Changes Detailed For Battlefield Hardline Post Beta Feedback

After the intensive beta period for Battlefield Hardline, Visceral Games was not overly convinced by its product judging on the feedback it was getting. To fix the issues, the game was pushed back ’til next year to allow for some changes, and some of the changes that have been announced so far sound promising.

According to this interview both factions within the game, the cops and robbers, will have weapons suited to their outfits after the beta players raised concerns that having the same loadout available to each didn’t feel authentic. Secondly, mines and RPG’s will not be so easy to procure this time and will have to be picked up at certain locations. This is what Visceral’s Steve calls a “junk in the trunk” feature (based of on movies where you get to see bad guys puling out heavy equipment from the back of their cars). It overall feels more authentic according to him but also more cinematic.

“The other big change is more around explosives and some of the heavy duty weapons. Obviously with Battlefield you have this really solid foundation of rock, paper, scissors gameplay. The heavy weapons counter the vehicles, etc. There’s a great balance that the team has created over the years. We wanted to include RPGs and mines – and we did – but people felt that it took them out of the fiction a little bit; that you could just load up a character and equip an RPG. So that wasn’t an easy thing to get rid of because it’s part of the balance.

“The design team came up with a cool ideas based on that feedback. One is to have some of those more powerful weapons be pick-ups so it creates a secondary objective. Some of the modes, like in Hotwire, the RPG cache is one of the objectives. If you control that cache your team has access to the RPG. And that creates more interesting gameplay. We also came up with the notion of ‘junk in the trunk’ – what if we allowed players to equip special items to their vehicle instead of their inventory loadout. It goes back to movies where bad guys pop open the trunk to grab something big. When you play the game, if you set up your vehicle loadout to have a specific weapon in the trunk and you control the vehicle you can use that item. So now you want to get a vehicle to get access to a specific weapon, which also fits the fiction better.”

I am very glad that you won’t be able to procure heavy duty armaments so easily as when I was playing the beta. It was very explosive with grenades and rocket launchers just going off everywhere. That, was a bad thing. I understand it works in the war themed battlefields, but here in a city setting with a cops and robbers they really didn’t suit.

Battlefield Hardline will release next March, delayed from its original target of October this year. The game will be available on the PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS3 and Xbox 360.