Walking the line between historical accuracy and fun in Battlefield 1

GamesBeat: There’s the beginning of the Italian story, too, where you talk about this lost generation.

Grøndal: We have nods to many different, I would say–different forces, different happenings across all the different episodes. If you really want to dig into it, there’s more to it than perhaps meets the eye in each situation.

GamesBeat: It’s an interesting balance for me. It’s very respectful of sacrifice, but it’s also trying to be a fun game.

Grøndal: It’s a challenging path to talk. But again, that’s why we always have to lean back into what makes a Battlefield game, at its core. It’s not a documentary. It’s supposed to be a game that people will have fun with first.

GamesBeat: The campaign structure is also very different. It’s more like five campaigns in one. Is that simply because you wanted to tell a variety of stories?

Grøndal: Our thinking behind that—it’s a number of things. We felt like, in Battlefield in general, you don’t just play one soldier in multiplayer. That’s not the way it works. So we wanted a structure that represented that core value of the franchise. You play as many different soldiers and get to experience many different stories. That’s where it started.

We also felt like it’s not necessarily for us to direct you as far as exactly what order you play things in. You have some freedom to play the one about this tank crew, or the one about this fighter pilot. It’s more up to the player to choose how they want to experience the campaign. You have more freedom to engage with the game in the way you’d like.

GamesBeat: I haven’t played the campaign all the way through, but at the end of the Lawrence campaign they mention a battleship. Is that a multiplayer map?

Grøndal: There’s a battleship in multiplayer, yeah. But it’s not in that particular theater of the war. We’re more hinting toward what Lawrence of Arabia did after that episode. He traveled and had more adventures after that. His campaign was pretty significant and very long. So it’s talking about where they headed after the events of our particular story.

GamesBeat: It’s a more diverse view of the war than people maybe have been used to. You have women characters, African-American characters.

Grøndal: That goes back to—we wanted to challenge preconceptions a bit as far as what this was all about, who was fighting for who. This was still the age of empires. Empires had colonies and colonial troops in their armies. We wanted to tell a bit of that story and bring that to light, bring some more diversity across the board and tell those stories. Maybe we can help people learn more about this time.

GamesBeat: It seems like one way to extend this might be to come out with downloadable war stories.

Grøndal: Right now we’re focused on bringing more multiplayer content. We haven’t really announced anything outside of that yet. That’s our main focus right now. But I like the idea.

GamesBeat: Russian players might be disappointed right now since the Eastern Front wasn’t included.

Grøndal: We haven’t ruled that out yet. We may still get there.