The Battlefield 5 German Campaign in War Stories Isn't a 'Hero Story'

During the final of Battlefield V’s War Stories, players will experience World War II from the German perspective. This German-centric campaign, entitled The Last Tiger, focuses on a German Tiger tank crew near the war’s end. While Allied troops advance on Berlin, the isolated crew begins questioning the very ideologies that brought them to the war front. It’s a hero’s journey in the making, right? Wrong. According to DICE, this is no tale of heroism.

Speaking with Eurogamer, Design Director Daniel Berlin explained the reason behind DICE’s exploring the German perspective. Apparently, credit goes to fan feedback about Battlefield 1 and tanks. Who doesn’t love a good tank story? (Fury, anyone?)

Berlin told Eurogamer,

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. 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.

There exists a gamut of emotions to explore in such a narrative. This particularly holds true considering The Last Tiger focalizes German soldiers at the tail end of the WWII conflict. However, as noted previously, this does not a hero story make. Berlin elaborated on this notion with the following:

You may deny the actions you made, but even if you deny them you have to live with the consequences. 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.

We’ll see exactly what Berlin means when The Last Tiger comes to Battlefield V in December 2018.

Battlefield V hits the PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One on November 20, 2018.

[Source: Eurogamer]