It’s that time of the year again–the time of year where your favorite Triple-A developers and publishers release the next installment in whatever your chosen, vaguely modern/near future multiplayer is! This year’s heavy hitters are the return to form Battlefield 6 from EA/DICE and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, both promising a short campaign, battle royale modes, and their bread and butter multiplayer offerings and are both poised to sell gangbusters up to and through the holiday season.
I’m not really here to talk about the actual games, though. If you want to know that, Battlefield 6 is really fun, and who cares about Call of Duty. I’d instead like to take this time to highlight a trend I’ve seen in these massive games, and that’s the sanitation of both historical and modern militaries.
To start, we do have to go a bit back, all the way to 2017, with Call of Duty: WWII, which is the first point I can remember this trend emerging in mainstream, historical-set FPS games. If my memory does justice–please remember I was in 8th grade when that game released, and also, it kinda sucks so I haven’t revisited it–the developers at Sledgehammer Games (Or more likely, higher-ups at Activision) made the decision to scrub the Nazi Swastika and several other bits of Nazi Germany iconography from parts of the single-player and multiplayer portions of the game.
This change always struck me as bizarre; I am of the opinion that when depicting any history, whether recent/modern or closing in on 100 years ago, you shouldn’t sanitize it. World War 2 is not only the largest war in history as far as countries, conflicts and casualties go, but also the point in time host to several of the biggest tragedies in modern history. The conversation of setting an arcade multiplayer shooter in it where stuff like flamethrowers are a reward for Killing The Most Guys is a whole other can of worms that I don’t want to get into, but at the very least I think censorship of iconography from it is the wrong direction to take.
Especially when it continued, not just in games set during World War 2, but afterwards as well. Battlefield V removed Nazi imagery almost entirely from the game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) was set in a completely fake country where the villains were a generic Not Taliban, Rainbow 6: Siege at some point just stopped adding characters from actually existing spec-ops units from any country, and now we have Battlefield 6, which has gone and replaced the actual countries of our modern world with a generic catch all “NATO” faction for Western forces, and “Pax Armata”, which as far as I can tell is a generic private mercenary group with vaguely Eastern equipment and aesthetics. This would be fine if there was no precedent set beforehand, but a lot of these AAA shooters had a rich history of portraying authentic arms and armies from countries throughout history; not 15 years ago, Battlefield 4 had semi-authentic kits for American, Russian AND Chinese army forces in a game where all three of those countries shot at each other.
The reason for this paradigm shift is obvious; These are games made in the West, often America, depicting at least Vaguely American military units. The Department of Defense has a pretty strict code on allowing its portrayal in entertainment products–If you use authentic American standard issue arms, vehicles, or uniforms in any way, you’re not allowed to portray American forces as “The Bad Guys” in really any form, and I expect this standard has only gotten more strict as time has gone on and the political climate in the West has shifted. As a result, authentic depiction of both historical and modern armies has shifted into the often independent “mil-sim” space, where games like SQUAD and Hell Let Loose have taken on the responsibility of authentic portrayal of arms and armor of the time period combined with a level of realism not matched by games such as Battlefield.
This sidestepping of authentic portrayal for these big, arcade-shooter productions is…fine, it doesn’t ruin the game for me or anything close, and based on the reception Battlefield 6 has gotten, very few other people either. But it does poise the question: If we’re going through such lengths to avoid using real weapons, uniforms, and flags, why are we even setting these games in our Modern Earth in the first place? These are games that, while, yes, are arcade-y and unrealistic, place a lot of emphasis on “Immersion”; feeling like your character is in that time and space doing those things. That’s what makes those “Battlefield Moments” so cool; when the game has made the effort to ground you in its setting with semi-accurate aesthetics, locations, etc, that moment when you pull of an insane, action movie stunt can feel like you’ve broken through the matrix for a second and have become the main character, where just seconds ago you were another nameless grunt on the field.
When this sanitization comes through for both historical and modern conflicts, the context in which your character exists starts to fall apart. Its easy to imagine why the U.S., China and Russia would want to shoot at each other; they’re all countries with beef going back almost a century, and have repeatedly tried to antagonize one another into doing something catastrophically stupid to justify a shooting war. When you replace these very real countries with “Pax Armata”, now you open up a whole new list of questions, especially in a series pretty light on storytelling in the first place; Why is NATO beefing with them? How do they operate, how did they balloon to this size? An entire list of justifications need to be thought of before you even get to that part where the game starts; the part where everyone starts shooting at each other. Obviously, in a game like Battlefield, the fact that the game is fun to play should come first, but justifying and staging a “realistic” conflict for your multiplayer game to take place around becomes a lot harder when you’ve replaced a century of geopolitical beef with what are essentially comic book villains. But with execs who want to sell the game in Asia and Eastern Europe and the, oh you know, United States Department of Defense breathing down your neck, what are you to do?
Luckily, we have a perfect example of how this style of modern military-focused games should go: the Ace Combat games from Bandai Namco. These games use very accurate depictions of weaponry, specifically aircraft, from our reality, and transplants them into a completely fictional setting with its own politics, factions, and geography.
Now, lets get a few things out of the way; Is this setting stupid? Yes. Are the foundations of this setting flimsy and, at points, contrived? Yes. But, by setting the Ace Combat games in what is a 100% fictional reality and not this weird middle ground that we find Battlefield in right now, we accomplish a few things; We have sidestepped any meddling by real world governments or corporate higher-ups that are iffy about the portrayal of whatever military machine one of those governments used to bomb a small village into the stratosphere this week, we can make up any justification we like to have these fictional nations justify a shooting war with each other (Especially in the nuclear age, which games set in our reality have to deal with but Ace Combat gracefully sidesteps.), and we now have a free pass to do whatever we want with this fictional world instead of being constrained by actual history. This also allows Ace Combat to explore very real-world issues and politics through the lens of a goofy fictional reality to avoid any censorship laws or government/corporate backlash; in their last installment, Ace Combat attempted to explore the new wave of battlefield drones and information gathering by big tech companies. Granted, these weren’t the most original ideas at the time of the game’s release, and it was not the most graceful of explorations, but these are ideas worth exploring and they tried to explore them, which is more than I can say of any Battlefield or Call of Duty game from the past 10 years.
So I return to the original question; Why are we still bothering trying to awkwardly shove these alternate-reality or blatantly fictional conflicts into our real world, especially in games where the scale is as big as Battlefield? While its plausible to create a small insurgent group for games with a smaller scale, setting your game in this globe-trotting, future defining world war and having the foundations of that conflict be as flimsy as they are kind of breaks down the whole justification of setting this in our own reality in the first place. We’re now just setting Battlefield game in modern Earth with modern countries for no other reason than “that’s just what Battlefield does” when this problem has opened up an argument for exploring all sorts of alternate history or blatantly fictional conflicts. Make a Cold War Gone Hot game. Make a Battlefield game set in a fictional world with relatively modern military technology but one or two pieces of tech that are really out there in the sci-fi realm. Hell, Battlefield 6already presents an interesting idea for a conflict in the NATO as we know it completely collapsing any many former members turning on its tentpole countries! What if the U.S. had to fight an alliance of Britain, Spain and France? Just anything besides “Pax Armata”. Because Pax Armata is boring. Besides some cool uniforms, countless other games have explored the “what if a mercenary company got so big they could destroy world governments”; when you’re getting beat to the punch by Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, you might want to consider that your idea for a faction has already had anything interesting that could be done with the concept squeezed out of it.
While I would love a return to the time when arts and entertainment were allowed to use existing and historical iconography, arms, armor and weapons, I also have to face reality and see the time for that may be passed us, or at least dormant for the time being. Whether that’s due to rising censorship, meddling from higher-ups, or simply licensing restrictions, no one but those forcing these changes know. This awkward middle ground we find ourselves in isn’t doing it for me though; It needs to either be one thing or another. I would much rather the industry as a whole commit to a complete fiction, like Ace Combat, if we can’t go back to a time when using actual history for your games wasn’t subject to such scrutiny.
The context in which these stories exist–and, by that, the context in which they are written–are just as important as the stories and settings themselves. I bring us back to the importance of “immersion” in Battlefield games; grounding the setting in a version of reality that is flimsy and hamstrung makes it feel…grey, like nothing of consequence is taking place. And if I had to have a choice, I’d rather these clearly talented developers when it comes to aestheticizing existing militaries, take a crack and worldbuilding their own fictional ones. You can have all the consequences and goofy setups for peer-to-peer conflicts you want that way, and all the allusions to real world governments and modern warfare that you want without the President of the U.S. telling you actually, you can’t do that, or someone in Eastern Europe banning your game from store shelves.
I realize no one else cares about this, its just been a pet peeve for me in games lately. I still really, really enjoy Battlefield. But I think context is important. And I think that if this series ever wants to even try to tell an interesting story again, it needs to take some notes from the Japanese. Ace Combat isn’t just a fun game that I highly recommend; its also how you do a game exploring the realities of current geopolitics and modern warfare without all the hangups of our modern age of corporate and government censorship. And I think a lot of big developers, not jut EA/DICE, can learn from that. Thanks for reading.
