A former developer on Battlefield Hardline has said that the game’s cops and robbers setting held it back somewhat as it didn’t focus on the core of what Battlefield is.
Scott Warner was design director on Battlefield Hardline, and he told NME that the game’s focus on police made it difficult for it to fit with the overall design objectives of the series.
“It’s not controversial to say, you know, for the Battlefield that I worked on [Battlefield Hardline] part of the problem that we ran into was that when you decouple that fantasy from ‘Battlefield’s a big war’, and then the specific fantasy we’re talking about is like a cops and robbers type heist thing, they’re two very different things.”
“It becomes difficult to sort of connect the two and make them always feel like they’re extensions of each other,” Warner continued. “So that’s where you can get into some challenges. Like if you have an experience at a low level that’s not congruent with your fantasy.”
Battlefield Hardline released in 2015 and was developed by Visceral Games instead of series regular EA DICE, and shifted focus from military warfare to police in a “TV crime drama” setting, as described by EA.
“If you have a Battlefield game, there’s certain expectations you have it, from being over the top, and huge, and responsive, and whatnot,” added Warner. “You know, when you think about cops, they’re not like demolishing skyscrapers, right?”
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Hardline fared slightly worse than other titles in the series upon release, averaging around 70 per cent and above on Metacritic, whilst Battlefield 4 averages 85 per cent and follow-up Battlefield 1 in 2016 sits at just shy of 90 per cent.
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