Friday, February 13, 2015

Battlefield Hardline: It may be the Battlefield you've been waiting for


On this page you'll find 4 videos of an upcoming Battlefield game....

Ok, that's obvious but what isn't is something new.  That being, the fact that I actually enjoyed making them.

I've been a Battlefield player since the days of Battlefield 1942.  To be honest it was my favorite game in the series for a long time mostly due to Dice's release of a then "unofficial" mod for the game called Modern Combat.


It was that mod to an already great game that laid the foundation for every Battlefield to come after it.  Battlefield 2, Bad Company, Battlefield 3 and 4 all followed the formula of huge maps set in a modern setting.  Yes I left out 2142 mostly due to that game being more of an aberration than a successor to Battlefield games.  Proof being that the major releases after it returned to a less "whimsical" premise of staying within 20 years of present day.

World War 2 was abandoned by Battlefield long ago (except for the Play4Free version) leaving such well traveled ground to other games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty.

While Battlefield games have become better looking, full featured and more engrossing they haven't been immune to the distractions of DLC disease and profit over polish.   Just like its primary competition,  Activision's Call of Duty series,  Premium subscriptions, seemingly endless DLC and "shortcut" kits have made good games often little more than cash cows for their publisher.  Which has led to rushed development and release of what was essentially games still in a beta phase at launch.  A condition that culminated in a near disastrous launch of Battlefield 4 even going so far as to inspire litigation against its publisher, EA.

So when I heard about a new branch of the Battlefield family coming online last fall (Battlefield: Hardline) I was interested to see if EA and Dice had learned their lessons from all the missteps of Battlefield 4. 

During the closed (later open) beta of the initial candidate of this new Battlefield game I saw promise but also saw many of the same issues from the Battlefield 4 codebase that it shared.  Wall hacks, a screwed up kill cam and problems with hit registers were all present and accounted for. 

In short the game was Battlefield 4 with cops and robbers.  An interesting premise but other than some cool new gimmicks like the zip-line, the game was far from ready for prime time.

The difference with this Beta, however, was that EA listened to feedback and pushed the release date from Fall 2014 to spring of 2015.  EA didn't need another billion dollar disaster and the newly minted Dice L.A. studios (now responsible for Battlefield games) didn't want to have its first release fall on its face.


So here we are half a year later and EA offers up another beta release of Battlefield: Hardline.  So the burning question for anyone who'd played the original beta was, had anything changed? 

I admit that I'm somewhat of a curmudgeon when it comes to hype.  I hate it and I hold a deep seated belief that the level of hype for anything is inversely proportional to the quality of whatever's being hyped.

It's a formula that worked for just about every game released in the past 5 years and I have no intention of changing my view.  While EA is promoting the game and offering the same old overpriced "Pre-Orders" that it has in the past, the hype machine is set somewhere around medium.

In other words, my formula is working perfectly.  The original beta heavily hyped the game and in a word it was mediocre at best.  This time around things are different.
In the videos this old grumbling gamer actually had to admit the game wasn't that bad, at least in Beta.  For one thing there were 3 different play modes; Heist, Hotwire and a classic conquest mode.  There was also a mode akin to Battlefield 4's Commander mode called Hacker that was far more entertaining than similar modes in previous Battlefield games.

In one of the videos I actually said, "I'm having a hard time not liking this game."

That's high praise from me especially when we're talking about Battlefield games.  If the final release on March 17th is at least as good as the beta experience this may breathe new life into the franchise.

A picture is indeed worth 1000 words so rather than try to fight the cliché I invite you to watch some moving pictures as I explore the 2015 edition of Battlefield: Hardline Beta.


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