14 DAY TRIAL // Battlefield Hardline developer Visceral Games highlights the single-player campaign's quality, with its TV show-inspired plot and its multiple choices, as being the differentiating factor for the new shooter against its rivals.
The first-person shooter market, particularly the military-themed one, has seen quite a lot of franchises appear in recent years, each with millions of loyal fans.
However, while Activision's Call of Duty franchise reigns supreme, Electronic Arts, with its Battlefield series, wants to draw in more and more fans with lots of other elements besides a top-notch multiplayer mode.
Hardline places big emphasis on single-player
With the upcoming Battlefield Hardline, coming from developer Visceral Games, EA wants to put a much bigger focus on the single-player story, using the fact that Hardline focuses on the war on crime, instead of other fictional military conflicts.
According to the studio's Senior Producer, Steve Anthony, the team used its story expertise earned while making Dead Space or Dante's Inferno, coupled with the cop dramas seen in Hollywood movies or TV shows.
"At Visceral we’re very proud of our lineage when it comes to single player stories," he tells PS blog. "What we’ve done for Battlefield Hardline is to take influence from popular television crime dramas and built a campaign that will unfold in episodic format. That means each episode of the campaign will have character development, intense moments and cliff hanging endings."
Lots of Hollywood talent are on board
In order to nail the authenticity of the plot and its characters, Visceral has brought in a lot of great actors seen in plenty of TV shows and movies for Battlefield Hardline.
"In order to do that we’ve brought on some key talent from Hollywood," he continues. "So we’ve got Benito Martinez, who you may know from The Shield and Sons of Anarchy, Wendy Calhoun from Justified and Bill Johnson from The West Wing – actors, writers and directors who have given that influence and helped us deliver the format you’re going to find in the single player experience of Battlefield Hardline."
Besides the TV-like plot and characters, Hardline's story has another ace up its sleeve, according to Anthony, in the form of a bigger emphasis on choices. Players are no longer taken through a linear ride, from set piece moment to set piece moment. Instead, they are presented with more open situations that can be resolved in different ways.
"Hardline differs in that we’re really pushing player choice," he adds. "As you approach any given situation within the game we want to give you the tools to be able to analyse and assess how you want to deal with it. Previous Battlefield games were all about the high intensity, moment to moment action; with Hardline it’s much more about player choice and you deciding how you approach situations."
Battlefield Hardline is set to debut in early 2015, as both EA and Visceral wanted to delay its initial fall release so that more work could be put into the project.
