That, scant battlefield ammunition and fully destructible environments reward more cautious, methodical gunplay that’s nothing like the boisterous lethality on casual loan in so many modern shooters. Juxtaposed with photos, Battlefield 1‘s weapons are virtual analogues of their archetypes, though having hefted none in real life, all I can tell you is that wielding them efficiently requires adaptation to slower fire and reload rates. It’s a scene from DICE’s Battlefield 1, a stupefyingly gorgeous first-person shooter out for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 18 that puts the lie to decades of assumptions-that World War I’s internecine trench volleys and wire-snarled footslogs are anathema to gameplay anyone might find tactically absorbing. I could linger indefinitely, the moment frozen in motion like the looping images in a Harry Potter tabloid. Uphill lies cragged headland, machine gun roosts, bulwarks of stacked logs and the terra-cotta rooftops of a village below a crumbling fortress. I’m taking the view off Cape Helles near Gallipoli circa 1915, beside the deck rail of a ship flanked by Dreadnoughts, about to charge the beachhead. Above it all, a study in contrasts: half the dimming blues of an idyllic sunset, half atomic wrack and bloom, like the skies over Mordor. Down rains devastation, hundreds of pounds of steel-cased explosives flung in parabolic arcs from smooth-bored cylinders. Out go the soldiers in tin hats, the bayonets, the haversacks and hobnailed ankle boots. Up go the signal flares, the shouts, the tracers and plumes of artillery smoke, the embers from blazing trees like startled fireflies.