your fellow crew members—Finch and Pritchard—in the first mission. In the final mission, Townsend dies and so does your tank, Black Bess.
  • In a similar vein, you can see in the trailers and the ending of the 12-minute preview, one of the pilots for the Friends in High Places war story dies at some point.
    • ...Which is actually a case of Trailers Always Lie! The trailer cuts off right before the moment when, in the actual story, the pilot about to kill his friend changes his mind and saves him instead, leading to one of the only War Stories in the game with an upbeat, happy ending. Then again... the same one also suffers from a serious case of Unreliable Narrator.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The first half of the Italian campaign has you joining wave after wave of Italian soldiers charging very boldly at the enemy yelling "Avanti! Cosi!" ("forward! Like this!") and getting shot down in droves. Cynics have noted that "Avanti! Cosi!" was indeed the gist of Italy's strategy in the war.
• Badass Crew: Black Bess' crew proved to be this when they annihilate an entire German counterattack aimed at Cambrai, and that's only with 3/5 of the original crew!
• Big Bad: Tilkici is one to war story "Nothing Is Written" and the only notable "bad guy" in the entire anthology.
• Bittersweet Ending: Some of the War Stories end this way if only to highlight the War Is Hell situation.
  • "Through Mud and Blood" has Black Bess destroyed and 3 of the crew dead, including Townsend. But Danny and McManus survived, they stopped a German counterattack, and will make it to Cambrai.
  • "Avanti Savoia!" Luca and the Arditi manage to take control of the Austro-Hungarian fort despite their setbacks, but Matteo is dead.
  • "The Runner" Foster and the ANZAC troops manage to safely withdraw back to the Allied ships on the port, but Bishop is heavily wounded and is presumably unable to escape the incoming British bombardment. This also closed the campaign with a Downer Ending, as the ending narration reveals that the Ottoman Empire eventually won and held Gallipoli.
• Black Dude Dies First: The first player character casualty in the game is a member of the all-black Harlem Hellfighters. The game all but straight up demands that this poor bastard die first in order to proceed with the campaign; when he kicks the bucket he does not get a checkpoint restart, the point-of-view simply shifts to the next platoon member and the level carries on from there, with whoever died remains dead. It can potentially double as a playable Red Shirt as well due to how this first soldier is a frontliner, whose insignificance is punctuated by him not even having an identity, the game simply generates a new name for him every time the level is played and the fact that it blatantly expects none of his regiment to survive.
• Birthday Party Goes Wrong: Downplayed in the framing story of "Avanti Savoia", where Luca slips away from his own birthday party. When his daughter goes up to see if he's okay, he confesses that - since it's also the birthday of his twin brother Matteo, who died in the war - it brings back some painful memories for him. This transitions into the main campaign, as Luca tells the story to his daughter. At the end, however, the story told, he is able to go back downstairs and enjoy the party with his family.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The finale of the "The Runner" campaign. Bishop is shot in the back, and gravely wounded. He manages to pull himself to the fortress parapet, in time to see the flare shot out by Foster close by the docks. It ends with a naval bombardment gradually dropping closer and closer... but the campaign ends just as the shells hit Bishop's position.
• Boss Battle: The Ottoman armored train Canavar in the final chapter of "Nothing is Written".
• Brave Scot: Townsend, the tank commander in "Through Mud and Blood". As noted below, he's introduced as a polite, eloquent chap who is going into the thick of battle despite his grey hairs. He never panics or falters in the face of the Germans, and ultimately pulls a Heroic Sacrifice, saving the last two crewmen under him.
• Captain Smooth and Sergeant Rough: The commanding officer of Black Bess, Townsend, is a refined and levelheaded individual that cares about the people under him. McManus, while not really at a commanding position, can be considered man immediately under him since most of the tank crew is dead during most of the war story and is a much rougher and more cynical person. McManus is also an Irishman, and if you know what was going on in Ireland at the time this story is set, his lack of enthusiasm for serving the British Empire is pretty understandable.
• Chekhov's Gun: The pigeon that bothers the crew at the beginning of "Through Mud and Blood" comes back in the end of the same mission as the last hope for the crew. In the same chapter, The leaky fuel line in the first mission comes in later in the last mission for Townsend's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Companion Cube: In "Through Mud and Blood", the whole crew treats their Mark V tank "Black Bess" as this, to the point of borderline cargo shipping.
  Finch: Nononono! Don't swear! She doesn't like it when you swear.
• The Dreaded: The Harlem Hellfighters are this to the Germans if one listens to the Enemy Chatter. They talk about the Hellfighters' feats like never getting captured, never letting go of a trench, and being able to steamroll German lines.
• The Dead Have Names:
  • In the Prologue, every time you die, you learn the name and dates of birth and death of the soldier you were controlling, before taking control of yet another soldier.
  • There's also a small chance that when your soldier dies, the screen will simply say "A Soldier of The Great War", essentially implying that his identity was lost to history. In a way, that's arguably worse.
• The Ending Changes Everything: In the ending of "Friends in High Places", Blackburn's ending lines implies that he's an Unreliable Narrator and that everything you have experienced during his War Story might have just been a fiction told by him in order to make himself look 'heroic'.
• Enemy Chatter: In the campaign during the stealth missions (most notably in "Friends in High Places"), some conversations can be heard between the German soldiers. Topics range from the Red Baron, the Harlem Hellfighters, and The Spanish Flu.
• Excuse Plot: Averted. Several reviewers have noted that the single player "War Stories" mode is the best Battlefield campaign since Battlefield: Bad Company, if not arguably the best in the entire franchise. In particular the campaign has received high praise for telling small, personal human stories amidst the backdrop of the epic Great War and focusing on more intimate heroics and tragedy rather than competing with the likes of Call of Duty to produce a big and vapid spectacle.
• Fighting Irish: McManus, the Irish tank gunner. He's a large, tough man of questionable loyalty to the war effort. Given that Ireland was in the middle of its own war of independence from the British Empire at the time the campaign is set, the subtext is that McManus may feel like he's fighting on the wrong side of a war he has no stake in. In the end, he is loyal to his fellow soldiers, regardless of politics.
• Final Boss: Unusually for a Battlefield single-player campaign, the game ends with a final boss fight against the Ottoman's armored train (it even has a health meter), a preview of Behemoth fights in multi-player.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • The opening text before you take control in "Storm of Steel" brings one up.
    Over 60 million soldiers fought in "The War to End All Wars". It ended nothing. Yet it changed the world forever.
  • Likewise, in the "Avanti Savoia!" campaign, it's very apparent to the player immediately that Matteo, Luca's brother, wouldn't be found alive.
  • With the setting of "The Runner" set in the Gallipoli campaign, those informed of the events there will know that the Allied forces will fail to set up another front in the war.
• Framing Device: In "Avanti Savoia!", the campaign focusing on the Italian Front, the story is framed as a story an old veteran is telling to his adult daughter, many years after the war ended. This cleverly allows for English narration so that the presumed English-speaking player will know what's going on even when all the in-story dialogue is in Italian.
• Flamethrower Backfire: A more realistic example than most, in that the tank doesn't explode right away, but rather leaks for a few seconds as the soldier wearing it struggles to get it off before the inevitable happens.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: While it varies from campaign to campaign, most of them aim for a feeling of gritty historical realism showing the horror of war. But you're still playing a One-Man Army with a Healing Factor who is routinely expected to take on ten-to-one odds and win.
• Gameplay Roulette: While the game remains a shooter throughout, the style and pace of gameplay changes drastically between the different War Stories. Through Mud and Blood is mostly about driving a tank, Friends in High Places is about piloting a fighter, Avanti Savoia is about playing the human tank that is Luca in a relatively open environment, The Runner is all about fast paced, tight-spaces shooting and Nothing Is Written is more of a non-linear open-map stealth game. Combined with the general introduction to various gameplay mechanics in A Storm of Steel, this means that playing through the campaign effectively functions as a solid, all-around tutorial for multiplayer, while feeling varied and exciting as well.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality:
  • While never directly stated (and the gameplay perspectives focus on the Allies), the ending for the "Storm of Steel" prologue for the singleplayer campaign highlight the nature of the war as this. After a grueling fight involving tons of deaths on both sides and the entire battlefield being flattened by an artillery strike, two soldiers who survived, one American and one German, found each other and stand off against each other. After a few seconds, both of them throws their guns down, seemingly both realizing that they are really aren't so different.
  • Another, subtle touch would be the German soldier Wilson beats up on board the Zeppelin attacking London. Blackburn interrupts their fight to warn Wilson of the other Zeppelin about to crash on them - and the three decide to high tail it, ignoring the fact that Wilson and the German was busy beating up one another seconds before.
  • The ending of "The Runner" also focuses more on the sacrifices of the Ottoman troops to preserve their nation, alongside the ANZAC men that we play as.
• Heavily Armored Mook:
  • Flame Troopers wear heavy armor and are well-protected from small arms fire as well as immune to melee kills; however, they can be blown up by targeting the fuel tanks strapped to their backs. Because of the game's bullet penetration system, it's entirely possible to puncture their fuel tanks even if you simply fire wildly at their center mass.
  • Sentry Troopers equipped with MG08 machine guns are a very rare enemy type encountered in the single-player campaign (there are only about 5 of them in the entire game). They resist headshots and can soak about three dozen rounds of submachine gun fire before dropping; the game recommends defeating them with explosives instead, though high-caliber light machine guns are also pretty effective.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In the end of "Through Mud and Blood", Townsend ignites Black Bess' gas leak, causing an explosion that kills him and the surrounding Germans.
  • In the end of "The Runner", Bishop assaults an Ottoman fortress alone to provide cover for the rest of the ANZAC forces to withdraw. He succeeds, but is heavily wounded and unable to quickly withdraw from the impending British bombardment. Though the screen cuts before we see any shells hit his position.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: A variation with the Prologue, "Storm of Steel". You're not fighting as a Super-Soldier—you're just a regular soldier fighting another army in an Anyone Can Die situation. Every time you die, you learn the name and dates of birth and death of the soldier you were controlling, before taking control of yet another soldier. Before you even take control, the game tells you as much.
  "What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive."
• Hope Spot:
  • In the unwinnable prologue "Storm of Steel", one of your characters man the left side guns of a Mk. V tank and bulldozes through the attacking German forces. When you reach the German line, one of your crew members cries out, "We're going to make it!" And it looks like you just might...until an artillery shell obliterates your tank.
  • In "The Runner", you playing as Bishop manage to mow down the Ottoman forces and capture the fort. Everything seems okay until a lone Ottoman soldier shoots Bishop in the back, severely wounding him and making his escape nigh-impossible from the incoming barrage.
• Jerkass: MacManus from "Through Mud and Blood". He makes it clear that he has no faith in Edwards whatsoever. Ultimately averted by the end when he finally decides to put a bit of faith in Edwards.
  Mac: We'll find [the right way]. You're the driver.
• The Lancer: Zara evolves into this for T.E. Lawrence by the end of "Nothing is Written".
• Mercy Kill: The campaign trailer shows a pilot about to give this to his companion in the wake of their plane crash. Averted in the actual campaign, as the American pilot in question, Blackburn, decides to not do this to Wilson. Instead he drags him back to British lines. Or did he?
• Mood Whiplash: "Friends in High Places" has such a different tone and atmosphere from the rest of the War Stories that playing it is effectively bound to involve some. Whereas every other War Story is at the very least sombre, and most of them emphasize the themes of War Is Hell and Grey-and-Grey Morality, "Friends in High Places" is a straight up, swashbuckling ace pilot story seemingly pulled straight out of pulp fiction. The dialogue is a lot more lighthearted, the visuals are much brighter and more fantastic, and the action leaves the gritty realism of the rest of the campaign in favor of leaping between zeppelins and fistfights on airplanes. This may be a hint that it's all a lie.
• Mortal Wound Reveal: Downplayed in "Through Mud and Blood". Townsend was seen wounded in the first mission, but it didn't get extremely serious until after defeating the counterattack in the last mission.
• Mountain Warfare: "Avanti Savoia!" takes place in the midst of the mountains of the Italian Front during World War I, with the protagonist being a part of the Royal Italian Army fighting against the Austro-Hungarian Army.
• New Meat: Danny Edwards from "Through Mud and Blood" and Jack Foster in "The Runner."
• Now It's My Turn: Invoked by the Zara when she stabs Tilkici with his own knife.
• Nice Guy: Finch from "Through Mud and Blood". He immediately befriends Edwards in the intro cut scene.
• One-Woman Wail: Used at the end of "The Runner", and throughout "Nothing is Written".
• Optional Stealth: With the stealth mechanism a derivative from Hardline, this remains an option to the player in the War Stories.
  • The second and third mission of "Through Mud and Blood" gives Edwards this option. While the second mission has the benefit of Black Bess giving you cover if you decide to go loud, the third mission is entirely on your own and you can choose to go loud or quietly.
  • The third mission in "Friends in High Places" also takes an optional stealth method in the first half, before becoming mandatory in the later half.
  • Players are expected to have Zara slowly sneak through an Ottoman encampment to accomplish her objectives in "Nothing is Written". If one is fast enough in a certain area, she can just hijack a Renault FT and simply blow everything to smithereens.
• Percussive Maintenance: Maybe in "Through Mud and Blood" as Edwards continually punches and kicks Black Bess' engine during his rant that ends up with the engine running the third time he tried.
• Poor Communication Kills: In "The Runner", the lack of established communication lines and the vulnerability of the messenger runners ended up that the attacking ANZAC forces never got the message that the Allied lines have fallen, the survivors have retreated, and an artillery strike will shell the village and fort to kingdom come. Though while Bishop manages to successfully relay this message to his CO Whitehall, he then has to go rescue the ANZAC forces that went up ahead and assaulted an Ottoman fort since they still didn't know an artillery strike was incoming. This resulted in Bishop going up to save them, attacking the Ottoman fort alone to buy time, and possibly fallen victim to the artillery when he couldn't make it out.
• Rage Against the Heavens: An understated one at the end of "Avanti Savoia!".
  Luca: He never got older. And here I am, still. ...Who decides such things?
• Red Shirt: The playable Harlem Hellfighters in the prologue due to how they are all frontliners, whose insignificance are punctuated by them not even having an identity, the game simply generates a new name for each soldier every time the level is played and the fact that it blatantly expects none of the regiment to survive.
• Samus Is a Girl: Zara is initially set up to be Lawrence of Arabia in "Nothing is Written", and is mistaken as such by the Ottomans when she gets caught. Of course, the player should hardly be fooled since she's been featured prominently in marketing up until this point.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • The entirety of the "Avanti Savoia!" campaign. After going through almost literally hell on earth, including almost an entire fortress worth of German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers, to find his brother Matteo, Luca finds his brother's lifeless body right outside its walls. He's almost entirely overcome by despair, and collapses then and there beside his brother.
  • And also implied in "The Runner" Campaign, where the ANZAC wins a few engagements with the Ottomans only to the lose the Gallipoli Campaign in the long run.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Wilson shoots off Blackburn's handcuffs in "Friends in High Places" to free him to fight back the German air raid.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The Prologue has a Harlem Hellfighter watching soldiers brutally fighting and killing each other in melee combat while the song Dream a Little Dream of Me is playing in the background.
• Theme Music Power-Up: In "Through Mud and Blood", after Edwards' long rant against Black Bess for its mechanical troubles, he starts the engine one more time... and its runs as good as new, complete with the original Battlefield theme. The Battlefield theme also kicks in soon after during the final fight against the pair of German A7Vs, as well as during Bishop's charge through the city in "The Runner".
• Third Time's The Charm: The third time Edwards tries to start Black Bess after repairing it, it runs perfectly.
• Trial by Friendly Fire: When Black Bess gets stuck in the mud and swarmed by German soldiers, the crew sends out an order to the back lines via messenger pigeon to fire artillery directly at their position. Miraculously, the barrage kills all the Germans while Black Bess remains relatively unscathed.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: A section of the "Through Mud and Blood" campaign has the player taking control of a messenger pigeon flying through rings of air as it makes its way back to base. The gameplay was so different to the rest of the game that Polygon gave a separate review for just that section.
• Unique Enemy: There are only about 5 of the Heavily Armored Mook "Sentry Trooper" enemies in the entire campaign; similar to the ones from Medal of Honor Warfighter and certain Call of Duty games, it seems the devs didn't want to over-use them for fear of detracting from the game's "realistic" atmosphere. Flamethrower troopers are noticeably more common, but are a bit less durable and have a big obvious weak spot to target.
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • The implication of the final narration of the "Friends in High Places" campaign: that the entire sequence of Blackburn and Wilson fighting through the German airship raid was just heroic embellishment that Blackburn created after the fact, and that what may have happened was that he killed Wilson, deserted, and escaped his court martial in the ensuing chaos of the attack.
  • Generally, the framing devices around each campaign are used to patch over gameplay abstractions and historical inaccuracies. "Through Mud and Blood" and "The Runner", being the least ahistorical campaigns, have no narration. "Friends in High Places", however, is related by a serial liar, and "Nothing is Written" is a story told by T.E. Lawrence. The effectiveness of the armor worn by the protagonist of "Avanti Savoia!" is part of the story convention of the teller; it keeps him "perfectly safe" in the narrative he is telling his daughter, until he is forced to remove it as the story enters its darkest hour.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: In "Nothing Is Written", Lawrence says that vengeance can feel sweet or empty and asks Zara about her thoughts after destroying the armoured train. She didn't respond.
• War Is Hell: It's often been said that World War I revealed to the world that war wasn't glorious, and this game certainly proves it. The campaign's prologue starts with a brutal frontline battle, in which you're put into the shoes of regular soldiers, many of them in their early twenties, fighting in a mud-soaked hellscape that used to be a town, instead of the usual One-Man Army specialists the past games had you playing as. Every time your soldier dies, his name and birth-death year is displayed to you. Gas attacks, flamethrowers burning men alive, shell-shocked and wounded soldiers being gunned down mercilessly—it happens to every soldier around you, and it can be one of the many ways your soldier will die like a dog. The theme continues into Campaign proper, where in the first War Story, "Through Mud and Blood", in the first segment alone, you lose two of your own crewmates. Multiplayer also has its share of nightmarish elements like quotes of hopelessness uttered by lowly soldiers at the start of Operation games in the Verdun maps in They Shall Not Pass.
• Wham Line: This one is a wham line for the sheer bluntness of how it is presented, and the context for it. In most games, especially war shooters, you play as a soldier who will most definitely survive the war to come. This game spells out its tone in a single, brutal sentence.
  What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive.
• What a Senseless Waste of Human Life: With the pointlessness of World War I, this is really driven home, along with War Is Hell. Best stated in the Opening Crawl.
  Narration: More than 60 million soldiers fought in "The War to End All Wars." It ended nothing.

Multiplayer Tropes

• Achilles' Heel: The Elite classes, while awesome to play as, come with a few very crippling weaknesses that can be exploited. To elaborate;
  • The Sentry's bulletproof helmet is large enough that it makes equipping the gas mask when faced with Deadly Gas simply not an option. Combined with their sluggish movement, expect heavy damage at the very least if one gets caught directly in a gas cloud. They also take bonus damage from the K-Bullets, fittingly enough.
  • The Flametrooper dominates infantry up close, but that's pretty much it. Outside of interior spaces and closed passageways, they're pretty vulnerable to getting cut down before they can get into range.
  • Despite the Tank Hunter having a rifle capable of one-shotting infantry and turning tanks into Swiss cheese, they must be prone to use it and it must be reloaded after every shot, making them vulnerable to close ranged attacks if they can't land shots from their sidearm. This pretty much forces them into a defensive support role.
  • To top it all off, they're not immune to things that are normally one-hit-kills on regular infantry: Bayonet Charges, Melee Takedowns^note Only from behind or when prone, or when their health has been reduced to the same or less than the normal damage of a given melee weapon, as the Sentry is immune and the Flametrooper a really bad idea to melee under normal circumstances, being hit by cannon-caliber weapons^note The AT Rocket Gun, Stationary Field Guns and Fortress Guns, and tank's cannons, and being trampled by horses or hit by vehicles. The Trench Raider is especially vulnerable to some of these since he has to get close to kill people.
• Alternate History: What might've happened if the real-world losers of the WW1 battles were to win is briefly explored upon should they win an Operation:
  [Sinai & Palestine Campaign]: "Victory for the Ottomans in the Middle East would have been seen as a sign of a new strength in the empire. If so, the power gained from controlling the worlds oil supply would have almost certainly seen the Ottoman government abandoning their support of the Central Powers."
  [Battle of Vittorio Veneto]: "One can only speculate what an Austro-Hungarian victory would've meant for the future of Europe. It is possible that success could've united the crumbling empire, allowing the Hapsburgs to keep control of their countries, races, and ethnicities for at least a few months longer."
  [Meuse-Argonne Offensive]: "One can only speculate what might've happened if the German Army successfully defeated the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. After four years of war, the will of the German people was breaking and its empire collapsing. With American troops still arriving in Europe, an Allied victory would've still been likely."
  [Kaiserschlacht]: "With Germany now controlling the vital railway hub of Amiens, the Allied armies in France would have been divided. And if Paris were to fall, the surrender of France would likely follow. In this situation Britain would have no choice but to seek a truce while they planned their new strategy. This speculative situation would have certainly impact the outcome of the war."
  [Second Battle of the Marne]: "By 1918, the Germans had perfected the art of defending in depth. But at Marne, the French proved that a new type of war can waged, that favored the attacker, and not the defender. A war that used mobile and mechanized combined arms. If the Germans had found success, and mimicked these Ally tactics, perhaps further assaults on France in the capital would have been possible, changing the course of the war."
  [Battle of Verdun]: "The defense of Fort Vaux was marked by the heroism and endurance of the French soldiers stationed there. This small garrison repulsed constant assaults of gas and fire and bullets, before physical conditions forced them to surrender. If the Germans had been able to hold the fort, perhaps their assault on Verdun itself would have been successful, and the Western Front permanently breached. However, strategically, there was little justification for the atrocious losses on either side."
  [Brusilov Offensive]: "By the beginning of 1916, it was becoming increasingly clear that Russia could no longer sustain the losses from several failed operations while maintaining loyal to the autocratic and ever more dysfunctional monarchy of Tsar Nicholas II. If the Austro-Hungarians had managed to halt the first Brusilov advance, inflicting further wounds on Russia, it is likely that anger amongst the people at home would have ignited the revolution immediately, leading to the Bolsheviks pulling Russia out of the war before the winter set in, a huge blow to the Allied alliance."
  [Russian Civil War]: "Had the White Army succeeded in holding Tsaritsyn, and kept control of the Volga River, access to oil and grain would surely strengthen their tiring forces. With fuel in their tanks and food in their stores, perhaps their subsequent march on Moscow would have been successful, and seen the volunteer army put an end to the socialist revolution. Had the Reds lost Tsaritsyn, perhaps Commissar Joseph Stalins' position in the Bolshevik ranks would not have been so favorable, and so the future of Soviet Russia would have looked very different indeed."
  [Gallipoli Campaign]: "If the allies had succeeded in securing the Dardanelles, the British fleet would have reached and taken Constantinople. The subsequent fall of the Ottoman Empire would have opened up a new front for the Allies to attack the Balkan states loyal to the Central Powers, possibly ending the war within months. Failure for Colonel Mustafa Kemal’s 19th Turkish division would likely have seen him demoted, and his role in the rebellion to liberate occupied Turkey would have been very different indeed."
• Amazon Brigade: The Russian Women's Battalion of Death, a Real Life example, appear in the In the Name of the Tsar DLC.
• Anti Poop-Socking: Frontlines once unintentionally recreated a miniature version of the stalemate found in the real WWI. The game's timer counts up instead of down, and due to the tug-of-war nature of the mode, games could last for unimaginably long periods, with most reporting one round of game ending somewhere in the 40-minute to 1-hour region, with some reports going all the way to 1 and a half or even 2 hours in a single game. DICE eventually implemented a 40-minute limit on the mode, because the rounds were so long they were interfering with the servers.
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • The Scouts K-Bullets are designed to pierce a vehicle and deal some damage. They're not very powerful, dealing a measly 4 - 11 points of damage depending where you hit. The game itself even recommends to coordinate with other K-Bullet using Scouts to actually pose a threat to any vehicle encountered. Most of the time, though, you'll be using them for stalling a vehicles self repair while you wait for dedicated AT players to come by, or as a Desperation Attack when you're cornered. They also deal 'critical' hits depending on where you hit the vehicle (each vehicle has a number of critical hit locations), causing bonus damage, and they can also disable components, if the shot and the vehicle's condition are right, including treads, weapons and engines. K Bullets have no effect on behemoths excluding the Armored Train. Their nature as AP rounds also comes into play against Elite Classes and Cavalry, who all wear heavy body armor. Normally, this renders basic bullets almost worthless against them, but K-Bullets punch straight through, making them ideal for countering these juggernauts.
  • By design, the Tank Hunter totes a colossal anti-tank rifle as his primary weapon, which is essentially the K-Bullet's purpose-built, juiced up brother. Unlike the K-Bullet, which depends on the material properties of the bullet's metal to do its job, the tankgewehr banks on the massive size of its bullets, making it monstrously lethal to infantry as well. This same gun is also found mounted on the Anti-Armor variant of the Landship as a driver weapon.
• Artistic License – Military: In the player chatter, all squad commanders are referred to as Sergeants or as the equivalent rank (e.g. Feldwebel in German). In most armies during World War I (and, in the case of the British and German armies, even today), squad leaders were not sergeants, but corporals (e.g. Unteroffizier in German).
• Artistic License – Pharmacology: An adrenaline shot as a revival kit can make sense. But not as much if you use a fully charged up adrenaline shot to kill an enemy soldier... only for moments later for an enemy medic to use another adrenaline shot to revive that same soldier you overdosed.
• Artistic License – Physics: You can change aircraft position when the plane is completely upside down. The problem is that it shows your character physically changing position with no regards to the direction of gravity.
• Badass Boast: The Central Power announcers seem to be especially prone to these after a successful defense in Operations;
  [Conquer Hell, first Stop in Ballroom Blitz]: "With this First Victory, we have proven these Americans to be a mob. Reckless, and disorganized, while we have shown strength and an iron will. We will not bend."
  [Iron Walls, after the third and last stop in Monte Grappa]: "We have defeated these Italians with a hurricane of fire! You’ve set an example for all of the Central Powers across the world! Be proud!"
  [Oil of Empires, after the fourth and final stop]: "Let this great Ottoman victory be the first of many! Let these dry winds take this news across the world! Forward brothers, always forward, for conquest, fame, and eternal happiness!"
• Battle Cry:
  • In the Operations game mode on the attacking team, once the team had captured a sector and begins advancing to the next, the entire team will roar loudly for several seconds accompanied by trench whistles, creating a very epic moment reminiscent of war movies. The Defenders will also let out a cry a while after they lose territory, accompanied by retreat bells. Though this might be less of a Battle Cry and more of a Mass "Oh, Crap!" from the retreating soldiers who found themselves deep within what is now enemy territory and are now being hunted down.
  • Bayonet Charging will also have your soldier let out a loud war cry as they charge to a target. This also serves as a cue for potential targets to look behind them/focus on the charging soldier before they get stabbed.
• BFG: This being World War 1, examples abound.
  • Everything that a Support class can take as his primary weapon is a fairly hefty machine gun. It's telling when the smallest, but by no means least dangerous, gun they can carry is a Browning Automatic Rifle. The irony, and in a particularly egregious version of Gameplay and Story Segregation (the story being real life), is that the actual killing power of the LMGs is shockingly low. Despite all firing the same rifle bullets as Scout and Medic weapons, their damage models are generally only slightly better than those of the submachine guns.
  • The Sentry elite class is a souped-up Support with an accompanying firepower increase, as they wield aircraft machine guns as their guns of choice.
  • Tank Hunters are likewise equipped with a monstrous version of a more basic weapon. In their case, they have the Tankgewehr, a huge rifle intended to blow holes in tanks. It's so enormous they absolutely cannot fire it unless it's been braced first, usually against the ground.
  • Behemoths, as their name would imply, are colossal war machines, and carry weaponry to match. The main guns of a Dreadnought, Heavy Tank or Armored Train are cannons so large a man could fit his arm quite comfortably inside, and all of them are covered in autocannon turrets. While the bombs of an Airship are similarly destructive, they are not, however, actually a gun.
  • Attack Planes can take a tank hunter loadout, which features a 37mm cannon normally mounted on actual tanks now strapped to a plane. Often, your only warning of one of these monsters flying around is a nearby vehicle or building suddenly detonating, followed by the plane lazily buzzing past.
  • The level 10 rifle for the Scout, the Martini-Henry, is a big, long, breech-loading single-shot rifle chambered in .577 rounds. It has a very good one hit kill range, and its damage even goes above 100 in a part of it allowing it to ignore bodypart damage reduction completely.
  • A BFG less for its caliber but more for its size, Turning Tides is set to feature the M1917 MG as a new Support primary. Browning M1917 is a heavy machine gun that weighs 103 pounds (or 47 kg) when the gun, tripod, water for the water-cooling, and ammunition are combined. For a comparison, that's about the weight of five M249s, and the Support can run around do parkour and hipfiring it while carrying his other massive gadgets. John Basilone would be proud.
• Blinded by the Light: The Scout's flare gun, in addition to phosphorus flares that spot enemies, can fire magnesium flares that burn on the ground and blind anyone nearby.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Most of the Scouts gadgets are this. Assaults get explosives like AT grenades, dynamite and rockets, the Medic gets a healing crate and grenade launchers with a variety of bombs for different situations, Supports gets explosive charges and mortars that can be deployed, but the Scout gets but a simple bullet shield, fake heads and a spotting flare that work as they're intended to no matter the situation.
  • The Bayonet Charge. Need to dash across that open road quickly? Bayonet charge. Need to take down that one guy running from you? Bayonet Charge. Enemy Elite mowing down legions of your friendlies? BAYONET CHARGE.
  • On the subject of default weapons, the MP 18 and its variants for the Assault Class. It doesn't have the extreme rate of fire of the Automatico M1918, nor does it have the large magazine of the Hellriegel 1915. What it does have is control, a decent ammo capacity, flexibility and a longer range than the other two submachine guns.
• Boss Rush: An odd variation in the maps Verdun Heights and Fort Vaux. A team that's been doing well in a match can expect to see that the enemy team has been given 4 constantly respawning Elite Kits to use for the rest of the game instead of a Behemoth. This means that players can suddenly find themselves dealing with a constant wave of Villar Perosa and MG08 Sentries, Flametroopers and Trench Raiders while trying to hold their ground.
• Bragging Rights Reward: The Broken Bottle melee weapon, added in Apocalypse. It's little more than just a reskinned default knife, but it's only available via finishing a difficult challenge of getting kills via hard-to-find and non-respawning wine bottles.
  • The Horsemen of the Apocalypse dog tags. They're only acquired from Harder Than Hard Service Assignments, requiring you to do some insane achievements while saddled with Afflictions.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: While there are many advanced or prototype weapons available, some weapons precede World War I by decades.
  • The Howdah Pistol dates back to the beginning of the 19th century.
  • The Gasser M1870 is described as being obsolete by the start of the war, but still favored for its stopping power.
  • The obsolete Vetterli-Vitali M1870/87 rifle was bought and used by the Russians, who were desperate for firearms.
  • The Martini-Henry rifle was used as far back as the Zulu war, though a rechambered modern variant was used in the war the original model is used in game.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Although the game is currently playable without spending a cent more than its purchase price, it's possible to skip leveling entirely by purchasing a Shortcut Kit.
• Call-Back: The old Australian veteran who speaks towards the end of the British cutscenes in the Gallipoli operation from Turning Tides is none other than Frederick Bishop from the single-player campaign.
• Cherry Tapping: Courtesy of the 2.7 mm Kolibri pistol, the world's smallest handgun. At close range, it does 5 damage to a hit enemy, and only 25 for a headshot. At longer ranges, expect every single shot to deal 1 damage.
• Close-Range Combatant: The Trench Raider Elite Kit is designed to be a melee based kit equipped with the new and lethal Raider Club, with the only other options of harming other players being indirect fire from Grenade Spam or shots from their revolver sidearm. He moves faster than normal players so he can chase you down easily, and his Raider Club has no takedown animation and is a one-hit-kill, making it deadly even in group situations.
• Comeback Mechanic: The massive and heavily armed Behemoth vehicles like zeppelins, armored trains and battleships spawn on the side of the losing team to help them catch up.
• Crippling Overspecialization: In contrast to Battlefield 4 and Battlefield Hardline, classes are now less flexible outside of their intended ranges.
  • The Assault class dominate in close quarters thanks to its submachine guns (highest DPS) and shotguns. However, it struggles to harm anyone outside of 50 meters as its weapons have horrible accuracy and recoil at range.
  • The Medic class excels in mid-range, especially after their weapons received a damage buff in January 2018 patch. However, they can't outgun Assault players in close quarters or Scout players at range.
  • The Support class can mow down waves of players with pinpoint accuracy, but only if aiming down and either lying down or mounted on a wall. Like Medics, they usually operate best a mid-range where they can set themselves up to mow down enemy players through sheer volume of fire.
  • The Scout class, in tradition to its equivalent classes from previous games, operates most effectively from range with its bolt action rifles, which fire slowly but deal massive damage. The sweet-spot mechanic gives the majority of its rifles the means to have a medium-long effective range depending on the weapon chosen, instantly kill infantry if the Scout works at their preferred range. However, even the Infantry-variants of their rifles are no match to an Assault up close and can be outgunned by a Medic if they’re not a crack shot or are in their sweet-spot range.
• Death or Glory Attack: The bayonet attachment available for some weapons. Land the attack, and it’s a one hit kill on the enemy. However, your soldier will let out a very loud battle cry, alerting your target and any of their teammates who are nearby. It also lowers your turning speed considerably, and if you stop charging without hitting an enemy you will be incapable of sprinting for a short time, which isn’t ideal when you’re right in the face of a person with a gun and a reason to use it on you.

• Deployable Cover: Courtesy of the Scouts, they can deploy a small piece of cover on the ground with a small hole in it for shooting out of. It's mostly meant for sniping safely though, since it's rather small and the user needs to be prone.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Behemoth-class vehicles. Sure they're big, scary, and highly damaging, but their large size makes them easy bullet magnets to the enemy. Even worse for the armored train is that it is stuck on the railways and unable to freely maneuver. Not to mention, they also remove 4-6 footmen on your team from playing the objectives. But if one could bypass all that trouble with good team coordination, their nature as a Comeback Mechanic becomes clear - they have such insanely powerful armaments that they can singlehandedly push the other team back through brute force, giving the losing team a chance to come back and win.
• Dirty Commies: A pre-Cold War example. The Red Army added in the In the Name of the Tsar DLC are not viewed very favorably by the opposing White guards in the Russian Civil War operation, who highlights their brutal tactics to force villages into submission. The Tsaritsyn operation intro even has a Red Army member questioning whether or not their actions constitute fratricide. The narration surrounding the Red Tide operation however, has a more neutral view on them.
• Dynamic Entry: What you'll be using the Limpet Charge as a Support for most of the time. Sure, it can deal hefty damage to tanks if you get close enough to attach it, and crafty players can time the explosion with approaching enemies, but it's much easier and helpful to simply use a Limpet Charge on a wall or locked bunker door and let both you and the team skip the trouble of going around the longer way. It's also much quicker to regenerate than say, your Assaults precious AT Rockets and dynamite.
• Easter Egg: There are a few easter egg reloads, including a Shout-Out reload to Doom Super Shotgun reload animation for the Sawed-Off Shotgun, complete with the low-frame animations.
• Grenade Spam: Bound to happen in general, but taken up to eleven with the Trench Raider elite kit, described as to having 'an impressive grenade arsenal' (3 normal grenades and 3 smoke grenades).
• Hand Cannon:
  • In addition to the revolvers mentioned below the game also features a few oddities like the Lancaster 'Howdah', a powerful break-action pepperbox gun, as well as the Mars Automatic Pistol, an absurdly powerful (then and now) semiautomatic handgun that fired huge rounds at the cost of immense recoil and mechanical complexity (for which it was repeatedly rejected by the British War Office).
  • In the Name of the Tsar adds an Obrez Pistol, a Mosin-Nagant sawed down to pistol size.
• Hero Shooter: The Elite classes have elements of this, being tremendously more powerful than a regular soldier as well as having an assortment of unique special abilities. The concept was controversial for the series and removed in the next game, Battlefield 5.
• Historical Badass Upgrade: In real life, the Russian Women's Battalion of Death played a largely ceremonial role and most of its members never saw combat. In the game, they serve as the Russian Scout and accompany battles by the dozen.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: A careless player can easily end up being killed by their own grenades.
• Humans Are Bastards: Mentioned twice so far by the Central Powers in Operations;
  [Oil of Empires]: "We know why they have come. They have come for our oil. This black gold, so abundant here, it is both a curse and a blessing. For it can turn nations into empires-but it also turns men into monsters. And monsters know only war. So while the oil continues to flow there will be no peace here."
  [Beyond the Marne]: "From our window in the chateau we can see their tanks gathering, lumbering forward in the half light of dawn, their huge fascines on top making them appear even more like monstrous prehistoric animals, animals ready to consume men and material alike. What has become of mankind when he creates only to destroy. It will all be over soon, they say. Yes, in a bloodbath of flesh and steel."
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • Somehow, the act of putting on your gas mask while in contact with an enemy has a chance of dealing 45 damage to that enemy. It is possible to kill an enemy by just putting on your gas mask.
  • This oddity also extends to the Trench Periscope when viewing through it, meaning that you can also kill an enemy just by peeking through your periscope a few times while touching them.
  • Among the various improvised weapons a soldier could carry, ranging from combat knives to digging and climbing equipment, the bottle melee is cheapest and arguably the oddest to bring to a war zone. Even the Kolibri has its history as a weapon.
    • Likewise, the dud club is a dud grenade attached to the end of a metal stick to act as an improvised club - the game itself notes that it’s probably safe to swing at people.
• Jack of All Stats: The Cavalry kit when one gets off their horse. They come with the fast-firing-yet-accurate Russian 1895 and a sword that can kill in two swings, making them relatively proficient at close and medium range combat. Along with those, they come with a Light Anti-Tank Grenade to lob at vehicles every once in a while, and can also drop both ammo pouches and bandages to resupply themselves or their teammates. To top it all off, they also receive reduced damage as a result of wearing a breastplate.
• Joke Weapon: The Kolibri pistol. It's a laughably tiny handgun chambered for 2.7 mm ammunition, so small that you hold it by your forefinger and thumb, and just as powerful as you'd expect for a gun that fires bullets roughly the size of a pinhead. Its only real use is to embarrass enemies.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • Cavalry (on horseback) stands out for this, at least relative to infantry and light vehicles. Highly mobile and surprisingly resilient to damage, a player on horseback can use their mount to trample enemies or to slash at enemies with their sword, which will kill any infantry in one hit. They also have access to a pair of Light Anti-Tank Grenades, which they can toss at targets while riding at full speed.
  • The Trench Raider is a Lightning Bruiser among the Elites, as they're deceptively sturdy, faster than the other infantry when sprinting, have a Raider Club that can one hit kill infantry with a takedown animation lasting under 1 second, have smoke/explosive grenades to harass players/cover a retreat and/or charge and best yet, are completely self sustainable with a medic kit to heal themselves. It's not an uncommon sight to see a Trench Raider get a chain of beatdowns infantry, get fired at when the survivors catch wind of what's going on, only to be met with grenades forcing them to back off as the Raider retreats to heal himself, leaving the survivors wondering whether they should try to pursue him or run while he's healing.
• Mission Briefing: A skippable cutscene appears in each Operation when the player joins that has the factions announcer explain where the battle will shift on the map as key locations are gained/lost, all in real time so you can get an idea where the teams are currently fighting as soon as you join a game in progress.^note Though this does lead to some funny/frustrating moments where the announcer is showing off the final location while boasting that it will be where their victory is guaranteed, only for the camera to show it being swarmed with enemy players raising their flag over it.
• Multinational Team: The British faction has Indian medics and black (presumably African or Caribbean) scouts, so most if not all British squads will end up being this trope. It's also implied from the Kaiserschlacht operation that Canadians, Australians, and New Zealand troops are among the British ranks too.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • As mentioned below, flares are meant to be fired near the target area to mark or blind the enemy. It's not unheard of, though, for Scout players to sneak up on a group of people and fire the flare directly at them for stacking fire damage.
  • AT Rockets are ideal weapons for killing snipers, as not only will their Splash Damage injure and suppress the target, but can also obliterate whatever they're hiding behind. If that happens to be a wall, feel free to chuckle smugly as the ceiling caves in and crushes them, or the floor gives way and he plummets to his doom.
  • Bayonet Charges are supposed to be last-ditch melee attacks, but it is also possible to use the instant boost of speed as a tool for retreat, nevermind the Battle Cry of "panicked cover-seeking".
  • Like the AT Rockets, the Tankgewehr is very effective against all kinds of infantry at all ranges, moreso since it has a much higher velocity and insanely high accuracy, as well as a very high one-shot-kill potential. These qualities also make it very effective against enemy aircraft. It's an anti-materiel rifle in World War 1, and like other anti-material rifles, it has the common alternate use as anti-infantry weapon commonly seen in video games and real life.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The Ottoman attack on the Suez Canal is only discussed in preliminary voice-overs; the Suez mission proper focuses on the British counterattack.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Whenever a gas grenade is deployed, all nearby soldiers will constantly yell "Gas!" until it dissipates. Also an example of Shown Their Work, the word "gas" shares the same pronunciation between all the languages spoken by each faction in the game.
  • The automatic callouts also apply for Cavalry kits, whenever one shows up soldiers will make to sure to shout them out without the need to spot them on the players end, most likely due to the swift potency that the horse riding swordsmen have.
  • Soldiers also cry out when they see mortars/artillery shells about to come down on them, though it rarely does any good for the people about to get bombarded.
  • The player character will audibly gasp in horror when a grenade lands within damaging range.
• Orientalism: In-Universe, the British narrator for the 'Oil of Empires' Operation considers the Ottomans to be primitive savages that would easily be defeated before the first battle at Fao Fortress. This changes right around after that battle, presumably after seeing the casualties they've inflicted and their raid, and then occupation, on the Suez Canal.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Revolvers are available as unlockable sidearms in each class, doing more damage than the other pistols in the selection. Reloading however, is a painstaking task, as most of them use loading gates to load one round at a time.
• Rousing Speech:
  • A losing, attacking team in Operations will have their respective announcer give a short speech when they lose a battalion of soldiers. Some notable examples are;
  [Iron Walls, first defeat on Monte Grappa]: "Our attack has failed, but if we pull together like true Italians, then these walls of rock that face us, they will crumble, and The Empire will fall.
  [Oil of Empires]: "We lost, but don’t give up! Remember; we have a water pipe, they do not! We have a railroad behind us, they do not! We are the path of true civilization advancing into this wasteland! So once more, to battle!"
  [Kaiserschlacht, first defeat at Amiens]: "We lost this fight, but our war is not over. Out there remains thinned ranks of shaken survivors, and raw recruits. You are the best of all Germany's great armies. At them again."
  [Beyond the Marne, first defeat on Soissons]: "Yes, the attack failed, but do not lose heart, it is the last 5% of possible exertion that often wins the battle! At them again!"
  [Brusilov Offensive, second defeat on Brusilov Keep]: "Another battle lost, but the great Russian bear is but wounded. While there is air in your lungs you can still roar. This is our final attack, we fight to the last soldier. We do not surrender."
  [Volga River, first defeat]: "Brothers, our attack has failed, but be not afraid! You have hearts of iron, and will of steel. Now you will triumph!"
  • More speeches can also occur for every faction before an Operation starts, in the seconds before all players standing by charge to the sectors, each with an appropriate amount of hamminess applied.
  [Verdun Heights, German attack]: "We have raised the veil of hell! Let us show these poilus^*poilu, a nickname for a French soldier who the true devils are! Fight until the ground is soaked in their blood! ATTAAAACK!"
  [Ballroom Blitz, American attack]: "We've come a long low way, boys! Now it's time for America to show its teeth! Fix bayonets! CHAAARGE!"
  [Suez, British attack]: "For King and Country! For the glory of the British Empire! FORWAAARD!"
  [Soissons, German defense]: "We stand side by side and fight! We will repulse this attack! Kill them all to the last man! ATTAAAACK!"
  [Empire's Edge, Austro-Hungarian defense]: "All of you are heroes, brave souls who survived the fighting in the mountains! Fight for your life. Fight for the Empire! Defend our country, or die trying!"
  [Volga River, Red Army attack]: "The world has turned against us, but we will not stop! We are the future of humanity! Fight for the whole oppressed class, comrades! URA!"
• Shoot Out the Lock: One of the animations upon opening a battle pack is a character shooting the lock on the pack.
• Shot to the Heart: The Magical Defibrillator from the previous titles have now been replaced with period-appropriate adrenaline shots, but function similarly just without a charge up time like 4 or Hardline. It can even be used on living enemy patients with the desired opposite effect.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • The 1.59 Inch Breech-Loading Vickers Q.F. Gun Mk.II (called in-game as the AT Rocket Gun) is a portable artillery piece meant to be used against bunkers in real life. However, nothing stops you from shooting infantrymen with it, and a direct hit anywhere to the body at any range results in a guaranteed One-Hit Kill.
  • Aside from the usual methods you'd expect from a Battlefield game, the absolutely massive cannons on the maps Empires Edge and Monte Grappa are clearly meant, from a balance perspective, for the potential Dreadnought and Airship that's given to the losing team. Though, there's nothing stopping you from using them on the mostly defenseless Infantry on the ground.
• Truth in Television:
  • One of the most common complaints is that the Model 10-A Hunter shotgun is overpowered (so much that it was recently Nerfed by a patch at the end of 2016); amusingly, in real life the Germans made similar protests about the use of shotguns by the Americans due to their massive asymmetrical effectiveness over bolt-action rifles and even early submachine guns in trench warfare, so much so that there's a common tale that in the later years of the war the Germans threatened to execute any American found equipped with a shotgun on the spot.
  • The damage model for sniper rifles in Battlefield 1 are different to previous Battlefield games. Instead of only having a damage dropoff at the distance, they instead first go up to 100 damage and then go down, making all sniper rifles able to deal one-shot-kills at their own unique ranges. This might sound weird and unrealistic, but it could be an interesting representation of a phenomenon in real life, simplified into a game mechanic, where some rifles deal less damage to their targets at closer range due to the higher bullet velocity making the bullet pass through the body quickly, while at slightly longer ranges the slowing bullet tumbles within the body and tears up a massive cavity inside, causing lethal damage, and at further ranges the bullet slows down to the point where the amount of damage to the body decreases again.
• Sawn-Off Shotgun: A double-barreled version is used as the sidearm of the Tank Hunter class and can be unlocked as the primary weapon of tankers and pilots.
• Shmuck Bait: The Sniper Decoy that Scouts can use, which is a fake head on a stick. Seen from afar, it glints with the same effect as a sniper scope looking at you, and can be spotted to mark it as an enemy sniper. Trigger-happy players that fall for it (specifically, by shooting it) will get their soldier marked with a red aura for every enemy to see.
• Sniper Scope Glint: In addition to scoped rifles producing glints, Sniper Decoys and Trench Periscopes also produce one, the former to bait enemies into attacking it, the latter as part of gameplay balance.
• Songs in the Key of Panic: When the game timer is near an end or when one team is close to winning, the game starts to play one of several intense songs that gradually pick up intensity as the round gets closer and closer to the end.
• Spiteful Spit: As Zara is taunted by Tilkici as he's getting ready to kill her she spits in his face, grabs his knife, and then stabs him in the throat. She then cuts her legs free from the rope he tied her with.
• Stock Scream: As something of an Easter Egg, there's a small chance that players who die from an explosion will let out the Howie Long Scream.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Quick! You just got set on fire by an incendiary grenade. What do you do? Run around searching for the nearest medic crate? That'll make your fire burn faster and get you killed in a few seconds. Do a mini "Stop, drop and roll" by diving prone? That's the right decision. If you go prone, both the afterburn damage and time decreases, giving you a far larger chance to survive.
• Universal Driver's License: Played With. While the normal four classes may enter and drive any vehicle in the game; spawning into a vehicle turns you into a special class, either the Tanker or the Pilot, who is equipped with special pistol carbines. Only classes with a repair tool can repair it from the inside. The Pilot and Tanker always have one; Support may equip one.
• Unorthodox Reload:
  • The Nagant Revolver added in In the Name of the Tsar has a very interesting empty reload animation. While it normally reloads using the loading gate, the empty reload animation shows the player disassembling the gun, removing the empty cylinder and replace it with a full one, before reassembling the gun. It makes the revolver the only revolver that can be reloaded one cartridge at a time and all at once. Disassembling a gun in the middle of a battlefield is of course not recommended in real life.
  • The Repetierpistole M1912 and its high-capacity machine pistol version feature an internal magazine reloaded via clips. On the sidearm version, is it faster to reload it from empty, as any rounds remaining in the magazine are ejected first before reloading. This is not done with the machine pistol variant.
• Useless Useful Spell: Two of the Scout gadgets, the decoy heads and the sniper shield, while technically having useful effects (decoy heads trick enemies into shooting them and cause themselves to be spotted; sniper shield protects much of the sniper's front), are so easily circumvented and nullified (decoy heads can be identified easily and avoided; sniper shield still leaves the rest of the body exposed), 99% of the time they're practically useless.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted. The flamethrower pickup has a very good range, an extremely high damage output, its flames hit a wide area and last for a while, making it absolutely deadly at close quarters against groups of enemies. It might even be more effective than real life thanks to also having infinite fuel, whereas the real Wex can only afford to fire in short bursts. Of course, just like real life, this makes flamethrower troops a higher priority target and comes with the downside of forfeiting your more versatile weapons in favor of a flamethrower.
• Violation of Common Sense: There are a lot of things that could be done in the game (due to gameplay mechanics) that would be otherwise stupid or suicidal in real life. Observe:
  • Some of the fighter aircraft in the game have two seats — one for the pilot and another for the rear gunner. The expectation is that one player would be flying the plane, and another will man the rear machine gun to guard against any enemy getting on their six. However it's entirely possible in-game for a single player to fly the plane, quickly hop into the second seat the man the rear machinegun and take care of any pesky pursuing enemy plane, then hop back into the pilot's seat to take control again once the enemy was shot down.
  • The standard grenade has the ability to One-Hit Kill any player caught in its immediate blast radius. However jumping on top of the grenade in a prone position actually reduces the damage enough that it won't outright kill the player.
  • The flare pistol is intended to be fired into the air in order to spot enemies, however it's possible to fire it at the ground (specifically, at the base of a doorway) as an impromptu area denial tool as enemies that pass over it will be set on fire.
  • Has a Flametrooper or Sentry been mowing your friends down and causing havoc? Bayonet Charge/Melee them, as they're still vulnerable to the bayonet and don't take much of a damage reduction from Quick Melee attacks. It's even very possible to charge right into their gunfire/stream of fire and plunge a bayonet into their chests, and come back out alive thanks to speed boost and damage reduction that charging players receive.
• War Is Hell: Mentioned in the operations several times:
  [Ballroom Blitz cutscene]: We have nothing to fear from these Americans. They are simply boys who think that war is like Samson with his spear and shield and sword, like David with his sling. They do not know that war is now the conflict of smokestacks. A combat of the driving wheel and engine, splintered steel and toxic gas in melted lungs. When we dug this trench we dug not dirt alone but legs, arms, skulls, helmets, all of the debris of this mighty struggle. This is the reality they now face.
  [Argonne Forest cutscene]: Rumor has it that the war is almost over, but it feels unreal it could ever happen. We have been fighting on this front for four years now. The only thing we know is real is death. Most of us have forgotten there is an outside world. When we try to cheer ourselves up with stories from before the war, we can scarcely believe that these are, in fact, true stories. No, I don’t believe that this is the end, not here in this forest, not today. We have no fear left in us.
  [Argonne Forest ending narration, assuming the Germans lose]: We lost the battle, but this terrible war is finally over. Too many of us have perish, too many injured, broken forever. We who are alive must tell the stories of our sacrifice, our struggle, so that such horrors never happen again.
  [Rupture cutscene]: With our war so close to being over I am more scared than ever before. At last I can imagine the future. Not one with Germany as victors but one where I can see my family once again. So now the though of dying terrifies me. And I pray for a small leg wound and a cart ride all the way to Berlin.
  [Galicia cutscene]: Religious souls visualize hell as a blazing inferno with burning embers and intense heat. The soldiers fighting in the snow on the Eastern front know otherwise.

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