Beyond the frontlines: how Battlefield V found fresh WWII battles to fight

Swedish games studio Dice on telling lesser-told - and sometimes controversial - stories of the second world war

Since their beginnings in the early 00s, Battlefield games have been known for wild, unpredictable battles involving up to 64 players, on foot, in tanks or on planes. But the last two games, themed after the world wars, have introduced a new kind of single-player storytelling to complement their frenetic multiplayer warfare. Presented as an anthology of separate stories about individual people and places involved in the conflicts, War Stories debuted with 2016's Battlefield 1, and focused on allied soldiers fighting the Germans in France, Turkey, the UK and Italy, and Ottomans in the Kingdom of Hejaz alongside Lawrence of Arabia.

Battlefield V, out this week, uses the second world war as its backdrop, and tells four new war stories. This time the game's Swedish creators at Dice went in search of lesser-told stories from that conflict, rather than the frontline soldiers that dominate cinematic portrayals. They chose a Norwegian resistance fighter, the Senegalese fighters of the Tirailleurs, a Brit in the Special Boat Service, and a veteran German tank commander in the final days of the war.