To be like Call of Duty, Battlefield’s creator had to play against its strengths they did so willingly, for years. Where Battlefield encouraged experimentation and destruction, Call of Duty locked players into cinematic scripted set pieces and static corridors. Where Battlefield was large and open, Call of Duty was compact and claustrophobic. For too long, ‘Battlefield’ aped ‘Call of Duty’ But for single-player, each new Battlefield - and EA’s marketing division - seemed evermore infatuated with the design of the massively successful Call of Duty games, despite the series being Battlefield’s aesthetic opposite. They established and nurtured a team with a specialized talent for creating huge, destructible maps for players to explore in top-of-class multiplayer modes. Battlefield’s publisher Electronic Arts and developer DICE have themselves to blame. While more creatively ambitious, more technically impressive, and all around prettier than the Call of Duty series, the Battlefield video games have been its competitor’s perpetual runner-up. Imagine living in someone’s shadow for a decade, and you’ll get the gist of the Battlefield brand as of late. Battlefield 1’s campaign is nothing like its recent predecessors.
