One of 2015's most anticipated multiplayer games is Battlefield Hardline.
The first-person shooter is being developed by Visceral Games, using DICE's Frostbite 3 engine, and it's shifting the franchise from a military setting to a fantastical police vs criminals setting.
News broke last week that an open beta for the game launches tomorrow on all platforms.
I spoke with producer Scott Probst, senior multiplayer designer Evan Champlin, lead multiplayer map designer Jeff Zaring and QA analyst Forrest Tarleton to find out more about the game and what they hope to achieve with the beta.
How would you describe Battlefield as a franchise - how does it fit into the first-person shooter genre?
It's a franchise that has a lot of pillars associated with it. It's got big sandbox open environments, it has a rock-paper-scissors element between the vehicles and infantry. It's single-player, it's multiplayer - there's so many different aspects. For us to call this a Battlefield game and to put the cops vs criminals fantasy on top of it, it brought us some very cool opportunities.
Battlefield Hardline developers Scott Probst, Evan Champlin, Forrest Tarleton and Jeff Zaring
I think one thing that defines the Battlefield franchise is just how hardcore and fiercely loyal the fans are. How do you think they're responding to the new cops & robbers setting of Hardline?
We've seen the conversation change a lot in the past 18 months. At first we heard things like, 'This is a cool idea, but why isn't it just DLC?' As we've moved through development we've interacted with the community to show the depth and breadth of this game. This is something that has its own multiplayer, it comes with nine maps and seven modes, all these gadgets and weapons. It's got a huge single-player campaign and a story associated with it, it really is a true Battlefield title that stands on its own two feet.
Talk me through some of the major changes made to the game based on data from the first beta.
The list is a mile long. But one of the most significant examples was a mode in the beta called Heist. After the beta we redesigned the whole second half of the way that it works. We found that it got stagnant or stale after you played it a few times, so we switched it up and randomised the drop-off locations so that it changes every time. We also added a feature where a helicopter can fly in to pick up a heist bag, which also feeds into our goal of increasing the cops & criminals fantasy as well.
The most recent video I saw for Hardline featured professional Battlefield players giving feedback to the development team, who were taking notes. Is listening to the players a big part of your job?
Since day one, we've been interacting with the community in some fashion. We have a group that are called 'game changers', who are basically YouTubers and influencers. We bring them into the studio every three months or so, they give us feedback and then we make changes to the game. Not only that, but both of the betas have been huge opportunities to get feedback and put that into the game. The closed beta we did after E3 last year gave us a lot of data and let us increase the quality of the game.
Last year quite a few major titles had big issues when they were released with buggy, unfinished products being sold to consumers. Does pushing the release date of Hardline mean there won't be those sorts of issues with this game?
After the E3 beta we realised we had something that was good on our hands and we started having conversations with the company because we knew if we had more time, we could make something that was great. We know this has so much promise, and if we gave it more time we can deliver on the promise and let this thing reach its ultimate potential. In terms of stability, that's been one of our huge areas of focus. That's why we had the E3 beta, that's why we're having the open beta. As we move into launch we're going to keep listening to understand any issues that people are going to run into because ultimately we'll fix those and improve the game each and every day.
There are first-person shooter multiplayer modes that have always been popular like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Conquest, Domination and so on. There are some brand new ones in Hardline - do you think they'll catch on and be just as popular?
We hope so. The team has done a lot to build up these modes that fit not only from a fantasy and fiction perspective, but also from a gameplay perspective. We looked at the coolest things we could do as cops & criminals, what opportunities that afforded us, then how to take that and map it into this awesome franchise. Our hope is absolutely to make new modes that become long-standing modes for Battlefield. But we're not ignoring the awesome modes that already exist, so we have modes like Conquest and Team Deathmatch in Hardline too.
In this new generation of consoles, the major first-person shooters so far include Destiny, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Titanfall. They all have advanced mobility and sci-fi elements, but Hardline has opted to keep it real, right?
We're putting out this cops & criminals fantasy, something everyone can relate to and did when they were growing up with friends or brothers or whatever. So the fact that a lot of games are heading in a sci-fi direction, there's a kind of gap in the market that gives us the ability to take advantage and hopefully provide players with a new experience that is unique, different and fun.
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The Battlefield Hardline open beta will run from February 4 - February 9 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC.
The full game launches March 19.
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source: newshub archive
