Battlefield Hardline has been delayed to early 2015, Electronic Arts announced today, saying that the development teams want to spend more time developing the game to ultimately deliver a better product.

"Back at E3, we launched a beta for Hardline — we wanted to not only show you the game, but to let you play it for yourselves," Karl Magnus Troedsson, DICE vice president and group GM, wrote on the Battlefield blog. "Millions of you jumped in and had a great time. As a result, the Visceral Games team learned a lot from players about what they wanted in the game. We've been pouring over the data and feedback, and have already been putting a lot of it right into the game and sharing it directly with you.

"This feedback also spurred us to start thinking about other possibilities and ways we could push Hardline innovation further and make the game even better. The more we thought about these ideas, the more we knew we had to get them into the game you will all be playing. However, there was only one problem. We would need more time. Time that we didn't have if we decided to move forward with launching in just a couple of months."

Troedsson said that the teams at Visceral Games and DICE want to focus more on multiplayer innovation and incorporate "ideas direct from the community that will evolve the cops and criminals fantasy into a truly unique Battlefield Multiplayer experience."

Battlefield Hardline's single-player campaign is also getting some extra attention, Troedsson said, as is the game's technical stability, an issue that plagued last year's Battlefield 4.

"This has been a focus for our team since day one and we're going to be using the extra time to continue to optimize the game for a stable launch," Troedsson said. "We have learned a lot from Battlefield 4, are continuing to learn from our Community Test Environment and will learn more from another Hardline beta. More time allows us to surface issues that the team can attempt to fix prior to launch."

Battlefield Hardline was previously slated for an Oct. 21 release date on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.