Dynamic Reloads | How Battlefield Pioneered Next Generation Gun Animations

BF1 is one of those weird cases of a AAA game that feels like a genuine passion project that used its huge budget to create something different and beautiful, rather than a cynical product that just wants your money.

The jump in quality as far as reloads go from Black Ops 4 to MW 2019 is genuinely hilarious. Not quite as funny as the nose dive from MW to Cold War though

The case of the Nagant Revolver sticks out to create a gas seal, meaning it is the only revolver that can be effectively suppressed (the ammunitions is also unique)

Don't forget Mosins and Carcano also has unique K-bullet loading, reload and unloading animation. Mosin has 7 unique animations in total. Carcano being the only rifle in BF 1 that has a unique last round reload animation.

BF1 was, and is, a masterpiece

In Russian and Soviet armies reloading whole cylinder in Nagant revolver was claimed irrational and extremely unreliable and time-consuming, yet the way they made it look in bf1 was super-cool and when I saw it for the first time I was like "you did WHAT" Sadly in game Nagant was always an underdog revolver but I still preferred it to others due to coolest animations besides the peacekeeper

Battlefield 1 is the reason why I'm now a history major starting college right now. It started with seeing weapons like the perino that not only look unique, but also have a unique system to how they work that got me to look into the codex entries in game, then looking up more about them, and snowballing to now

I especially enjoyed the m1912 pistol reload. Where you can watch it eject however many unfired rounds are left.

Biggest thing I've learned is that storms on the beach/ocean are beautiful.

Shout-out to Red Orchestra 2 for having quite possibly the most authentic reload animations of its time. The player-character would reload G43s and SVT-40s - detachable box-mag-fed rifles - with stripper-clips and loose rounds unless the mag was empty.

I love when weapons have multiple weapon animations for reloading or inspects, for example the weapons in Cyberpunk 2077 have many variants of empty and partial reloading. It also conveys character a good example is the malorian arms 3516 the realod animations just screams badass

I'll mention, there's one game that did this prior to BF1. Red Orchestra 2 / Rising Storm 1. These games are more combat focused than things like ARMA or SQUAD and don't emphasize team tactics, but built with a HEAVY emphasis on combat realism. Any weapon that uses rifle caliber rounds will one-shot someone if you hit them center of mass, weapons that use smaller rounds usually only take a couple rounds or so to kill as well, and every weapon is a guaranteed kill with a single bullet on a headshot. Weapon hip fire and aiming are both done semi-independent of the player camera. The whole body has a damage model that shows what trauma you've received. Etc. But for the rifles in particular, you also have this "3 reload" system. If you popped off a couple rounds, you'll single load, if you did all 5 you'll use a clip, and if you did all but one, you'll eject the unspent round and use a clip. But unlike BF1, you have an option to manually cycle the bolt after each shot by left clicking each time you fire on bolt actions like the Mosin, K98, 1903, or Arisaka. If you cycle a new round before doing a partial reload, that unspent cartridge will be discarded. Semi-auto rifles have their own unique quirks. the G41 has a fixed magazine and reloads solely through clips and single rounds. If you have shot 3 or less rounds, you'll eject one unspent and load up to 4 new ones. If you've shot 4 to 8 rounds, you'll open the action and eject one round before loading a single 5 round clip and closing it again, meaning you'll have to do a second reload if you want to fully top up. If you've shot 9 or 10 rounds, you'll either refill using two clips or eject the last round and use two clips to refill. The SVT-40/AVT-40 uses clips or removable mags. If you shot less than 4, you'll swap mags and place the partially emptied one into your reserve. If you shot more than that before but not running dry, you'll open the action and eject one round before loading a 5 round clip taken from one of your spare mags before shutting it. If you fire all your rounds, you'll mag swap, discard the empty mag and rack the action. The M1 Garand is the simplest, where if you're empty you reload a clip, or if you're not you'll discard all your unused ammo and load a fresh clip. All of this in 2011, which was WAY ahead of its time.

me being able to tell the difference between the HK and the M4 made me happy.

Battlefield 1 & Battlefield V were my gateway drug to becoming a gun nerd myself. All the cool weapons and unique quirks they all had were so fascinating to me that I ended up doing a ton of research into the real guns that the games were representing. Eventually led to me becoming an amateur firearms collector myself. And gun ownership has made me appreciate accurate weapon designs and animations in games even more.

The reloads in BF1 were really fucking well done because even to this day I still notice the reload animations because of how good they are.

I really appreciate how bf1 forces you to know your guns with some reloads being counterintuitively faster than others. It makes me think between gunfights, like -- ok I could reload slow now or try to get this next guy with 3 shots so I get the faster empty reload. its really cool mechanically

Red Orchestra had dynamic reloading (and firing) animations in 2006, and there's probably other games that came before it. It's cool to see this in a AAA, but praising BF1 seems a little tone deaf, although that detail on the colt single action is very cool - even hunt:showdown doesn't do that, and that one is super detailed in most aspects.

much love for subtly dropping American Venom during the peacekeeper segment.

One thing that Battlefield has lost is one-in-the-chamber for tube magazines. It started with the shotguns in BF1, where you could only load a certain number of cartridges no matter if there was one in the chamber or not.

Wow, what a wonderful look at some of BF's best reload animations! I actually worked with a couple of the DICE LA guys (an animator and a weapon designer) back during, and before, the Community Test Environment days in BF4, through BF1 and into BFV (both moved on to other studios later in V's life cycle). I basically did volunteer QA work on exactly the sort of technical details you're looking at in this video, though that said I very much share your comments on certain things being extreme nitpicks (sometimes simply due to technical/engine limitations) and that it's important to keep the big picture in mind when looking at oversights or goofs (like the end of the video). I want to emphasize that I was helping out people who themselves were extremely passionate and knowledgeable about this stuff, which is why they were happy to have an extra set of hands/eyes in the first place. For example, in BF1 the weapon designer literally did the math on how much higher the Maxim action's rate of fire would become when scaled down to become the 9mm "SMG 08/18", which is why it has the particular rate of fire that it has. In BF4 there was already a solid base to work with, as Battlefield had moved to "proper" realism for reloads and weapon details with BF3, but there was certainly more to fix than in BF1, due to this combination of the passion the devs had for getting things right, and because of that the improvement of the engine/etc to actually allow these sorts of dynamic and diverse reload animations. I helped with correcting magazine capacities, open/closed bolt, cartridge (very important as BF3/4/1/V use cartridge-based damage models), staged reload save points (another wonderful animation addition), broken/incorrect animation details, and even names in a couple cases which is hard as Legal has to approve ("RPK-47M" to RPK, "L96A1" to L115, both along with cartridge and capacity fixes), and this sort of thing. For example, in BF4 it was a technical limitation that if a gun was set to be open bolt (and thus not get a +1 to its ammo count) it could only have one reload animation. This is because nearly all modern open bolt guns are belt-fed MGs, so this was setup specifically with the idea that you would pull the charging handle during the reload whether it was empty or not. However, the mag-fed Ultimax 100 is also open bolt, and we decided that it incorrectly having a +1 in its ammo count (but not pulling the charging handle on partial reloads) was the lesser evil than pulling the charging handle after every single reload (but with a correct always-30 capacity), though the animation design does at least suggest open bolt (a hard and "loud" pull rearward, but a gentle and "quiet" push forward). Upgrading the game engine to allow for proper open bolt reloads was one of the most important things done for BF1, given the drastically higher number of them in that era (especially SMGs). By pure bizarre coincidence, I was also the first person to find/record the Unica 6's easter egg reload animation in BF4... made by one of the guys I was already working with at the time, which he found hilarious. Outside of technical stuff, I also got them to pester the art/model people into allowing removal of those hideous flat colour default camos that most of the "variant/family" weapons had in BF4.