Battlefield 1 will let you customize your semi-historical soldiers with Battlepacks, just like Battlefield 4 and Battlefield Hardline. But they worked a little bit differently back in the Great War: instead of offering an assortment of items like weapon grips and XP boosters, each Battlepack is guaranteed to include a weapon skin. On top of that, a pack could also hold a part for a special melee weapon and another unspecified boon.
Melee weapons are a much bigger deal in Battlefield 1, and it looks like EA is leaning into that by letting players build their own. It does make me wonder if the melee weapons assembled with these parts will be more powerful than their vanilla cousins or if they'll just look more exotic. Ooh, speaking of exotic, they could even have cryptic flavor text like in Destiny! "A jeweled shovel better suited for digging royal graves than our ignoble purposes."
