The Battlefield 5 campaign lets you play from the German perspective but "it's not a hero story", insists DICE
Don't get iron cross.
The Battlefield 5 campaign lets you play from the German perspective, but "it's not a hero story", the developers have insisted.
The Last Tiger, the last of the game's War Stories due out in December 2018, is set during the twilight of World War 2 as the German army "descends into chaos". It follows a lone Tiger tank crew that "begins to question the ideology that got them to this point".
In an interview with Eurogamer, franchise design director Daniel Berlin said The Last Tiger is not a hero narrative, and expanded on why DICE decided to put it in the game.
It all started, Berlin said, with tanks.
"With Battlefield 1 we got a lot of feedback that it'd be nice to see a German perspective, so that was in our back pocket," Berlin said.
"And also one of the best-received war stories from Battlefield 1 was the one featuring a tank. So we knew we wanted to do a tank specific war story for Battlefield 5.
"So then we looked at which tank should we have. There's a set of tanks you can have but there's one tank I would claim is what the Spitfire is to aeroplanes: the Tiger tank. It's almost a legend, the Tiger tank. There are stories like that Allied soldiers were told to retreat if they saw one, do not engage. The gun itself is as long a full Sherman tank, so we knew this vehicle was the tank we needed to make a War Story of, and of course that comes with the German perspective.
"So when then building The Last Tiger, we decided to really dive into the emotions and the aspects of consequence, I'd say, and that was a driving factor when we built this."
While it's a surprise to see Battlefield 5 let you play a campaign mission from the German perspective, it's in keeping with DICE's desire to tell untold and unplayed stories in the game's single-player mode.
To that end, Battlefield 5 lets you play as a black colonial French soldier from Senegal, a female resistance fighter from Norway and a young British criminal, as well as a German tank commander, although based on images and video released by DICE, Battlefield 5 does not feature the swastika, instead favouring the iron cross for German soldiers.
"You may deny the actions you made, but even if you deny them you have to live with the consequences," Berlin said of the German perspective mission.
"All actions have consequences, even in war, so that's an ongoing theme throughout the whole thing.
"And I don't want to spoil anything, but I hope that mantra helps you understand some of what I mean when I say it's not a hero story. It's really about this tank crew going to war in this crazy machine and they start to actually question why they fight."
UPDATE: This article has been edited at the request of DICE after the developer said Peter Mueller, the German soldier you play as in Battlefield 5, is not a Nazi. Rather, the War Story in question depicts "the German perspective".