Battlefield 1 – Game Mechanics

by Falagar / Articles, Battlefield / 23 Oct 2016

All classes and soldiers have unlimited sprint, unlike in COD. This allows you to traverse long distances in the game rather quickly.

Like in COD, you can jump and climb over objects. You can also vault over taller walls which takes more time.

Many doors, windows, and gates can be opened and closed.

When you see an enemy, look at them and press the spotting button to mark them for your teammates. This makes a marker appear over their head and puts them on the minimap. You are able to see their health, class, and name when they are marked. Vehicles can be spotted.

Players can only be marked by other players and flares. Spotting is only temporary.

Players and vehicles have a health bar in the lower left-hand corner. When injured, players can wait for their health to passively return, but it is much faster to be healed by a medic’s health packs or health box. For Vehicles, see Vehicle Mechanics below.

Ammo is limited for both soldiers and vehicles. For players, the only way to recover ammunition is from Supports dropping ammo packs and crates. Weapon ammunition recovers the fastest, while gadgets and grenades recover the slowest. Vehicles reload in a different manner, see Vehicles Mechanics down below.

Melee is available to everyone. When looking at an enemy, pressing the melee button will cause you to melee attack them. Damage, hit radius, and speed of the attack is determined by your selected weapon. Melee attacks from behind are always instant kills and allow you to take an enemy’s dogtags. Melee attacks also break windows and certain objects in the environment.

Bayonet charging is only available to Assaults, Medics, and Scouts. To bayonet charge, hold your melee button down while sprinting. Your soldier will scream and sprint forward with greater speed, and your vision will blur slightly. While charging, you cannot shoot or vault over objects. Hitting an enemy with a bayonet charge is an instant kill. After charging, you cannot sprint. The longer you charged, the longer you have to wait to be able to sprint or charge again.

Suppression is caused by being shot at. Suppression causes your screen to blur, reduces accuracy, and increases recoil. Different weapons cause different amounts of suppression.

Gas grenades thrown by the enemy will produce a cloud of gas that will cause damage to you while you are in it. To remove the effect and prevent taking damage, put on your gas mask as prompted.

While wearing a gas mask, your vision is reduced and you cannot aim down your sights. You can mitigate this disadvantage by equipping weapons with great hip-fire accuracy.

Weapon Mechanics

Unlike in COD or some shooters, bullets in Battlefield have travel time, much like in real life. Bullets do not reach their target instantly. Some guns have lower velocities than others(pistols rounds will move more slowly than bolt action rifle rounds). Make sure you aim ahead of your target if they are moving. This applies to all weapons in the game.

Similarly, bullets also have drop. In general, the higher the velocity, the less drop there will be. At long ranges, aim above your target.

Accuracy is affected by your stance(standing, crouch, prone), movement, suppression, the presence of a bipod, and the amount of time you’ve fired. Firing in bursts not only keeps recoil in check, but also increases accuracy at range. Moving around and hipfiring with an LMG will produce worse accuracy than going prone and firing in controlled bursts. Edit: Maintaining fire with LMGs produce the best accuracy.

You cannot fire while jumping.

Reloading also works slightly differently to COD. Some weapons might carry one bullet more than the stated capacity(spawning in with 31 rounds in the gun, but the magazine carries 30). This is because you have one round in the chamber already. If you only partially empty the gun, you will reload with a full magazine + one round in the chamber. If you empty the gun, you will have a longer reload because you need to charge the gun and will only have the stated capacity.

Reloading with certain rifles also has somewhat unusual mechanics. The starting weapon for the Medic class, the Cei-Rigotti Factory, has a capacity of 10 rounds. Instead of a detachable box magazine, it is fed with clips of five rounds each. If you empty the gun, you load in two clips. If you empty it halfway, you load in one. However, emptying it partially, say you have three rounds left, you would load in one clip, and then two loose bullets. In some cases, it may be faster to fire the gun a few more times and reload.

It is faster to pull out your pistol than to reload.

For the support class, especially the weapons with large magazines, it is possible to overheat your weapon. Firing your weapon for extended periods of time will cause the barrel to overheat, leaving you unable to fire for a bit.

Bayonets do not affect ADS time.

Vehicle Mechanics

In Battlefield, many maps allow the use of vehicles, ranging from cars, horses, tanks, boats, and aircraft. To spawn in one, select a spawn point with the appropriate vehicle symbol that has a vehicle available to spawn in. This is displayed by a number next to or below the symbol, showing the number of vehicle spawns available.

All vehicles have limited health. This health does not regenerate. The only way to regain health in a vehicle is to be repaired by a Support with the Repair Tool, or to self repair(On PC, this is the X button by default). Self-repairing restores a small chunk of the vehicle’s health, and no other actions can be done while self-repairing. Any damage taken during that time will interrupt the repair, requiring you to start all over again.

Some weapons on vehicles have unlimited ammo, displayed as an infinity symbol in the ammo counter. However, these weapons are limited in that they can overheat. It is best to fire these weapons in bursts to prevent overheating. If they overheat(you deplete the meter), then you will be unable to fire for a short period of time.

Weapons with limited amounts of ammo, like cannons, are more akin to a bolt action rifle. For instance, the light tank’s cannon starts with 4 rounds. At any point after firing a round, the tank can begin replenishing the rounds which takes a lot longer than reloading. It is advisable to be replenishing whenever you are not in combat to keep the tank combat ready.

Other weapons, such as bombs on aircraft, can only be used once before requiring replenishing.

All vehicles can be disabled. This occurs after a certain amount of damage has been taken and reduces the fighting capacity of a vehicle, either be slowing its movement, destroying guns, or impairing turret traverse speed. These effects cannot be reversed unless the vehicle is repaired, unlike in previous Battlefield games.

Different parts of vehicles take different amounts of damage. The front of a tank will take less damage than the sides or the rear. The angle of impact also matters; hitting the sides at a flat angle will do the most damage, while hitting at a higher angle will reduce the damage. If the angle is high enough, the rounds will simply ricochet off and cause no damage.

Vehicles are in fact customizable, though to a limited degree. After selecting a vehicle, go to the customization screen, and you have the option of selecting a different layout for your vehicle of choice, allowing you to change playstyles.

Other Mechanics

There is no friendly fire, though you can kill teammates if you bring a building down on them. Please don’t do this

Capturing a control point is only possible in the area defined on the map. This area can be seen on the minimap as a sort of opaque area around the capture point.

Capturing a control point can only be done when more allies are in the zone than enemies. The more teammates there are, the faster you will cap. If you are capturing by the point still belongs to the enemy, they can still spawn near the area. The same applies to friendly cap zones that are being captured by enemies.

You can spawn in your spawn area, in capture zone owned by your team, in certain vehicles, and on squadmates provided they are not under fire.

When dead, you are able to see the distance between you and medics nearby, allowing you to see if someone is coming to revive you. Even if it says nothing, it is best to wait until the deployment bar has filled up, as you cannot deploy until then. Might as well wait for a medic to come revive you, you never know! Seriously you fucks let us revive you

At random, special kits will spawn on the field. These kits give players access to unique weapons and gadgets not normally accessible to players, such as flamethrowers or hand-held heavy machine guns. These kits usually give the player more health, but also reduce regen. If you are a special kit, stay near medics to keep your health up, and medics should stay near these special players to help keep them alive.

While these special players are strong, they are all instantly killable by a bayonet charge.

Use smoke or gas grenades to help push objectives. Smoke heavily obscures enemy vision, and gas can prevent snipers from aiming down their sights. Gas and smoke also provide some area denial, cutting off chokepoints and such.

In conquest, the losing side is given a very powerful vehicle, either a massive zeppelin, a battleship, or an armored train. These vehicles can be ridden by multiple players and can be very effective in killing infantry, tanks, and aircraft. These vehicles also have a large amount of health and require a great team effort to take down. Like in other vehicles, different parts of these special vehicles can be disabled(ex, destroy the gondolas on the Behemoth to kill players and destroy guns).

Aircraft can be damaged by pretty much everything. If a bomber is giving your team trouble, try to deal some damage with lmgs, mounted guns around the map, or the Anti-Aircraft guns.

If you are a squad leader, don’t forget to mark objectives for your squad. If your squad attacks/defends the point you marked, you and your squadmates get a ton of extra points. The same goes for reviving, resupplying, and healing squad members.

Remember, Battlefield is a team game. Don’t go off on your own and sit back in spawn trying to snipe people from 300 meters away, push up and help your team cap zones. You will get more points and you’ll help your team win the game. Lone-wolfing it can only get you so far. Even if you don’t think they need any, drop ammo and health packs around. They’re unlimited and don’t cost you anything, and its free points.

Falagar

He is the founder and editor of Magic Game World. He loved gaming from the moment he got a PlayStation 1 with Gran Turismo on his 7th birthday.
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