Why Battlefield Hardline will be a prettier, less buggy game than Battlefield 4

[Bald Bouncer]

Visceral's Battlefield: Hardline looks quite a lot like Battlefield 4, at a glance - no real surprise, given that it runs on the same, much-hyped Frostbite engine. Both Visceral and franchise creator DICE are, however, adamant that the game is a significant technical advance. Here's a round-up of thoughts on the subject, courtesy of PSLS, VentureBeat and PC Gamer. Where changes have been made, they've been made with Hardline's contemporary crime premise in mind. "We've got improvements incoming to it, we've improved the vehicle physics and so on, because in a cops and criminals setting vehicle collisions are way more important than in Battlefield," Visceral's lead multiplayer designer Thad Sasser told PSLS, describing Frostbite as a "fantastic" engine. "So, we're making fundamental changes under the hood to some of these systems."



"In terms of the UI, we still want it to be recognizably Battlefield but we got some changes," he went on. "We're listening to user feedback, and we're always soliciting comments and feedback from the players. So, if you have specific comments, you got specific feedback, let us know. We're happy to take it in, we're still a good way from release, we got time to make some changes. Let us know what you like and what you don't like and tell us why."

Preserving a sense of continuity between games is important for executive producer Steve Papoutsis, too. "There are certain things we want to make sure feel familiar and comfortable to players," he explained to PC Gamer. "If you think of Battlefield multiplayer as an e-sport and you compare that to, say, baseball or football, you don't drastically change the rules year-to-year, because it's going to confuse people and confuse the players. So we took a very measured approach to the things that we changed and the things we didn't change."

Among the things Papoutsis hopes Hardline won't share with Battlefield 4 are bugs - the game continues to be slammed for technical deficiencies, almost six months after release, though as always, it's hard to gauge how representative the complaints really are. "The folks at DICE and folks at Visceral have been hard at work on addressing some of the issues that you're surfacing," Papoutsis promised.

"There's been a lot of effort going into a variety of fixes, and we've got folks on our team that are looking to them as well. This is an issue the franchise takes seriously, and EA takes seriously." You might recall that Patrick Söderlund, DICE employee turned EA exec, has conceded that EA needs to do "a better job" with its bug-testing.



"We acknowledge that we had certain challenges with Battlefield 4 when it launched," DICE's general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson told VentureBeat at E3. "It wasn't on the server side. It was more on the client side, just to be picky about it."

"That's why we've been so dedicated, and still are, to taking care of Battlefield 4. We have people in Stockholm, L.A., Uppsala, and Redwood Shores as well helping out and taking care of this product. It's the same way we're going to take care of all our products. We're dedicated to making sure people have a good experience."

Now that Battlefield's many developers are more comfortable with Xbox One and PS4, he added, the situation should improve. "As with all game teams and all games and all code bases, the more you work on them, the more they mature. Making games for new technology platforms is always a big challenge. You always need to overcome a lot of unknowns.

Coming in with our second generation of next-gen games, if you want to call it that - I wonder when we'll stop saying "next-gen," by the way - is definitely going to be a different ride for us as game developers. We're in a better baseline when we start out building a second generation."

Source: www.Rheena.com