Battlefield Hardline – A faster Battlefield Game
Welcome to the complete rundown of Battlefield Hardline! The game comes out March 17, so it has only a couple of weeks to go before launch. The open beta just completed around two weeks ago and it went pretty well for EA. More than 7 million people tried it out! That being said, nothing destroyed itself in an epic fashion! *Ahem, Battlefield 4* *Cough, cough* Of course, the usual random character models freezing and random floating players occurred, but what can you expect? It’s still a beta after all. That being said, graphically, the game is looking great! With the update to new current generation consoles, the game looks similar in fashion to Battlefield 4 on the PC. The game is being produced for Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One, PS4, and PC (Sorry Wii U. You got rejected by EA again.)
Now all of this being said, I’m going to be honest: I have never played a Battlefield game before. All the information I have is based off of a lot of different research and watching a bunch of videos so if something isn’t completely correct or if I explain something too in-depth, please excuse my juvenile experience in the series. I’ll be covering my predictions on the campaign, the multiplayer beta, the player experience through leveling, the new hacker mode, and my own personal opinion. Now, onto Battlefield Hardline, the twelfth game in the Battlefield series!
Campaign:
*To start this section is purely speculation based off of quotes and facts
To figure out what the campaign is going to be like, we can look at the definition of words in the title. According to Dictionary.com, the word hard-line means,
“Adhering rigidly to a dogma, theory, or plan; uncompromising or unyielding.”
Now after that, you could be thinking, “What the heck does dogma mean?” Well, dogma means,
“An official system of principles or tenets concerning faith, morals, or behavior, as with a church.”
Word meanings leads me to think that the main characters storyline is going to be a man vs. self deal going on. Battlefield.com states that you play as a detective named Nick Mendoza , but that’s pretty much all the useful data we get. My guess is that it’s going to be a Need For Speed: Rivals type thing where there are two different campaigns dealing with either a cop story mode or a robber story mode, or the two campaigns are going to be combined where a robber questions his decisions and battles himself into working against robbers. I support this with the Battlefield Hardline website saying, “It’s a Cops vs. Criminals World. You can raid vaults or save hostages. Which side of the law do you want to ride with?”
Multiplayer Beta:
Gameplay:
-The Beta has 3 game modes: heists, hotwire, and conquest.
Heists: The Goal is for the robbers to break into a bank, crack open the vault, and deliver 3 bags of money to different points around the map–all while the cops are trying to stop them. The cops can stop them by depleting the robber’s ticket count to zero. The ticket count is depleted by killing enemy robbers. This game mode is like a mixture between Rush and Capture-The-Flag from Battlefield 4. (For those of you who don’t know, Rush is a game mode where one team is tasked with the challenge of destroying two M-COM stations while the opposing force depletes the attacking team’s ticket counter.)
Hotwire: The Goal is to deplete the enemy tickets by controlling vehicles. The more vehicles your team controls, the more you deplete the enemy ticket count. There are five marked vehicles and both teams start at 400 tickets. Your team receives vehicles at the start of the game including muscle cars, motorcycles, and a helicopter to track down the marked vehicles and the enemies driving away from you (or are chasing you for that matter.) Depending on the vehicle, a number of other players can ride along with you and sit out of the windows or stay in the vehicle to fire at the enemy. This game mode is basically moving conquest.
Conquest: Conquest is the typical 3, 5, or 7 control point game type where you gain points depending on how many points your team is controlling. This is the only current game mode that has been directly recycled from previous games so far.
Player:
Classes:
There are four classes in Battlefield Hardline: the operator, the professional, the mechanic, and the enforcer. The Operator is the same as Assault from Battlefield 4. They carry assault rifles and have med-kits to heal themselves. The Professional is the sniper class. It is also the same thing as recon in Battlefield 4. The Mechanic destroys vehicles and fixes friendly ones. They carry rocket launchers or grenade launchers. They are the same thing as Engineers from Battlefield 4. Last is the Enforcer, which is the same as the support class from Battlefield 4. They carry shotguns.
Hackers:
This is basically an upgraded version of the commander mode from Battlefield 4. Basically a hacker in Battlefield Hardline is an all-seeing eye who can cycle in-between security cameras to cause havoc in the battlefield. They can explode transformers, cause poisonous gas to pour into a room, jam GPSs, upgrade a squad, have a vehicle deploy faster, and many more options. There is one player who can as a hacker per team, and if the hacker wants to leave the position someone else can step up and take the place. There is a skill tree that gradually unlocks as the hacker levels up their abilities by playing as the hacker.
Leveling:
To me the leveling system seemed overly easy. Within a handful of games I was already at level 20. The leveling system claims to go all the way up to level 150. I’m assuming (and hoping) that the farther you level up the more experience is required. From what I saw, leveling up provides no actual advantage. It’s a sign to show how much you’ve played Battlefield Hardline. You might unlock new challenges which in turn can be used to buy new weapons, modifications for vehicles and firearms, and different levels of battle packs which can unlock exclusive items which you cannot buy, but only unlock such as some camo skins and uniforms.
Personal Opinion:
Overall, yes I would say I enjoyed it. Is it “game of the year” worthy? Not a chance. Nothing is really all that ingenuitive so far. All of the big FPS games that have come out so far have been focusing on faster gameplay. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare included the jetpack and new parkour abilities creating faster gameplay, the Halo 5 beta showed how 343 increased the speed of their gameplay dramatically, and almost exactly a year ago Titanfall almost started the era of faster FPS games.
To me, a lot of the assets seemed recycled. A lot of the guns aren’t even new. The only major things sticking out for me would be the game modes and the new equipment including the zipline, grappling hook, and the electrical taser gun-thing. Yes, I had a blast playing it but it wasn’t like a gripping game that is a 2015 must buy. I especially found hotwire mode fun. Maybe a little too easy if you were driving and had a car full of people and you were trying to avoid everyone, but fun.
So overall, unless the multiplayer is updated incredibly regularly and presents an amazing, consistent experience, I fear that Battlefield Hardline is just going to be another game that is lost the vault of “okay” games. We’ll see what the game presents on March 17. If you disagree, feel free to comment below and “hash it out” with me!
