These stories are generally well-written and tonally varied. Some characters are desperately trying to survive, some are looking for redemption, and some are mounting a guerrilla resistance to centuries of occupation. There’s some quippy heroics at one or two points, which is nice, honestly, because Battlefield 1 is, more often than not, pretty dark. Any heroism on display is contextualized within a conflict that had little in the way of triumph.
Battlefield 1 navigates the tonal challenges of the awful human cost of WWI well, in part by not ignoring them. There’s a consistent acknowledgment of the abject terror and hopelessness that sat atop the people involved in the conflict on all sides, in part thanks to a grimly effective prologue. There's also less explicit demonization of the "enemy" — something that feels like a real relief in the military shooter space, which seems hell-bent on giving players something they can feel good about shooting at.