Summary
Battlefield: Hardlinewas a cool concept that didn’t enjoy a lot of praise. It took a break from the strictly militaristic roots of the franchise for a more “cops and robbers” inspired take on the core gameplay fans know and love. But the public wasn’t ready for it and the title stalled out, especially with the stiff competition in the FPS genre at the time. Today,Battlefield: Hardlineis mostly remembered as a curiosity: a footnote in the series but not much else.
But it’s been nine years since the game dropped and nothing remotely like it exists in today’s FPS landscape. The genre has changed a lot in the past decade, with a noticeable pivot away from traditional multiplayer and with a focus on more battle royale gameplay and hero/class-based shooters, with any outliers of those trends still focused on military vs military combat.Battlefield: Hardlinehad a unique concept, and it would be a shame if EA left it in the past.
Why The FPS Market Needs More Games Like Battlefield: Hardline
Battlefield: Hardlinewas and always has been the black sheep of the franchise since its release, but its premise is something that no other game has touched since, maybe because of the icy receptionHardlinegot in its day. The game came out shortly after its predecessor,Battlefield 4, was finally patched into a playable stateafter its disastrous launch. This essentially meant that two separateBattlefieldtitles were competing with each other for players, and of the two,Battlefield 4felt the most familiar to the traditional formula and ended up winning out.
TheHardlinename is mostly synonymous with failure in theBattlefieldcommunity, so any attempt to revive the cops and robbers concept would probably be in need of a rebranding. But it’s still a concept worth revisiting.Battlefield: Hardlinetook the classicBattlefieldformula and applied it to a setting inspired by over-the-top80’s action movies likeDie Hard,Commando, andLethal Weapon. Those movies, for all their flaws and cheesy datedness, are nothing if not cool, and players want to feel like they’re constantly pulling off cool stunts in-game. There’s a lot a talented developer can do when using this type of beloved source material for game content.
What Should a Battlefield: Hardline Successor Look Like?
AHardlinefollow-up can and should deviate from one key aspect of its predecessor. The original game was much too afraid to embrace theasymmetric nature ofBattlefield’s conflictsit was trying to portray. While cartels have been known to have some pretty sophisticated gear in real life, it’s not especially common. More often than not, law enforcement is the better equipped of the two, and keeping that true in-game would lead to some interesting and fun asymmetric gameplay. In a follow-up, don’t have both sides equally kitted out.
While certainlya break from the normalBattlefieldformulawhere everyone has access to the same gear regardless of their side, forcing players to adopt different strategies and tactics depending on their faction can go a long way to keep the game fresh over time and distance itself from unfair comparisons to other titles in the series.
A trueBattlefield: Hardlinesuccessor doesn’t even have to be aBattlefieldgame proper. The original game came out almost a decade ago now, with neither EA nor DICE showing any inkling of interest in continuing the spin-off series. The concept, however, is open season.A “cops and robbers” style FPSis an untapped goldmine that dev teams should pick up and turn into something amazing, and can even incorporate some features that, while may feel out of place in aBattlefieldgame, might enhance the experience further. A good example is giving an XP incentive to law enforcement players to use non-lethal weaponry to disable and apprehend enemies rather than outright killing them.
Battlefield
EA’s Battlefield franchise is a series of first-person shooter games. The games have predominantly been set in the modern day, though there have also been titles set in World War 1, World War 2, and in the near future.The Battlefield franchise is often compared to Call of Duty, with both franchises offering single-player campaigns and online multiplayer.
