Battlefield 1 will use its multiplayer medals to get players to focus on one style of play at a time.
Players must choose the medal they are going for from a list of five randomly generated medals, and they are only able to work towards one at a time. You are free to switch which medal you have activated so that you do not get stuck working on a challenge that you end up having difficulty with, but you will have to wait until the end of a match to do so. Your progress on the medal you switched from will remain, but you can’t complete it until you choose to activate it again.
The intent is to have medals make you try out different playstyles, and work deliberately towards fulfilling certain actions rather than earning rewards at random because you happened to do something you had a medal for. This is how medals worked in previous Battlefield games, where multiple medals would be active at once so you would always be slowly completing them, whether you intended to or not.
Completing medals in Battlefield 1 will grant players experience. There are 34 different medals that can each be earned 100 times, the selection of which will be rotated weekly.
Battlefield 1 releases on October 21st on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. You can also check out livestreams of the game until launch day.