Walking the line between historical accuracy and fun in Battlefield 1

GamesBeat: The idea of the runners at Gallipoli had been done in the movies before. Did that affect your decision as far as whether or not to use that concept?

Grøndal: As much as we wanted to challenge preconceptions about the era, we also wanted a couple of stories to portray some more familiar situations, or more explored settings and situations from World War I. The movies have talked a bit more about Gallipoli, and especially about the western front. We felt it was important to not just show things people hadn’t heard about, because it would seem a little too much like imagination. We needed to have some roots in those preconceptions.

We didn’t want to show too unexpected a version of World War I. We did want to have a little of what people expected as well. There are some expectations that come with the setting, and we wanted to confirm some of them while challenging some of them as well. That’s where a good balance for the overall product lies.

GamesBeat: I imagine gamers are going to want to know about the parting line between real history and what edges toward fiction. At Gallipoli, I suppose a soldier never really got that close to the fort in real life?

Grøndal: The situations are inspired by stories that really happened. That’s where we start to take some creative liberties, to create drama in the specific stories we want to tell. I think about it as a story that’s being told, not history. It’s not exactly what happened, centimeter by centimeter, but it’s our interpretation. Perhaps not to be taken literally.

GamesBeat: In the airplane section, I suppose there wasn’t really any bombing of London.

Grøndal: Actually, that did happen. There were several zeppelin raids over London. They weren’t super successful. It was perhaps a bit more of a terror thing – they scared the population more than they damaged their targets. But the fact that they could bomb London at all scared the English. Figuring out how to bring the zeppelins down took a while. Bullets would pass straight through them. It wasn’t until the British came up with the right combination of normal ammunition and incendiary ammunition that they would actually catch fire, and that was the end of the zeppelins.

What didn’t necessarily happen were all the fighters fighting over London. For gameplay purposes, we wanted it to be about pilots fighting against other pilots.

GamesBeat: The woman in Saudi Arabia, is she based on someone real? Was there a particular reason you chose to have a woman in that role?

Grøndal: All the characters in that story, except for Lawrence, are fictional. But we drew inspiration from real stories for them. There were women among the rebels fighting in that territory.

GamesBeat: That’s another thing I didn’t know. What about the big train, though?

Grondal: There’s no evidence that a train that big was ever used in the desert. But a train like that did travel around the theater quite a lot. Someone made a YouTube video about this, where they followed the path of the train we based it on. It eventually ended up all the way out in China or someplace like that. So it’s inspired by a real armored train that may or may not have ever gone to the desert.

GamesBeat: How about the armored suits that the Italian soldier was wearing?

Grøndal: That was a real group of elite soldiers in the Italian army, and they did wear this sort of armor plating. They were called the Arditi, and they actually fought in that location. That’s based on a real-world example.

GamesBeat: I would have thought that someone could just run around and shoot them in the back.

Grøndal: It’s an interesting era. People were trying out so many different tactics. Some of them were more successful than others. It was an era where a lot of technological advancement happened really fast over the course of four years. Maybe the fastest we’ve seen in modern times. People rode in on horses and rode out on tanks. Mechanized warfare had arrived by the end. It’s a clash between the old and new. We put in a lot of time trying to make sure that we did add as much real detail as we can, so people can start from here and read more about actual events.

GamesBeat: What about the German tanks at Cambrai? Was that imagined at all?

Grøndal: It’s re-imagined, I would say, but there was a tank battle in the very last stages of the war that was the inspiration for the Mud and Blood episode. There was a big offensive where they used tanks, and just a few months later the war ended.

The Germans did have tanks. They built one particular type of tank, the A7V, which was one of the largest tanks. What also happened was, there were a lot of mechanical failures in the British tanks, and the Germans would take them and refuel them and redeploy them as their own. That happened quite a lot on both sides, actually. One of these huge A7Vs was captured by the Australians, and it’s on display in Australia today, I believe. I’m not 100 percent sure. But it was quite common to steal and loot and retool the enemy’s equipment. Some troops were dedicated to doing just that.

GamesBeat: I take it the Harlem Hellfighters were real, at the beginning?

Grondal: Yes, they were very much real.

GamesBeat: As far as environments are concerned, can you go to some of these places and see some of the same views from the game maps?

Grøndal: Yeah, there are quite a few locations where we drew direct inspiration, but some of it has been creatively altered to fit what we wanted to tell. The desert in Nothing is Written, we captured a specific area that we felt was representative, but it’s perhaps not like the exact location where those events took place. It’s in the area, you could say.

The only one that’s really close is the multiplayer map that takes place in the Italian Alps. That one is a pretty close replication of how it looks today, with some creative license again taken for gameplay’s sake.

There’s a feature in the game, the Codex, that you might have seen. It dives a little bit deeper into some of the subject matter. We have some small articles explaining different details. We have about 200 entries or so. Those are the real-world anchors for our somewhat fictional events. It gives context to what you’re seeing, like how the Arditi armor was used. You can do some reading up if you want to dive into the subject matter.

GamesBeat: Do you see it as an opportunity to educate people? Give them a bit more sense of what the war was like?

Grøndal: From my personal point of view, we don’t own the subject matter. It’s not our era to own. But I hope that people will play the game and get interested in reading about the war. Again, I believe it was a period of fundamental change. It helped create the modern world we live in. Piquing people’s interest and getting them to learn—it seems like we’re doing that, by the way, going on what I’ve seen online. People are doing their own research, and I think that’s great. It’s an added bonus.

GamesBeat: The game has an unusual structure in a lot of ways. Soldiers die, especially in the beginning, and you move on to the next story. The characters aren’t reborn. It makes a different statement than a lot of games.

Grondal: I don’t necessarily want to comment on what we’re trying to say there. But you can choose to interpret it as you like.