battlefield 1 'Battlefield 1' Wins More Hearts and Minds Than 'Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare'

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Two of the biggest first person shooter franchises in video games outlined their plans this week to win the hearts and minds of gamers.

 

Activision's Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which will be set in the far future, will take players to space and other planets—a first in the series.

 

Electronic Arts' Battlefield 1 will be set during the first World War, also a first the series.

 

Battlefield 1, which was announced yesterday with a bombastic trailer, made a far more compelling pitch:

 

 

Judging which of the two games will be better at this point is a ridiculous, albeit entertaining exercise. It's like trying to judge which candidate will be a better president by their performance during a primary debate. It's less about measurable merits than it is about the cut of their jib, and Battlefield 1's trailer cut a way better jib than Infinite Warfare's trailer, which was also announced with a bombastic trailer earlier this week:

 

 

The obvious differentiator that works in Battlefield 1's favor is that it looks like something new in the AAA, multiplayer first-person shooter genre, though this is possibly the narrowest genre in video games. The Call of Duty series started in World War II, moved through the Modern Warfare era, dipped its toes into the near future in recent years, and is now finally in space with a full-blown science fiction shooter. It might be a giant leap for Call of Duty, but these are places that players have been to dozens of times before in other games.

 

World War I, on the other hand, is not a place that most players have been to, and that's exciting. Conventional wisdom is that there's good reason why there aren't a lot of first-person shooters set in WWI. It has to do with the weapons, which were slower to fire and reload, and the battles themselves, which were defined by cowering in muddy trenches and suicidal charges—a far cry from the WWII heroics we saw in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and the shooters it inspired.

 

Last year, I talked to Jos Hoebe, one of the three developers who made the WWI first person shooter Verdun. The game proved that conventional wisdom was wrong. There was a good multiplayer shooter to set in WWI, you just had to think about it differently. Embrace realism over cinematic action, teamwork over empowering every player separately. It totally worked, and if a team of three people can do it, hundreds of developers at EA's DICE studio can make WWI a mega hit.

 

"As a longtime fan of the franchise I'm very excited actually about this big series taking up the theme, which we successfully pioneered for them with Verdun ;)," Hoebe told me in an email. "I think that DICE made a great choice by taking this theme reaching their huge audiences, bringing awareness of the war which deserves more attention, especially since it is exactly 100 years ago."

 

So far, the huge audiences are digging Battlefield I more than Infinite Warfare. They've been outspoken about it. Here's what Twitch's chat looked like while the trailer aired:

 

 

It went forever. Infinite Warfare's trailer, meanwhile, has received more than 540,000 dislikes on YouTube so far, which was so bad publisher Activision's CEO Eric Hirshberg had to comment on it during an earnings call.

 

"The reveal trailer for Black Ops 2, which took the franchise into the future for the first time, had the most dislikes of any reveal trailer we had ever made at that time." Hirshberg said. "And that went on to become our most successful game ever."

 

As Hirshberg suggests, the current feedback from players doesn't mean Battlefield 1 will be the better game or that it will sell more copies. In fact, gamers love to complain about Call of Duty, then buy it (the last Call of Duty was the best selling game of 2015). In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't even mean that the two will be all that different, as only the players who are deeply into multiplayer shooters can really tell them apart.

 

If anything, it shows players are at least ready for new ideas within this narrow genre, which is slightly encouraging news.

 

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