‘Battlefield 1’ Embraces Its Inner Horsetastic

  When Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was announced, it was met with anger, boredom, death threats to the devs and petty Youtube dislike campaigns on the reveal trailer. All of this showed just how stale the FPS genre has become. Another spacetastic space shooter? Bollocks to that, everyone said, and everyone was damn right.  

All the love for the upcoming Battlefield 1, then, comes from the fact that it’s trying something all-new. The World War One setting lets players do things they’ve never done in shooters before, with the ridiculous technological advancement of the period coming into play. Starting with horseback fighting, ending with planes, trains and automobiles; that’s video game level variety waiting to happen right there.

All of that said, though, DICE still have to watch their asses. Shoehorning in new mechanics for the sake of new mechanics won’t cut it around here, buddy boy. You’ve got to handle them right. You’ve got to make horse combat as entertaining as traditional bullets-amundo shooting. So how are you doing that, huh? HOW?

'The team spent a lot of time making sure the horses feel less like motorcycles and more like… well… horses,’ we’re told. ‘In a blog post, DICE explained that horses are highly effective in close-quarter combat, provided the rider is skilled enough. "Their speed and agility means they can trample enemies under their powerful hooves, and they'll get you close enough to slash them down with a saber,’ GameSpot reports.  

Players can wield and use swords, as well as rifles, while on horseback, though aiming is likely to be difficult while galloping across the battlefield. You can also throw grenades while on horseback. DICE provided the example of running circles around a slower-moving mechanized vehicle to take it down with grenades.’

It all sounds like it’s going in the right direction. Here’s a little gameplay of horses in action, fresh from Gamescom 2016: