Lars Gustavsson, design director DICE, reminds me that WWI had thrust time forward. It triggered the outset of the world war age, it catalysed the fall of empires, and it brought in the industrial age.
"Just imagine being a farmer during this time," he says.
"You've never seen a car, you've never seen a bicycle in fact, and then comes an armoured tank and an airship. It's just hard to imagine that contrast."
But how much of the real time and place will Battlefield 1 tread into? Where will it draw the line between fiction and history? We spoke with Gustavsson and lead designer Danny Berlin shortly after the Battlefield 1 world premiere to get more of the finer details.
GAMESPOT: Prior to this interview I asked some of my colleagues what they immediately would like to know about Battlefield 1, and the most popular question was about the zeppelins.
Gustavsson: Ah.
They wanted to know whether the zeppelins can be piloted, and more about their role in this world you've created.
Gustavsson: Haha, this is a tricky one. These are... [Long pause]
Is it a case of you not knowing the answer yet, or...?
Gustavsson: No it's more than that, we have areas that we are starting to talk about, and there's areas that we're going to talk about later. But just like you see in the trailer, there's a plenitude of vehicle types. You saw the battleship in the trailer, you saw a lot of interesting stuff, so there will definitely be new and cool gameplay in there.
I get the impression from your answer that there will be talk about the zeppelins at some point. Are you holding that information back?
Gustavsson: Yeah we're saving it for a later date.
Okay then, let's talk about something else. At the Battlefield 1 presentation, your colleague Alex [Grøndal, senior producer] spoke about multiplayer and referred to a "persistent squad system" - I wasn't sure what that meant and was hoping you could clarify.
Gustavsson: I think, traditionally, we haven't gone all the way with joining people as a group and keeping them as a group all the way through a multiplayer session, but with a persistent squad you get to team up, get into a server together, but also switch between the servers throughout the session. You can jump between experiences without having to break up your group.
Team-play is so important in Battlefield, so knowing that you can still have the same team and same squad as you persist through everything is important. That's the message we got from the community.
So about the name: is the "1" in reference to the WWI setting, or something else?
Berlin: It's not, actually. We're calling it Battlefield 1 for a couple reasons. First off, we've never had a Battlefield 1 before. We started with Battlefield 1942, and went from there. But in the same way, we're also titling it this way because we're going back to our roots. We're bringing back that Battlefield flavour, with sandbox maps and wide open places for you to play. We're seeing how we can take our roots and make them something new again in 2016.
