14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts has shone a bit more light on just why it chose to delay the upcoming Battlefield Hardline shooter and how it wasn't succeeding in delivering a "cops and criminals" experience to users.
Battlefield Hardline was revealed earlier this year as a brand new installment in the first-person shooter series from Electronic Arts, but unlike previous ones that were made by developer DICE, this new one was coming from Visceral Games.
The studio wanted to deliver a bold evolution and changed the conflict from a military one to a battle between cops and criminals in largely urban environments.
The new premise was quickly offered for testing to players as a surprise beta stage that took place on PC and PS4. The response from the community was quite good and EA even extended the beta time in order to get even better feedback.
This is according to Electronic Arts' Patrick Soderlund, who has mentioned the reasoning during an investor's call, via MP1st.
"We allowed people to play for a little bit longer, maybe, than we planned, because we found a lot of feedback from players in there, providing us valid information and feedback around features of the game and how the game felt, etc," he says.
One of the most important bits of feedback is that Hardline didn't feel like a cops vs. criminals game, instead just like a slightly tweaked version of the military conflicts seen in previous titles in the series.
"And things like the cops and robbers fiction maybe wasn’t shining through properly, you know? Is it playing like a military game, but it should be a cops and robbers game?"
As such, EA and Visceral started combing through the feedback from fans and noticed that a lot of great ideas were being shared. As such, after a while, it became clear that, in order to implement these improvements, more time would be needed.
"We saw ideas around asymmetric gameplay, a bunch of really strong, good, well-thought ideas that we decided to listen to," he adds. "And having a long discussion with the team, and looking at where we were, we felt like the best thing for us was to give the development team a little bit of extra time and get the game to where we think it needs to be in order to be successful."
Currently, Battlefield Hardline is set to debut in early 2015 for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. A new beta stage should appear shortly before that time.
