14 DAY TRIAL // Visceral Games, the developer behind some pretty impressive single-player games like the Dead Space ones, wants to use that experience in terms of stories and plot delivery with the upcoming Battlefield Hardline first-person shooter, which is set to debut next year.
The Battlefield series has made a name for itself by delivering great multiplayer experiences to millions of fans from around the world, but with some exceptions like the Bad Company spinoffs, the single-player campaigns weren't that impressive due to their not-so-stellar stories.
Visceral wants to get a great plot in Hardline
With the upcoming Battlefield Hardline, however, developer Visceral Games wants to deliver a much more impressive single-player story campaign, as it can use its previous experience from the Dead Space games, which put a bigger emphasis on story than on online components.
According to Battlefield Hardline Creative Director Ian Milham, the studio looked particularly to its story aspect of the franchise as a point where improvements could be made.
"There were aspects that we thought we had been pretty successful with before, specifically with single-player and some of the cinematic presentation, that we thought would be an interesting addition to the Battlefield formula, that took a lot of figuring out," Milham tells VG247.
Milham adds that Visceral has a lot of passion for games that have great stories, and given its tradition with the Dead Space titles, it has high hopes about what it's doing with Hardline to the traditional Battlefield franchise.
"[Story driven games are] certainly something that we love. We started as and have traditionally been a storytelling studio. It felt like something interesting we could do in the Battlefield universe, in this sort of different flavor of it."
Fans shouldn't expect realism, however
Milham emphasizes that Hardline isn't trying to be ultra-realistic in terms of single-player or multiplayer, so fans shouldn't have such expectations.
Instead, the single-player campaign is focused on crime dramas like those seen on TV shows, while the multiplayer is more about the cops and robbers conflict than accurate police and criminal tactics.
"It was never our intention to make a realistic police tactics simulator. We’re playing cops and robbers. It’s always been a crime drama, exaggerated," he explains.
Battlefield Hardline was initially set to debut this fall, but due to the need of extra polishing and development time, its release has been pushed back to early 2015 by Visceral and Electronic Arts, in order to avoid releasing another problematic product, like last year's Battlefield 4.
