Battlefield Hardline — A rambling collection of thoughts

After an extended period of managing to not give EA any money, I finally broke down when their new Origin Access subscription service came online in the EU. I had been wanting to try Hardline again since playing in the beta and quite enjoying the familiar feel of Battlefield but in a different setting.

Having played for a few extended sessions, I feel that I’ve played enough to make some sort of comment on some of the components, along with a few gripes I’ve always had about Battlefield in general.

In no particular order…

Positives

Character control responsiveness felt good, on par if not better than bf4. Some of the animations and character movements in BF4 feel sluggish, like jumping over an obstacle, for example. This definitely felt better/more responsive in hardline.

Weapon aesthetics and variety fitting for the setting. The asymmetric design of the weapons really works in a cops vs robbers scenario. Weapon licenses are also an interesting idea.

Weapon unlock system — good. Being able to unlock the exact weapons you want is brilliant. I did not like the sequential unlocking of previous Battlefields. Having to wait til a certain class rank to get a weapon is not fun.

Attachment unlock system — not great… but better than before. This has moved on from previous BF titles in the fact that you can buy the attachments you want and don’t have to unlock them in a certain order. But… they are still gated behind a number of kills. It’s not a huge deal, but sort of annoying.

Attachments can also be unlocked from battlepack ‘vouchers’ now. This is great. Make the same attachments unlock over all weapons and now we’re talking.

You can also sell off old xp boosts for small amounts of cash. This again is brilliant. Please use this in the next Battlefield.

Best gadget — zip line, for the simple fact it facilitates different styles of gameplay. Putting a zip line from the bank to your vault on Bank Job is hella fun.

Environment destruction is awesome, the block is a great showcase for it. More of this pls…

blood money — best new game mode. Heist is ok, on some maps it gets quite repetitive. Hotwire is ok, sometimes repetitive and boring if you’re literally just driving around doing nothing else, quite a good way to gain cash though.

Negatives

It’s just not Battlefield. The name Battlefield does not conjure images of cops and robbers. Hardline on the other hand, could have. It should’ve been it’s own franchise from the beginning.

Time to kill “TTK” is far too quick, needs to be nearer to BF4. (This is being worked on apparently and hopefully prototypes will appear on the CTE soon, I’ll update this when the changes go live and we can test them).

The server messages and chat box cover too much UI. This happens especially in the loadout screen, when the server has lots of popup messages, choosing a loadout is annoyingly obstructed. This might be another hangover of the console based UI, another reason PC and consoles versions should differ.

Let me turn off the damn music. If I’m playing music on stream, having the game music chime in as well creates a mess of noise that is quite annoying. At least add an option to reduce the volume of it separately.

Military NVGs are in a cops and robbers game, but not Battlefield…? Uwotm8.

Suggestions/other

Gas is very annoying; you pretty much have to take gas mask as a gadget… in hindsight I guess this could actually be used tactically to good effect and create interesting gameplay scenarios. I still think the gas mask should be a separate gadget that you always have the ability to equip, but it might give you a disadvantage in some other way, e.g. less field of view or obscured vision.

Gun master needs to be a thing. One of my favorite modes from BF4, needs to be in Hardline.

Remove Conquest, or maybe alter the mode to incorporate other mechanics to differentiate it from standard conquest, as has been done with the Hotwire gamemode. Conquest is a Battlefield staple and should not be in Hardline. Maybe some alternate take on Conquest small, calling it gang warfare, or something…?

When a server has weapons blocked from use, do not allow them to be selected in load-out menu. This needs to be fixed in all Battlefield games. I don’t know how technically feasible this is, but getting killed after pulling off an unlikely kill with a grenade launcher only to be told it’s banned is very annoying.

Similarly with sniper limits, make them a lot more transparent than just messages in the server chat. Don’t allow me to select a sniper rifle or DMR if the quota for snipers is already filled.

Enable access to the options menus in between rounds…. This has always been an annoyance if I want to change or check any settings in the down time between rounds.

The cash system is ok for criminals but for cops there should be a renown/reputation currency, thematically it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever for a cop’s worth to be measured in dollars.

In summary…

It’s difficult to summarise my thoughts concisely, on one hand I like that EA is trying to do something different and experimenting with game modes, asymmetric designs and weapon/attachment unlocks.

It’s also great that other Battlefield games are benefitting from this work, but on the other hand, it feels like it’s being held back by being a Battlefield game and trying to incorporate too many elements from that series.

Hardline has the potential to be a standalone franchise, if only it wasn’t trying to be a Battlefield game so hard…