battlefield The name reminds different people of different doctrines. It evokes the battlefield, especially for those with imagination. A big field with dozens of players fighting. The field of battle. But the long-term, massive multiplayer shooter series of dice is no better than that. The Millennial Elder remembers Deringed’s spawning ability on early YouTube, including mid-air fighter jet pilot swaps, shooting fighter jets from the sky with one incredibly timed rocket launcher shot, and other stunts that somehow entangled the fighter jet.
It was a bold six-hour solo campaign home, and at one point it was the annual counterpoint for COD’s single-player components, except for the more destructive scenery (and fighter jets). It was a historical reenactment and a futuristic guess. Before 2015, nowhere in that fabric was even remotely associated with the police on the battlefield.
“Nuts for everything,” I thought of EA. What the series next needed was the police procedure that leaned against the story and NCIS-type ratios created by the studio behind the slow-atmosphere dead space game. Now that’s the battlefield.
Someone who knows who signed the project or why. What we know is that the result was Battlefield Hardline released in 2015 and emerged in the world as a very enjoyable cop drama cast entirely incorrectly by slap BF’s name.
Hardline’s single-player campaign is what happens if WWE wins the rights to the CSI Miami movie. Drug gangs are engaged in a full-scale lawn war in Florida cities, spread and encouraged. Something has to be done. That includes aviator policemen entering armed encounters of an absolutely unlikely scale. Detectives Nick Mendoza and Carl Stoddard find themselves at the heart of this drug war after a bust assigned to them to get worse, and when they go cheating and try to defeat the main players themselves, they reveal the corruption that is happening on their own power.
After numerous double crosses, prison stays and stealth missions, Credit does his best to do a massive shootout with an assault rifle, feels like a plausible police job and never truly succeeds. But if it hadn’t been seen by the existing pillars of the franchise, Hardline would have had a better shot.
During armed battles, for example, they move around very slowly, squatting down and defeating bad men. Critics of the game at the time reserved a lot of complaints about these sections. This is because the hardline was primarily a shooter, and its stealth mechanism ran shallowly.
Conceptually it is on Catch 22. As PCGN said at the time, big, fiery shootouts don’t feel much like cops. The ideal solution is whether you’re ready or something like SWAT 4. The actual police procedure follows protocols to violate the door and arrest Perps. And the fact that it cannot provide a mechanism that feels as clear as the police work is a large part of why we don’t hear much about Hardline’s name in past decades.
But there’s something here. The cliches of all used bullet casings and masked cop movies are tense stories where corrupt individuals in their own powers become increasingly difficult for the player’s character Mendoza. There is a sense of invincible odds, a true personal revenge to pursue, and a wonderful level of environmental fluctuations. It vibrates from vast compounds to tighter domestic spaces.
Meanwhile, in multiplayer, Hardline got more passes from critics at the time. Scramble to create something closer to the expected battlefield online experience, feels thematically linked to the central cop drama, so Hotwire, a particular mode that gained traction at launch, arrives.
Hotwire is more or less a hard point in Call of Duty, with muscle cars replacing fixed zones. Being either a crime team or a vehicle’s law enforcement, we aim to grab the motor and start driving, and stay in control as long as possible. Decent cops and robbers take on traditional, massive FPS gameplay.
Although it didn’t fill the servers when Hardline was launched, other modes also folded into the dynamic effects of law and lawlessness. HERIST pits one team to raid the safe against the first counterparts tasked with stopping bank robbers from extracting those loot, as discerning speculates.
Blood Money is a spin on the same theme, filling a wooden crate of cash in the center of the map, requiring both teams to film and extract it. After that there is rescue and crosshairs, two slow paces, no respawn, and a competitive mode. In a 5V5 match played in a 3-minute round, it is essentially counter-strike in cop clothing about hostage extraction or protection.
Not all of these modes are inspired, but they are all enhanced by the depth of customization of their typical battlefield loadouts. This means that you’re familiar with what you need to be effective in each mode, so you can adjust your gear in a specific role.
But that’s as close as Hardlines can really embrace online experiences on the battlefield. Ultimately, it was dealt with it in 2015 among critics and the community. Battlefield is a series of games that do better than anyone else. The huge militarized conflict that fought in the first person features ground and aircraft, as well as various player class and weapon options. Hardline isn’t so why release it as a battlefield game?
Hardline was also a game where you could do something specific in a different way than other games. Whether or not they were ready from SWAT 4, there was a police procedural vacuum that the visceral game could have been able to fill if it wasn’t as seen in the franchise convention.
So far, what do you think of Battlefield 6? Was it worth the repulsion? We ended up with community discrepancies to pick up the conversation.
