It's easier to make a game that's complete fabrication than it is to make a game that says, "Actually, the Eastern Front decided the war." Americans need their participation trophies for being the world's best 70th minute substitution.
I find it amusing that in the case of both Battlefield and Call of Duty, the
endless churn of soldiers to death represented by the fast respawning/countdown until certain number of deaths are recorded/etc. system is far more respective of the Eastern Front than the Western Front where most soldiers on both sides went for years without suffering severe injury, let alone dying.
And yet at the same time, the same type of war buff loves
Enemy At The Gates/
Call of Duty's Stalingrad intro of "here is a clip, when the soldier in front of you dies, pick up his rifle" portrayal of this even though that's ahistorical and the Soviets weren't using outdated human wave tactics, they simply were...say, less concerned...about individual conditions compared to the overall war effort than their Western counterparts both friend and foe. They also took into consideration their sheer manpower advantage onto a single front. Also, there was that whole part where they were being invaded instead of being the ones doing the invading I suppose.
COD:WWII's complete non-existence of the Eastern Front was surprising considering the series original history as being unique in portraying both it and the British's long war in Africa. I think in CoD/UO/2 you actually spend more time as a Soviet and British soldier than an American. And the American campaigns are comparatively non-eventful, even at Bastogne. (CoD 3 tried the idea of following all the individual nations (Canada/Poland/etc.) together as a group on the Western Front, and
2:Big Red One on PS2/Xbox was built around the idea of following a single unit within an army, so they get a pass.)
World at War added the Pacific War as their primary American campaign and used the Soviets as the one against the Nazi's.
I actually thought many of
BF1942's better maps were the British related ones. Especially in North Africa, it lent itself better to the engine at the time than the American and Soviet ones.
Red Orchestra seemed like the first game of the type to really be able to handle "cities" and other more common largescale Eastern Front locations as MP maps.
On the subject, I always thought it interesting how
Day of Defeat built so many of its maps around the Italian Campaign or Falaise. Anzio, Avalanche, Saints, Switch, etc. are all set in Italy. Caen, Donner, Flash, Kalt, etc. are in Falaise, some during the winter. Jagd is in one or the other depending on if you're playing the Source version or not. So many WW2 games, even media, do D-Day, then you skip straight to The Bulge and then the war's over. (Except stuff like
Band of Brothers and
Hell's Highway which both pop up to the North for Market Garden.)
IIRC, BF1942's expansions did add stuff like Italy and some Free French stuff and so on...though that's a very different DICE from the current one. BF1 was almost a parody of what that DICE would have done with the war.
