Battlefield 1’s Operations mode perfectly captures the chaos of war

Just look at this gif:

When you consider what’s actually happening in that scene, it’s quite spectacular. In real-time, on a server populated by 63 other players, a destroyed enemy airship is hurtling towards the earth, scorching and deforming the crash site, and killing the 5-6 man team of pilots and gunners inside. Player-controlled bombers and attack planes circle overhead, watching their kill crash land in an explosion of flames and smoke as an infantryman scrambles to get out of its path. And then there’s me, on the ground, mesmerised by the devastation.

I could watch that gif all day. Have you ever seen anything like that pulled off in a multiplayer game? But destroying the airship wasn’t actually the objective, as you may have expected it to be. Instead, it’s just a small part of Battlefield 1’s Operations mode, merely making the allied team’s task of holding their position slightly more achievable. To have any chance of successfully holding the line, there’s still the army of snipers, aircraft, tanks, infantry and field guns to deal with, too.

As daunting as it can seem, it’s this sense of scale that sets Battlefield 1 apart. Call of Duty’s quicker pace and smaller scale arenas evoke an entirely different feel to that of DICE’s shooter, as does Titanfall’s, where the focus is on twitchy, high-speed gameplay. Here, it’s all about scale, and while Battlefield has always done 64 player matches, they have never felt quite so fiercely intense as they do in Operations, as heavy arms fire rocks in overhead and waves of players converge to fight over territory.

On paper, Operations sounds like a fairly simple combination of Battlefield’s Conquest and Rush, merging Conquest’s point-taking with Rush’s map-progression. And in practice, that’s almost exactly what it is, tasking the attacking force with capturing a series of points while the defenders do their best to hold the line.

But the sense of chaos and immersion it creates is unlike anything I have experienced in an online shooter. It feels like a war rather than a skirmish, a battle rather than a gun fight. And whether you’re the final soldier bunkered down in a boggy trench, a pilot targeting buildings holing up the enemy, or a scout taking pot shots at infantrymen from afar, DICE succeeds in making you feel part of an army, rather than a lone soldier. 

Here’s another look at an airship coming down. It is breathtaking.

Operations doesn’t change multiplayer to the level some have suggested – it is, after all, an evolution of that which has come before it. But it is one of the best, and most intense, multiplayer game modes I have ever experienced. It is exciting yet unnerving, with an atmosphere that is as chaotic and horrific as you’d expect war to be. And after a decade and a half of perfecting the formula, DICE’s technology and expert craftsmanship has finally allowed the developer to successfully deliver its vision of all-out-war. Battlefield 1 is a triumph, and Operations is the star.